Off-Nominal - 129 - Tier 1 Gifts

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Dr. Gordon Osinski from the University of Western Ontario and member of the Artemis 3 Geology team which will develop surface science plans for the first lunar EVAs since Apollo.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeNASA Selects Geology Team for the First Crewed Artemis Lunar Landing - NASACanadian Researcher Gordon Osinski Named to Artemis 3 Geology Team for the First Crewed Artemis Lunar Landing - SpaceQNASA Identifies Candidate Regions for Landing Next Americans on Moon - NASA15 photos of lunar geology training in Canada | Canadian Space AgencyA Rock with a Mischievous History | National Air and Space MuseumFollow GordonDr. Gordon OsinskiFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey everybody. Anthony, we're having a bit of a Canadian special today. Oh, Canadian and rocks. This is like the most Jake you can imagine. A Canadian rocks episode today. It's going to be a lot of fun. Most Jake episode possible.

Well, you know, I try. Now that I don't have Weimarsians going every once in a while, I got to just like all the planetary science geekery that I have still inside me in different places just has to spill out. into whatever outlet I have, and here it is on off-nominal. So we're here with Dr. Oz, Dr. Gordon Azzynski from, let's see, University of Western Ontario. I always mix up where the Western goes in there.

Is it Western Ontario University? But I think I got it right. Yeah, no, and Western doesn't know either because we're sometimes Western University and sometimes the University of Western Ontario. So it's all good. University of Ontario West. We'll go for that. Lots of places you can put that.

But yeah, thanks for coming. We're excited to have you. So you are a geologist and a teacher and an astronaut trainer. And you've got some exciting stuff on your horizon. So really excited to talk about Artemis 3 and what the heck we're going to get those guys to do up there. So that's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. So where should we start?

Do you have a drink with us, Oz? Well, I was going to say, Jake, this is a. Jake episode yet. What is Dr. Oz drinking? He's drinking an empty drink. Apparently, I chose your favorite drink, so I got a gin and tonic here. It's not all lost. It's not all lost today.

But maybe I'm wearing the t-shirt for Jake, though. Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's legit. That's fantastic. That's good, yeah. Is that, did they give those out when they selected the team? Is that like the team shirt? Oh, I wish.

I actually bought this from the NASA store, just have something you have to change that. A government job right there. Well, you're a national, right? So you need a chaperone and you don't get any free t-shirts.

So. Yeah. Yeah, that's how it goes. Anthony, I'm still working on our pre-game show drinks. So we do we're doing a pre-show now for all our Discord subscribers. So we've actually been sitting here for a while.

So this is my Tamarind and lemon vodka and something else. Oh, I put a little extra tamron liqueer just to dial it up a little bit. So it's real flavorful. Yeah. A couple more of those than you would have bought a telescope on the pregame show, which is what I was trying to make you do. It's possible.

That's why I'm not refilling it. Yeah. Did you bring another one for the show or a different thing? No, that's it. That's it. I'm going to just work through the, yeah, I'll work through the last little bit here. Please mind. Don't worry.

I got a highlight straight from Florida. But this can is very dented, and I have no idea what's going to happen when I open this. So I'm a little worried about this. So you got the show for a second. We got to hear this. No, no, it's fine. Everything's cool. It was not a bad dent.

It was a regular dent. It's good. All right. Good. Cool. So where should we start? So maybe do you want to just talk a little bit about your job and, you know, your background and stuff? people have a little bit of context for who you are and what you do?

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, right now I am a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences here at Western University, so based in London, Ontario. As you might gather from my accent, although it's quite mixed. I grew up in the UK, grew up all over the place. My dad was in the Army, so moved around a lot. Northern England, teenage years, high school, did my undergraduate in Scotland. University of St. Andrews and that's where I kind of discovered geology for the first time. And that kind of really blended, yeah, what has become two of my passions, you know, the science, but also the outdoors. And so that's actually what attracted me to geology in the first place was doing field work, which I still really enjoy and getting up to, you know, remote parts of the Arctic. And undergrad in Scotland, you know, kind of figuring out what I wanted to do with doing life. And I was interested in, you know, going somewhere I knew for a little bit and kind of thought about Canada and started to look at graduate programs over here.

Originally, actually got into a program at UBC, but then I discovered, I still, you know, I retell this story quite a bit because it was this PhD advertised out of New Brunswick, which I never heard of. until that point. And it was working, yeah, working up in the Arctic. Western Brunswick. Yeah, right, total opposite coast, right, to UBC. And that was mostly because of the mountains and the Rockies and things. But it was basically working in the Arctic, which is somewhere I'd always wanted to go.

I've drawn to, I guess, remote, hard to get to places. Working with NASA, which sounded pretty amazing. And then working on meteorite impact craters. which was an aspect of geology I'd never really even heard of until then. And as I've discovered now, and as maybe we talk about later in the show, meteorite impacts, asteroids and comets hitting the Earth and the Moon, this is one of the most important geological processes.

And so following that, kind of a stint at the Canadian Space Agency, a brief postdoc in Arizona. And then since 2007 now, I've been here at, Western. Awesome. Yeah. Lifefish story in 30 seconds. That's good. You know, I love watching all the updates you and your teams do when you go up there because your Arctic trips are just like, they sound like such an odyssey. We're going to talk about people going to the moon, but I feel like maybe they can get to the moon faster than you can get to some of these places up there because the plane hopping you have to do is pretty intense. Yeah, yeah. I

I have joked about it and tweeted about it that this most recent trip was faster, but when I go to the high Arctic places like Devon Island, which is up in Nunavut. It easily takes three days for me leaving London to get to the field site and sometimes longer. And that's how long Apollo took to get to the moon. So it is really remote. I think there are a lot of analogies between spaceflight, space exploration, what we're going to do on the moon and going to these remote parts of the Arctic,

which is how I kind of ended up, you know, really training astronauts in the first place. Yeah. So maybe can, I want to start there just like training, like, you know, pre-Ardomus, like before any of this stuff was even like on the table, you were still teaching astronauts to do geology. And I think that's kind of an interesting thing

because it's like, why do they need to learn geology when they go to the ISS? And like, so like, why do you do that? and what does it look like? Because it feels like kind of a bizarre need for an astronaut like that. Absolutely. But actually, even before I got into training some of the more recent astronauts for Space Station stuff, it was actually, I think, looking back at it with huge foresight and credit due to the Canadian Space Agency.

So I had to remind myself coming into the show that was actually 2011 that I did my first. kind of astronaut geology training trip and that was with Jeremy Hansen and so that was only you know a year or two after he and David St. Jack had qualified and had become astronauts I'd only been you know a couple of years away from the Space Agency and we kind of got into conversation with folks at NASA folks at the Canadian Space Agency because of that time they were trying to reintroduce geology into the curriculum for the astronaut trainees.

So they had, for the first time, I think, Jeremy and David's class, they had a couple days in the classroom, and maybe they were out to Arizona, I think, for a field trip. So, yeah, I was basically, well, you know, I'm doing these expeditions anyway, up to the Canadian Arctic, looking at meteorite impact craters that are in important land form on Earth and other planets. And, you know, why don't we combine that?

Remotness, the kind of expeditionary skills that we could give the astronauts with the science and continue the geology training. And so yeah, it actually goes back quite a long way. You know, I guess around that time there was, you know, the Constellation program was around the, well, the first time in my lifetime and yours that we were going to go to the moon, you know, that fizzled out. And but there was still, I think, a good incentive to get the job, the astronauts learning some more geology. And then, yeah, yeah, basically over the last.

until a few years ago now, I took Jeremy on four trips with me and Davis-St. Jack on one trip, kind of between 2011 and about 20, kind of 18 or so. Yeah, yeah. Huh. I guess, I mean, there's some cool, like, remote work you could do from the station, right? I mean, some of these impact craters are visible from space. So I suppose there's some sort of productivity you can get out of that, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And so I think we'd always had, and I think if you spoke to most astronauts, they've always had their eye on the moon, eventually onto Mars, and actually going up there and doing geology. But, you know, as you say in reality, most of them, most of their flight opportunities have been and still are up to the International Space Station. But when you think about it, you know, a lot of the best tweets and things and posts and what the astronauts speak of as being the most, one of the things that strikes them the most and the thing they take home is looking down at the earth as they're orbiting day after day, right? And the things they see, the pictures they take, you know, it stays with them forever.

But they're, you know, they're circling over our planet and most of them don't have any geoscience training. And so they do, and they've, I would say, have expanded this in the classroom kind of aspect for ASCANs, so for ASCANs, for astronaut candidates is teaching them just the fundamentals of geology so that, you know, when they're looking out at the window, they don't need to look something up and figure out, or, you know, where are we? What am I looking down at? They know, okay, look, that mountain is

shaped like this, and there's a bunch of them in a line, and those are probably volcanoes. Or, you know, there's this linear straight feature in the crust that we're seeing, and that's probably a fault. And so just giving them enough, you know, knowledge and skills that I think they can appreciate what they're seeing and so that they can be more knowledgeable when they're speaking, you know, they are, you know, they do a lot of things from orbit and then when they're back so that they can kind of have the basics and fundamentals so that they can, you know, speak to the general public about things. So I think even there, it's still good to have those fundamentals for international space station visits.

Yeah, yeah. You mentioned Constellation, and now I'm like thinking, but they didn't get that far along in terms of prepping for, like, you know, not the way we are today, right? No, no. We are, you know, fingers crossed where we're going. You know, we've had Artemis 1, right? We have the first mission of the Artemis program. The crew is selected the training hard for Artemis 2. and the plans are afront.

And there's many other differences we can get into now. I think the other big one is that this is very much international. We have the Artemis Accords and Canada, and I've lost track of the numbers, but it's probably 25-ish plus now. Yeah. A lot of countries have signed up with NASA to go to the moon. And so I think like the International Space Station,

that actually makes it. really difficult for a country to turn around and say, well, we're not going to do this anymore. But their partners say, well, hang on a second, you need to sign this. We're in this together. You know, let's keep doing this. So that also helps to make it an international effort. And we've now made the jump from one administration to the next in the U.S. and had full support of the program.

It definitely feels like there's obviously a lot to sort out on like developing the lander and paying for it and making sure that it works and TBD on the timeline. but it certainly feels like we're reaching the point of no return on like there's not an opportunity to rethink this because everything's in motion and it's all happening and that I feel like that crept up on us we all complain about us less forever and where's the money for the lander and where's this and there's that but like we're at the point where all the sudden we're like oh no crap this is like it's actually happening people like twirling like oh shit I get my stuff done yeah actually have these people prepped yep and they're like oh we should

create a geology team to figure out what we're going to do when they get there. It's great to see those kind of things happening too. So you're on the geology team for, this is Artemis 3 specifically, but is there a similar, you mentioned training Jeremy Hansen, is there a similar thing going on for Artemis 2 or because of the nature of that they're not spending a ton of time right around the moon? It's not going to be a main priority of that mission. Yeah, so there's no geology two. that has been struck up for Artemis II.

I do know because I'm also involved in some of the aspects too, that they are getting a lot of training still from the internal Artemis science team. And so the way this is structured is NASA's created an internal Artemis Science team, made of NASA civil servants, of which there are many amazing researchers, I know kind of most of them anyway, and they're kind of really championed been in the training for Artemis 2 already and then Artemis 3. So, you know, they're having this lunar fundamentals, as they've called it. So they're doing, they're learning about lunar geology, even though they're just doing a flyby.

And actually, I think just yesterday I saw a workshop announced where NASA's putting it out to the community. You know, as there are things we can do from lunar flybys. I'm not sure they mentioned Artemis II explicitly, but I think we all know that it's for that mission. You know, is the science that we can do that we haven't thought of from, you know, even this kind of fly-by-type mission? So, yeah, because it's going to be a unique vantage point that we've never really had.

So, you know, is there some neat science that we could do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's doing the, or what is orbit is Arvist? It's not doing the near-rector linear one, is it? Is it doing distant retro? grade thing. I think it's straight free return. The double loop around, right, the distant retrograde free return thing.

Yeah, but it's like sliding into orbit, right? No, no, it's not. It's not a pollate. Yeah, it's not a pollute. Yeah, it's not a pollute. It would be. Yeah. I know.

We're all, we're all definitely bummed about it and no one will convince me we're not bummed about it. Yeah. Huh. It's still going to be awesome. Yeah. So you'll get some, like, pretty high vantage points compared to what we've with Apollo then because like it'll it'll go to yeah so seeing some of those larger structures

that at a different scale might be kind of interesting yeah yeah for sure and yeah you know just like the ISS we often think you know why is there anything you might be forgiven for thinking well you know an astronaut just taking pictures in the space station that doesn't contribute anything new when we've got hundreds of satellites around earth but there are different orbits and it is a more kind of human perspective where you're looking, you know, obliquely, you know, a volcano erupting in things and just being able to capture things in an instance. So yeah, who knows? I think there'll be some really interesting perspectives that they'll get as they'rethle around the moon on Artemis too. You'll always have some new stories to hear the next time you go training Jeremy somewhere.

And those two, yeah. We have a running theory here. The end. Any complaints about the whole Artemis program, like anything that you don't like about the program, all those are going to evaporate the very first time. An astronaut tweets a picture from the moon from Orion with a camera, like, you know, with a whatever camera they have. It's going to be like, I don't care anymore. Like, this is amazing.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. You know, I can't imagine being in their shoes. You know, they're going to go farther than any. humans ever gone from Earth, right? So just that as well is a pretty staggering feat for this mission.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was going to say, so let's talk about sort of this team and, you know, the artist three geology team and like what is your scope? And I know you haven't like officially kicked off all the work streams and stuff, but you know, what is this scope? And how do you, how are you imagining you're going to approach such an interesting idea as, as pre-you know prepping for an EVA on the moon is like that's a kind of a pretty wild job when you think about it so I'm just kind of curious to know how you're stepping into that yes as you say we haven't actually had our first meeting I think we're scheduled to kind of really kick things off with a new person you know visit down to Houston early in the new year but you know what I know of

right now is as the mission is this kind of three main phases you know of the long phases in advance of the actual launch and the mission. You know, during the mission is perhaps the most obvious, you know, we will be supporting the astronauts from a science backroom down at the Johnson Space Center. And then the third phase is also pretty cool, and we can talk about that when we, a bit later, but that's about the samples that we're going to bring back, which, you know, as a scientist, as a geologist, it's got one of the most exciting things that will happen from that mission.

But yeah, I mean, approaching EVAs, of course, you know, it's super complex. There's a huge number of people from the Johnson Space Center involved. You know, the EVA group, which right now is focused on EVAs for the space station, is figuring out how they're going to do EVAs on the moon again. And actually, coincidentally, on this recent trip up to Labrador, that I have with Jeremy Hanson, Christina Koch, to the Camastastastain crater, there were some folks from the EVA office along to try and kind of wrap their heads around what they need to do and what they need to change from, you know, ISF spacewalks to, you know, surface operations. The role of the science team is not really, really, you know, planning out the how, you know, the technical how, but the where.

And so right now, NASA hasn't announced, you know, where Artemis 3. is going to land. There are 13 candidate sites. I hear rumors that they're going to narrow that down to a few fairly soon, and then eventually one will be chosen. And so a big part of, and a big responsibility for the science team is planning out, you know, once we choose that site, what is the science that we could do? You know, what is the geology of this region mapping it out, using all the a little satellite imagery to map that out, to create maps, and then to plan out, you know, potential EVAs, to potential traverses on a map to connect, you know, the dots of the really interesting science targets. And so that, to a large part, will be the responsibility of this science team that I'm on that's, you know, going to be hugely exciting. Yeah.

You're allowed to smile more than that. I think I'll give you the full permission to be beaming about this at all my all times in the day. For sure. I'm sorry, I was just glancing over at the chat as well to see of any specific questions there. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's really cool and most of the early work. A lot of the training per se is going to be done by this internal team. But that's where I'm kind of already wearing a couple of hats because I'm kind of involved in that outside of this geology team with the site we have up in Labrador that I certainly hope. that we'll have the Artemis astronauts come back to. Yeah, as I said then, kind of during the mission, which is going to be pretty short,

we'll be there just to support the astronauts as much as we can. And then one of the most exciting things afterwards is that this group will also be the first to see the samples. So if you've been following along with the Osiris Rex mission, you know, a good analogy there is that, you know, there's a team that sloth, slowly opening up the capsule right, seeing what's inside, and they call it a PE, so a preliminary examination. So we, along with NASA J.C. scientists, Johnson Space Center scientists, will open the boxes.

Probably won't let me open them, but they'll open them. We'll get to see the rocks. We'll get to describe them. We'll do some initial analyses to categorize them, tell people what type of rocks they are. And then that will write a report and that will be released to the international community who will then be able to do, you know, apply for these rocks and to, you know, do all the signs that they want. But, you know, it's hard to pick out, you know, what's going to be more exciting during this mission. But hopefully being there and looking at these rocks for the first time is also going to be, you know, pretty wild, I think.

Yeah. When I was a kid and it was Christmas, I had a pre-evaluation that I was. do with my Christmas presents. So you open them all up first. And then you got to categorize them, like tier one GIFs, like Lego sets, you know, that goes like there, tier two, I don't know, hot wheels. So tier three is like new pajamas. That's for later. And then once you categorize, you can go and open the tier one gifts and start from there. I imagine it's the same process. This would be more like, well, I think I was the kind of kid. I would try to guess what was in size from the size and shape of the package. Um, but all of these,

probably going to be in the same sample container, so it's going to be, yeah, who knows. Exciting for sure. Is there anything that you can tell us, like, a little bit behind the scenes about how the team was put together or what kind of skill sets they were looking for? Or you honestly, like, how, you know, you're probably on the radar for these remote destination visits that you've done with all these astronauts. But how does that process go and any insight that you have on that? Yeah, so this was done really different.

from Apollo. You know, everything I read about the Apollo missions and the team that they built up in the background just kind of happened, I think, like a lot of things in Apollo, by seat of their pants and organically, you know, people were brought in. They knew people, knew people, and they just did it. It just happened. You know, we're in a different age now, and so NASA did a competition, which I think is the way to do it. I think it was very different to, I think, any of the call that NASA's ever put out, where, you know, usually the, you know, they put out other calls for participating scientists. Some, you know, listeners may have heard of, and Jake might be familiar. You know, for Rover missions, they'll, they select the core team and then they'll put out a call for others to join and there'll be an open call. Lots of people apply, but lots of individuals get selected. this was a call for a team, one team. And so, you know, obviously being not based in Canada, I am based in Canada, not based in the US,

the lead had to be from the US and a predominantly US team. And, you know, various groups. I don't know the final number that was selected, but I would guess it would be in, you know, probably the 10 to 20 range of the number of teams that were put in. the number was around like a dozen-ish that NASA was that NASA was asking for. And so, you know, obviously I think like any kind of project, small groups started forming in the U.S. And then, you know, building their teams.

And, you know, thankfully, I've, you know, know, know, know, no enough folks down there that I just started getting asking. I was asked by one team and then another team. And then it ended up being four proposals that I was on. I know that's not the record of colleague of my. who's actually on the selected teams on five or six, he said. I'm playing both sides, so I always come out on time. Yeah, I mean, that's part of it, but part of it is that, you know,

all these teams had, you know, different strengths, absolutely. And, you know, definitely been able to be on more than one, increases your likelihood of success. But we, I think, yeah, it didn't feel too uncomfortable. It felt, you know, fun to be involved in different teams. They were different approaches to things as well. So, yeah, those teams came together, and thankfully I was on the winning team.

That's awesome. I had no idea that's how that process went. That's kind of a crazy situation. It's the first time NASA did it, whether they'll do it for a future. I guess maybe the other thing just to point out to is that, you know, which I think took a lot of people off guard, was that they just did this for Artem's 3. So it sounds like a lot of work.

are they going to do this for every Artemis mission now? You know, maybe it will change as we get further out and they become more regular and, dare I say, you know, commonplace. But that's how they did this. And I think they'll do it for the first, you know, for four, five and six as well. So was each team, did you have to like kind of have like a mission statement as a team? Or what was, you know, what other than the set of people that you were proposing,

was there like a flagship kind of idea that you had to present NASA? So the two biggest things that you had to go in the proposal. And actually, the other neat thing about these teams, which NASA doesn't do for a lot of its proposals, is they were double blind reviews. So for the science content of the proposals, you weren't known. Because some, you know, it's tough to be completely unbiased in proposal evaluations. Yeah, he's guys like, Gordon bought me all sorts of drinks one time. We went out in Labrador and we had a great time around the campfire. Of course, the cratering expert of the world.

So let's give it to them. Of course. But they didn't do that, which I think is good too. So the two big kind of, they're almost, well, sort of exercises beyond then, you know, then there was bits that was evaluated, which was, you know, the team expertise and the management. A lot of focus on leadership skills, how, you know, the team would work, how team dynamic. would work, how you would deal with differences in the team. So that was part of the proposal.

But the two big things we had to do was to create a science traceability matrix. NASA loves these. STMs is the acronym. They do. And I mean, someone needs a better system, but the gigantic Microsoftic swell spreadsheets. Not very fun to do. with but it's basically where you lay out objectives you know so the questions you have the sub-objectives and how you'll address them and so we did that and

for a particular site and then we had to create a kind of geological map and come up with three EVAs so three extra vehicular activities or three traverses from a point around that landing site so it's basically the exercise that will do for real coming up. And they chose actually one of the 13 candidate sites, Malaput Massif. And so I don't know. To me, it's either that's going to be the one or that definitely isn't the site we'll go to. I'm still on the fence about that.

But they said, you know, for this purpose of this proposal, we're going to land here. And yeah, come up with these three EVAs, give us the science, the science trace of military matrix. And that was a big part of, you know, how these proposals were evaluated. Can we get to this question from Kurt? Because it's about landing sites. Do you have a favorite of the list of candidate landing sites and why? Show you? Show you. Another person who's very interested in Lunarregolith, I will say. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I see a bunch of comments and questions from Kurt online. I've you know as a cratering person I am drawn to particular regions and actually

also in parallel to Artemis I'm also the PI for the Canadian Lunar Rover mission and we're also undergoing a science kind of selection site selection process right now too and through that I've actually probably been studying this region in the Artemis landing zones in more detail than I ever have done. And, you know, there's some famous, yeah, thanks for putting up the map. Some of the famous sites they get talked about a lot, so is this connecting ridge, you know, coming off Shackleton, Crater right next to the pole.

Malapur is down there at the bottom of the screen. I'm quite keen, actually, on some of these sites. It's called Fastini Rim A. you know there's a lot of really interesting geology around the rim of that impact crater Amundsen you know out to the left of the screen is quite a big meteorite impact crater so I think there'd be a lot of unique geology there too so maybe not a favorite but yeah Fassini and Amundsen I'm definitely drawn to as well I'm I'm rooting for Falsini I just enjoy the name it It resonates with my blood.

It's like a good kind of pasta that I could make tonight. I'm in it to win it, Jake. I was going to say, picking these landing sites always feels like such a terrible job because it's just like, here's like 15 amazing places and you have to pick 14 of them that we're not going to go to, you know? It's like you're only there's only bad decisions to make when picking these things. It's like, you're just like cutting amazing places. What's up with like this?

what is this, Durr, derglock? DeGlach. What's going on with that? Rim 1 and 2? Like, Rim 1's getting shorted because Rim 2 is stealing a lot of its land.

What's going on? Why is it like that? Why wasn't that just one big square? Yeah, and then how was this giant right? So I don't know. It is interesting. I don't know the background to, you know, how these 13 sites were chosen actually

or how, you know, it will be down-selected either. And then there's even another layer, right? They pick a zone. And then there's a particular landing site within that. Yeah, I mean, these are, I'm not sure there's a scale, and I couldn't give you a scale. I could probably tell the size of some of the craters. But, yeah, those areas, a lot of those boxes are 10, there's several tens of kilometers across these zones.

And, you know, for the first Artemis missions, we're going to be, you know, within a few kilometers of the lander. So there's a lot of scope within each of those regions, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I want to ask about, I'm like ops geek. And so like just the concept of doing science and like you have to do science through this like very peculiar instrument, which is a human inside of a space suit with, you know, a hammer or whatever. Like it's it's not the easiest way to do science. And I'm kind of curious about how that impacts your planning and how much you have to factor that in. And like how do you. factor that in. How do you think about, okay, well, if I want to accomplish these things and I got to deal with this, you know, fighter pilot with big boots on, like, what do I, you know, what do I do? How do you work with that? That's all. Coincidentally, my Halloween costume this year, so that's great. Nice. Nice. Well, just in case, you know, there's any Artemis astronauts listening, I should probably

watch what I say, I guess. You should. You know, well, Jeremy Hansen is a fighter pilot, right? And he's turned into a very fine geologist. He's pretty tall, so he's probably got big boots. Yeah, yeah. You can see the rocks from far away. So there's still a lot of unknowns, Jake, you know, to answer your question a bit more directly. You know, we know what happened during Apollo,

but, you know, a bit like Apollo, and I think NASA would admit this. A lot of things are still in development. You know, they're focusing on the rocket, at Rolanda, the spacesuits, you know, getting to the nitty-gritty details of what and how we will work on the surface is coming, but it's, you know, it does, it is coming a little slower, let's say. So, you know, a big thing and a big unanswered question is what are the communications going to be like? Because this will really dictate the ops. You know, I had a vision going into this a few

years ago and I think we still do and I think for the future missions is to be the case that you know we'll have really good comms going out tens of kilometers from the lander um I don't think that's going to be the case for Artemis 3 I've heard as little as you know you know a low number of kilometers anyway away from the lander that they might have constant communications so you know if you do have constant communications of course the science back room can be more on the loop, really guiding in real time. If they're going to be out of communications for any length of time, you know, we really need to give the astronauts more autonomy. And then even that is, should we give them more autonomy anyway? You know, Apollo was quite scripted in terms of,

you know, the path, and, you know, back to our planning, right, we will come up with a path and stations that we think they should go to. But we're also actually doing that based on just satellite data that we have. And if there's one thing that I've learned from doing fieldwork in a particular analog missions, where we've simulated space missions, you know, you look at these satellite images, and no matter how experienced you are, when you get down on the ground, there's always things that you miss that you don't recognize. And so, you know, they may be land and say, well, you know, sure, that's still interesting,

but hey, what about this, this and this? And so we're going to have to adapt in real time. So I don't know if it's a Ternu diagram or a bunch of overlaven diagrams, but, you know, the amount of autonomy that we give the astronauts, I think, is a question mark right now. The ability and whether we'll have the ability to communicate in real time is a big question mark. another one we've been thinking about is what data will we get in the back room in addition to just voice you know voice data will we be able to get you know imagery video photographs back in real time I don't think we know the answer to that too so there's a lot of big things to think about

when we're thinking about the ops I think like everything's still in development they're like so on the spaces fingers were kind of tough where you just have oven mitts like so work with that you know there's no fingers yeah yeah I've seen some of the prototype tools and things

we're not going to mount a little bit of all spectrometers to their arms I don't think is that's probably not going to happen right no no and I think you know the way I do think it is going to be like Apollo where you know every mission is incrementally more complex

and more science is done you know, we had the J-class missions. Those last three is where they really got to the moon, figured out how to do it in different places, then it's like, okay, we can really focus on the science now. You know, we're not going to have a rover on the first mission, just like we didn't for Apollo. You mentioned spectrometers and things, Jake.

You know, there's been a lot of work, and I've been involved in a lot of analog activities because we have the capabilities now to have an instrument that we can put on a rock and get its chemistry. Do we want the astronauts to have that? Do we, that's a question and a discussion, but that's not going to happen for the first, you know, we've got to get there, comebacks successfully,

and then we can expand on that. Yeah, that's a great point, because you're right. Like, we all remember Apollo 11 as a historical moment, but like from a science productivity standpoint, like that was a very short EVA, and they were just like making sure the door worked and the ladder worked and the cameras worked and the spacesuits worked and they could call like you know that was really what that's the job of that one yeah yeah they dropped a couple pre-made things on the surface and then threw their poop

out and bailed like it was real quick you know like they grabbed a little bit of a little bag of rocks right the little bag of rocks yeah yeah so actually to emphasize that you know the the biggest science return from this mission in my mind don't quote the rest of my team is going to be the samples because, you know, we have not been, and just maybe to emphasize that to everyone out there, you know, we have not been to this region of the moon before. Robots are trying, they're getting there, but you know, we don't have, and we might maybe have the odd sample return mission, bringing back grams, but this will be our first opportunity to bring back multiple kilograms of sample chosen by humans with humans in the loop back on

Earth too and brought back to Earth. And, you know, we're still studying the Apollo samples 50, 60 years later, and they're still yielding secrets. And so we do think the geology of this area, the Moon, is quite different. And so, yeah, I think they're not going to be out there for very long on the surface, two or three EVAs. They're not going to be able to go too far, but they're going to be able to grab rocks and bring them back for all of us to study.

So it is worth emphasizing that, I think. Yeah, yeah. So maybe we should pivot into that then. So let's talk about these samples. Like do you have, is there baselines for how much you think you can get back? And is there like, is there any kind of specific questions you think the samples are going to go after? Or is this sort of like a broad, like we're just bringing all these rocks and then we're just going to see what happens with it? No, it's actually, it was, well, at least in the exercise we did for this proposal.

It was pretty scripted. I forget the mass limit we were given, and I know that's also up in the air as they figure out the air-grine configuration, but hopefully, you know, a few tens of kilos. It's not going to be as much as the final Apollo missions, but let's say it's 20 or 30 kilos. That's not a bad amount of rocks.

So in the planning, you know, it's not as easy, as simple as you might think, right? Just grab a rock, put it in a bag and move on. That only has a certain amount of benefit. To make those rocks valuable for science, they have to pause. They have to document the area, take photographs, take notes, record what they're seeing, document the kind of sampling location before and after. So actually, that takes time.

And so when we were building the EVAs for this kind of, for the proposing, for the exercise, you know, okay, it's like if you want to collect a sample with this, just a rock hammer, X minutes. If it's going to be a rake sample, you know, to get the little pieces, it's X minutes. The other thing, we haven't talked about it yet, but which why we're also going to the South Pole region is volatiles. So there is the potential that these astronauts might be able to sample frozen ground or even, you know, if you discover it blatantly ice, or at least Regolith, taking cores and bringing back

that sample intact and frozen, you know, if you take a core, that could be an hour to get the one sample. Yeah, yeah. It is very much integral to the planning in terms of number locations and things as well. I do hope, and I think for sure, there'll be those opportunistic samples, though. You know, they're driving along, and Apollo did this. sometimes you know behind the scenes right there's the most famous one i forget which which mission but it's called seat belt rock to this day um i wish i could remember the astronaut

top of my head but they were driving along between two stations um yeah maybe you can just google seat belt rock apollo 15 is what i was the vesicular basalt um and um you know they glanced down, like really beautiful. Yeah, I can see it on the... David Scott, sounds like? Yeah, of course it's David Scott. David Scott was also like the fighter pilot that really took on the geology. Beautiful, black rock with holes in it.

So black rock with holes in it looks super interesting. And I think, you know, the narrative goes, it's like, where we need to stop because I got a problem with my seatbelt. So they literally did it kind of without kind of the ground knowing that they were stopping. I hope this time around, there will be. you know, I think we know more about the science that this should be built in. That, you know, if they see something interesting, it's like, okay, sure, go take a look.

I rather than even to hide what you were doing from mission control. That's amazing. It's a really cool story. That's also, like, what I'm going to say, if I have to pull over on a road trip and, like, throw up outside my car. I got a problem in my seatbelt. I'm pulling over. Throw up. No, I'm trying to think of scenarios where this would be useful, but there are some of them.

You got a problem in my seatbelt. I got to get out. Well, if you're a geologist, right? You know, we're trying to get somewhere with others. We'll often pull over by the side of the road and take longer than we should have done looking at rocks. We do it here on us, too. That's so funny. No, I'm glad you mentioned that because I was thinking about that too,

because the rocks that are like hanging around, like, I could grab this rock. Those are probably the least value because, like, you know, he calls like float rocks, right? because you don't know where they came from. They could have just been blasted out from any one crater in the distance at some point in time. It's really hard to get the context for what created that rock. So the good ones are probably the hardest to get, right? Like I said, cores and stuff like that would be really, really valuable. Yeah, and then some of the bigger boulders, you know, there's some great ones on Apollo 17.

I don't know the numbers because, you know, Station 1, Boulder 2, because we have some of those samples in my lab. This is one of the really big boulders, you know, my arm's bigger than the screen. Now, a couple, two, three meters across, you know, Apollo 17 spent some time there, and it had, you know, different contacts in it, different types of rocks and different parts of it.

You know, those are hugely valuable. The reality is, though, that especially in this region of the moon, it is heavily cratered. You know, it is almost to the point that we call it saturated, where, you know, there's crater upon crater upon crater, stuff's been moved around and flung around. But, you know, the more context we can get, the better, absolutely. You know, if we at least know that this rock came from this close by crater,

that helps us a lot. But then you get the random cool sample like seatbelt rock that was in the middle of the regular, middle of the plane. Who knows where it came from, but it is still really interesting. Yeah, yeah. About the geology of the area, earlier, Kurt asked, where on Earth will the analog training be performed for this mission? I'm curious about that, too, given that the point of going to this region, the movement is that is so unique. Are there places that would be useful enough to go to here on Earth to practice that?

So we always say kind of in the analog community, there's no single analog that can meet all of your needs. And for the moon, I think that's definitely the case. I mean, you could argue for the complexity of, you know, the lunar regolith and looking out for, you know, keeping your eye out for weird, interesting rocks, that a beach is a pretty good analog location. Like, if you spend any, you know, depending on the type of beach, definitely on an ocean beach, you know, rocks can be from anywhere. And, you know, you're walking along and it's like, oh, this one looks cool, right?

and you might be drawn to it because of its color or something or something sparkly or shiny. But it's actually one of the exercises we do with astronauts quite a bit in the field is, you know, we're standing in a location and, you know, describe to me what you see and how many different types of rocks because that's a fundamental thing that we would like to know. And that's important. Okay, there are three main types of rocks. There's lots of them. So that is important.

But what is also important then is, you know, oh look, there's this one rock over here that is totally different and doesn't fit. That's as important as the other ones too. So, you know, you could argue that that kind of analog is good for training the astronauts. Of course, if you think about the geology of the moon in general, it's volcanic and impact for the South Pole region of the moon. It's even more dominated by impact cratering. And so, you know, going to meteorite impact craters is going to be one of the best things we can do.

You know, I don't think it will come as a surprise that they'll all go to Meteor Crater in Arizona. It was used by Apollo. It was actually the only crater that all of the Apollo missions went to. So they didn't actually get too much impact cratering training during Apollo. They got a lot of time in various volcanic regions in the U.S., but not too much in impact. craters. So they go there and then you know where it was a month ago we have a really unique site up in Labrador which is a complex crater a much bigger crater about 28 kilometers across called camastastastin or mastastin in English and this crater is neat because it has a lot more complex rock types it has this impact melt preserved which is one of the major types of rocks that we want to bring back from the moon to date particular events and what makes it, what is like the icing on the cake for Camastastasthan is that it formed in part in an orthosite. And so when you look up at the noon, the two main colors that you see is black and

white. The black is basalt. Think of Hawaii and Iceland, lava flows, and the white is this rock type unorthosite. It's relatively uncommon on earth, but if you think of granite that most people have seen either, you know, in nature or on your kitchen countertop. If you take the pink out or the pink mineral and leave the white mineral behind, that makes it an author site dominated by this mineral plagicase fell as far. And so, you know, I certainly hope that there'll be, and I know from me working with some of the Artemis internal team that we will be going to impact creators specifically for this region.

Yeah. I like the idea of going to the beach, though. It sounds like a good excuse to get a trip to Cancun on Massa's dollars. I'm not sure they'll swing that for the Gatsy, I'm not sure how that would go down too well with the public, however. Yeah, we're doing an analog of classifying sea shales as rocks, so we're going to southwest Florida in the middle of the winter and not hanging out. Well, you can try, right? There's no hurt in putting in a proposal that I always say. Jake's like, I live in an impact crater.

You can come hang out with me. I live in a very famous impact crater. Yeah, there's lots of science you could do here on the beach. Most of the impact crater is out in the ocean at this point. Yeah. Well, the beach is in the crater too. There you go. Come down to Chick-Shilloo.

You're doing both. We're saving taxpayer, I figured it out. It's a cheaper beach. You can do the beach trip all in one go. It's pretty good. All right. Hmm, okay. Well, I don't know. I'm still, I'm still like my mind is like running a thousand miles a minute here about like, what about this? This is this. I have a good one, Jake, though,

because this will be our lead time. This will give us our lead time on, on our bets we can make on who's going to be on the crew. Do you have a sense of how long the training for the science portion of the mission is going to be for Artemis 3? Like, is this something that because the astronauts all get a baseline level of. this kind of like geological training at this point? Is it going to be a shortened timeline and you're going to get like, you know, a couple of months of training with them or do you feel like it's going to be a longer process? I think, you know, whatever.

And again, I have colleagues on the internal science teams. I make sure I don't get them into trouble too. But, you know, I don't think it will be as much as Apollo, in particular for Artemis 3, right? You know, the priorities, they've got a lot of priorities. priorities, you know, they're going to be flying in this spacecraft for the first time. Humans have been in it. So, you know, for sure, we've got to go a lot of time in there for training. You know, SpaceX will want them for a large amount of time. Axiom will do for the suits.

So, you know, I do think we will, we're pushing for as much time as we can for the science. I think we'll squeeze We can squeeze that in whenever we can So maybe actually early on You know after the crew selected We'll get So a lot of the science, the geology training Done so that we A have the time

Before they get really busy in the lead up to the mission Again I hope as the things become more Regular We have more missions that you know we'll be able to expand that science and geology training wedge in the schedule. Yeah. All right. I hope so.

Maybe just quickly go back, you know, there'll be class in training and stuff. But of a lot of these astronauts, you know, they may not have had that. So the only time all of getting it these days is an askan training. So two years of fundamentals before they qualify to become an astronaut. And for some of this Artemis 3 crew, easily a decade, it could be more. If there's some more senior astronauts selected. So there definitely needs to be some geology training, both in the classroom and in the field to either remind them of things or teach them stuff at the first time, perhaps.

Got to go to the beach. Got to hang out on the beach, you know? Get out there, sit out there for a couple hours. Just let the rocks roll in. There's beaches and Camastastas and Lake and Labrador where there's literally like rounded pebbles and cobbles of impact rocks. So if not Cancun, it's not that warm. It's water's Baltic.

But, you know, it's, you can combine it there too. You like the cold a lot based on what we heard about. I do. Yeah. Through Scotland and, you know, New Brunswick. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I always like to think about it.

I may live in a famous crater, Chick-Shulhu, but it's also like the hardest one to study, considering we didn't even know it was there for so long. Completely gone. There's not a lot of science you can do on it here. And Meteor crater is really far from the beach, so it's all fun. Yeah, yeah. Buried about a kilometer or so beneath your feet, Jake. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty far down and far out.

So, cool. Okay, so what do we look for coming up? Like, what should we, if we're going to follow your work and the team's work, what are any exciting milestones hitting that we can be excited about? Yeah, I mean, if we think about the Optimus program in general, you know, for sure, the major milestone that will, you know, you could argue is maybe more important, even than Artemis 1 is Artemis 2, is Jeremy's mission. to test out the spacecraft and things.

It's scheduled for November 24 still. I think most people think that probably won't happen, but hopefully soon thereafter. And so, you know, that may sound obvious, right, but that's a critical step and a pathway to getting humans back to the surface. It is a bit of an anchor point, though, too, in this whole timeline.

You know, I think they're going to have to announce the Artemis 3 crew before that, though. I think, you know, the rumors I'm hearing is, you know, probably in this summer just because of the timeline. The current timeline has Artemis 3 in what, late 2025-ish, even if it's early 2026? You've got to have at least a couple of years to train for a mission. So, you know, however you do this, they're going to have to announce the Artemis 3 crew before Artemis 2 goes. And I, I, I have to announce the Artemis 3 crew before Artemis 2 goes. and I imagine as soon as that crew announced they'll be going into training and so you know part of the timeline for the Artemis 3 geology team

you know those results came out late September so early early September obviously contracts and things everything has to get put back in place but our first kind of big in person meeting is going to be in February and we'll be kind of getting things going from there. And so, you know, kind of get planning in the spring. And then, you know, we could be starting to interact with the crew as always the summer or the fall next year. You know, I hope. I think NASA's been doing a pretty good job anyway for Artemis II and Jeremy's crew

sharing all the training that they're doing. You know, so I hope we'll be able to talk about it and, you know, to share what we're doing. So I hope that is the case. because, yeah, with these big milestones there. Again, I actually have no idea, and I'm hoping to learn more when we meet next February 2,

where in the timeline, crew announcement, and then a landing site will happen, because that, you know, for us is a big milestone. I don't know how late they'll leave it. You know, for delays, it does change, you know,

all of these sites around the, The challenge with the South Pole is illumination. You know, we've got to deal to the shadows and lunar nights that they didn't have to really deal with an Apollo, which is why they chose the equator, you know, facing an earth-facing sites. So, you know, things start to slip and there's delays, you know, I can see changes happening to landing site locations

having to be made as well, perhaps later in the process than, definitely than Apollo. So yeah, lots of moving parts. Sounds like a lot of work. Going on. To be kind of

crew announcement for Artemis 3, at least the down selection of sites so that we can start focusing error if it's in. And then, of course, that Artemis 2 launch, absolutely critical. Yeah, yeah. Well, sounds like next year it's going to be big either way. That's good.

It's wild. I don't consider that the three crew would be announced that soon, but wow. That's pretty crazy. I'm a little skeptical we'll see you, but I don't know. Yeah, I know. I'm being optimistic. But it's got to be, you know, it's got to be a good couple of years before launch. Yeah.

With all the training that they have to do. So, you know, for ISS missions, it's about that length. And that's, you know, become a routine thing. Like, they'd be like, yeah, that's actually sounds great. But there's an extra two years in there. That would be much welcomed, I'm sure. Then, yeah, it'd probably be relieved at that at a certain point. This was super cool.

Well, yeah, thanks for hanging out with us. Oz, this is really cool. I'm sure we're going to have to have you back on to talk more about the process once you're deeper in it and what we've learned. Maybe, maybe after landing. Once the job is done and the rocks are back home, we can circle back. And then we can do a compare and contrast to our hopes and dreams from this episode to what actually happened.

And we'll go from there. So, yeah. That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's still kind of, I think because it hasn't really started yet, it's still sinking in, you know, that I'll be involved in this and helping plan out the traverses and seeing those samples for the first time. It all seems pretty surreal right now.

Yeah. Yeah, it would be pretty neat against chatter. Chat again after we have the astronauts and the samples safely back on Earth. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Amazing. Well, Anthony, we're going to continue the planetary science theme next week. Oh, that's right.

Yeah, but I'm going to pass the nationality flag over to you. We're going to get my friend, my friend Stefano Narotti is going to come on, who is a Mars guy. and we're going to talk about Mars stuff. So I'm sure there'll be some stuff about Mars sample return. I know he was involved in that interesting mission, the radar one, the ice mapping mission. That's going to be kind of fun to talk about.

Yeah, he's connected to that because he's a radar guy. So we're going to have fun with that. Let me see. That's what we're going to do next week. Nice. I'm pumped. Sounds great. Let's do it.

Well, I guess that's how we have. So yeah, Gordon, thanks for much for joining with us. And it was a pleasure, pleasure to talk with you. Thanks so much. Absolutely. You're totally welcome. Anytime.