Off-Nominal - 147 - Bouncy Castle Payload Adapter

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Jake is joined my Simon Stähler from ETH Zürich to talk about the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTube147 - Bouncy Castle Payload Adapter - YouTubeEclipse 2024 Meetup - Off-NominalJake's new blog post on Mission SuccessFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeBlogWeMartians 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. You see a nominal MECO. Welcome to space. Hi everybody. Can you hear us okay? I am hearing you. You are hearing me. Okay, good. I don't know whether that is. Excellent. There's still somebody else at this time of day,

errone. Yeah, exactly. Thanks everybody for hanging out and being patient with us. We fell into the classic time zone trap of March. So we have me and Mexico, does not do daylight savings. We have you in Europe who do daylight savings differently than all of our friends in the United States and Canada.

And we were trying to look at UTC and we're trying to look at Eastern Time and like all these time zones that neither one of you are on. And we messed it up. We didn't do it right. But that's okay. We made it. So Simon Steyler, welcome to the show. It's good to have you on.

Great to be here, Jake. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah. Of course. I mean, so we've had you on We Martians before. So we did a little bit of insight stuff there, but we're going to talk about very broad planetary science stuff today because Anthony's not here. Anthony's on vacation. He's hanging out with his family and so I'm taking over the show and that's how that goes. Yeah, so we got lots of stuff to talk about. Which topic do we pick? I bring something. So I picked, I wanted to get actually some space-related beer, but then of course in the

in the end this week was a mess and I went to a store two hours ago and the only beer I could get. It's actually this d'orteur gap from the Swiss, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, which is great. It's a great beer, but it's not space related in any way at all. Sorry for that, but it's good. What do you have? That's how that goes sometimes. Okay, I found one that I think I found the perfect beer for this very specific episode to check this out. Here, I'll flip up the camera here. Okay, so this is like a novelty beer.

Okay, so this is an ACD-D-Branded beer. The German-Australian Hot Rock. Yeah, German beer, so I got that for you. Thank you. I don't know why it's German and Australia. So that's fine. And then check this out. So we're going to talk about our sample return today.

That's what I'm going for. Rock or bust. Oh, and I have to, I have to ask you about this too. So it says on the bottom here, brewed in accordance with German purity law. Are there some like serious, are there some like serious beer purity life there?

Of course. What do you know about them? I want to do about those. You didn't know. I thought you'd been to Germany once, a long time ago? A long time ago. I learned how to drink beer in Germany. That's how long ago.

This Reinhites, or purity law is, it's as stupid as it sounds. It's a 500 something year old law that was just basically you're allowed only to use water and water and two kinds of, I don't know the English words. Roggen or exactly and barley and nothing else. And so it has nothing to do with purity in any other way. It's probably to annoy the Belgians who put fruit into their beer or something. And of course it has, I mean, in a way, it has guaranteed a.

certain level of quality, but let's say common denominator level of quality because it just stopped all innovation on beer in Germany for 400 years or so. And then you Americans came around with the IPA revolution and now everybody in Germany needs to, oh, we need to change something about our beer. Our beer must be ended. But beers is a pretty old school one. And this one's a French one. It's good in the glass here. Oh yeah, it looks very German. It's pretty nice, right? Cheers. Cool. Yeah. Prost.

The purity law. I haven't heard that in a time in a while. I think it got embarrassing for everybody. Anyway, speaking of things that got embarrassing for everybody. Are we already at the woodland? Nothing. Yeah. Yeah.

Simon's very excited to talk about the Woodlands. We're going to talk about the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference today, which happened a couple weeks ago. Yeah. And you were there. I didn't get to go this year. I chose not to go because, well, you know, all sorts of stuff. stuff. But yeah, so I thought maybe we'd do like a little bit of on the ground reporting and hear what you saw. And I guess my first question is, is it still weird there? Is it a weird place?

Because I thought they were leaving this venue. I thought that it was last year was going to be the last year in the woodlands, but I guess not. No, no, no, no. I mean the woodlands put in a big effort to keep everybody there. So they converted one of their big parking lots around the woodlands. They converted that to a food court area. So now you can actually choose between like 10 food trucks with different offerings. I mean, you're standing in the Texas Sun, so it's not really a nice place to be. But of course, every food truck is directly attached to a 450 pickup truck with a diesel generator on its back. So you have like 10 of these generators around you.

And it's, yeah, but hey, that's, I think that's the effort that the woodlands is putting in. The authentic, the authentic food truck experience, right? I think so. Generally. No, it's, I'm giving that. I mean, everybody's, of course, always complaining a bit about the woodlands. But then, I mean, it's a nice climate in spring that it's just the right size, this venue. So it's, I mean, for the people who haven't been there, it's these two floors.

It's a merit with two floors. So a big conference, I don't know, big halls at the bottom and up on the top, there are some smaller seminar rooms. There's one big escalator connecting the two. In half of the years I was there, one of the escalators was not working. So everybody needs to take the lift instead, the elevator instead. This year, the escalator downwards was not working. So people were walking downwards. And it's really long and quite steep.

And so therefore people had to drink. And then, oh, my God. I fall down and die. No, but it's fun. That escalator is like classic. There's so many, like, you meet so many people on the escalator because like you're forced to look at their faces as they come towards you and they're like, oh hey, are you, let's talk later. Yeah, but the escalator is so long that you take five minutes to go around and yeah. It's a bit like the, I'll come meet you down in the conference room.

Like the sub-women skull or something. No, but it's... Yeah. It's a good ben. It's a good venue. It's a good venue. I just, yeah, I wish it wasn't in a weird plastic city. I actually got interviewed by a lady from the city council of the Woodlands while standing on this food court in the Texas Sun.

And then she asked me what I'm doing here. And so I'm standing in front of this big banner that says lunar planetary science conference. So I said, yeah, I'm a scientist. Oh, wow, you're a scientist. Yeah, work on planets. Oh, this is crazy. We are working on plants. It says lunar and planet science conference right there.

And then she claimed it's the only conference where they're putting in that effort with the food trucks and everything. Apparently they are really trying. Big customer. I don't know. I wonder if the threat to moving got them a better rate too. Maybe that was the clutch move after all. Negotiating 101.

Let's say the complaining about Woodlands was less than last year. My impression is that everybody has now accepted that it probably won't move because every other venue will be worse and more expensive. Yeah, that's how it goes. Cool. So yeah, what did you see there? What's like the one minute highlight from LPSC this year? Like what was the big headline you think? It's difficult to get one big headline because I think there's just a one big headline because I think there's just,

so much happening. I mean, there are just so many missions in preparation, missions returning data all the time. I mean, and even like Lucy, for example, and Derek Dinkinus flyby, which was just on the way to the Trojans close to Jupiter, as just doing one engineering checkout while being close to a tiny asteroid and just see that all the instruments are working and all the opt-team works together. But still, hey, wow, we found that it's, it doesn't only have a moon, but the moon is a contact binary, which means that it's always in exactly the same. Yeah, this is crazy picture where I think they took, like they took several pictures before the nearest flyby, before they closed the approach.

And then this picture was only down and yeah, and that looked like this. And so they said, oh, yeah, it's a moon. And they had figured out that it's a binary system beforehand already. Yeah, it's wild, right? But then I think some hours after the fly by, actually they got this one final image and nobody expected so much. But wow, it's not only one moon. It's actually two moons.

And they discussed a lot on whether they're actually in contact or not. I think in the end they agreed that it must be in contact. Also, because the geometry is only stable if it has at least a certain connection. Yeah, it was, I mean, that's probably not rocket or not solar system shaking signs. But it's just cool that such stuff now happens all the time. Yeah, no, the Luzi stuff is like, I love the, we don't get to do this very much with planets of like this like moment of first discovery where it's just like, you know, like you imagine like the very first mariner arrives at Mars and it's like, oh, this is what it actually looks like up close. Like we don't get that with planets anymore, right? We've done them all more or less like that close. And so, so but these asteroids still give you that. It's just like, what's it going to look like? Literally no one knows. We have an eight pixel blob of different gray scale values that we can look. And that's the best we can do. And then you show up, it's like, oh, it's three asteroids.

It's come together and weird. It's wild. It's so fun. Yeah. Or you have the radar images of the big dish that collapsed three years ago, so we can't do any updates on that anymore. And then, yeah. And to be very honest, I've never been too excited about asteroids in the first place. But then just as you say, this variety, I mean, you get to another one and this is now all dust, all.

dust all the way down basically and and then of course the deep psyche it was was a interesting interesting session as well because I mean of course they have moved down the latter a bit from oh it's a pure it's a metal core of an ancient planet to now it's it's mostly metal asteroid and all at least half of it is metal asteroid the L-A-HM class of asteroid at this point and Yeah. That's going to be an interesting one for sure. Yeah. I have to ask you, we have to make a call out because I got to say something about these instrument names.

I'm so mad about them. They name the instruments on Lucy. Tell me something because I have no idea why is this actually with this L blah, blah, blah. Okay, so the best I understand it is that so the Lucy mission is like largely modeled off of New Horizons. Like there's a lot of the same team members and the instrument suite is pretty much identical. There is a lorry instrument on New Horizons. What's the other one they have? There's like Lollets or something.

Lel Rolf or something. Lattes or something like that. But all the instruments are like basically copies of New Horizons. And so to distinguish them, they added an L-Aposterphy for Lucy. It's Lucy's Lurie's Lurie. And then you get this Leroy thing, which I'm sorry, this is just bad. This is bad marketing. I mean, NASA should have called the off-nominal marketing agency before they did these things.

And we could have told them how bad this is. But that's what we get now, La L'Lauri. Yeah, L'Ralie and L'Ralph and... Yeah, LaRalph, yeah. I had always assumed that Ralph Lorenz was somehow involved in that in that. He might be. He might be in the original one. But that's how it goes.

Yeah, no, it's cool. I the Lucy thing one thing that was awesome it's just maybe they're doing it all the time and I never went to these sessions but I mean they did cross-eyed stereos on the big screen so basically the audience was sitting there and trying to get this cross-eye thing right everybody was having this crazy look

for a few seconds and oh I think I see it no I don't no I just can't are they like magic eyes or they like the No, no, the one... Just like the red blue. No, where you're right eye needs to look on the left screen and your left eye needs to look on the right screen. And then... And it's possible to do it.

It takes a bit of practice and... But it makes you look like a complete idiot, obviously, while you're doing it. Who's sitting one? Did you ever have those magic eyes when you were like a kid? Like, did you have those as a book or... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm just in the one eighth bracket where this was a thing, yeah. So this crazy one, where you see some pattern.

And then you need to, yeah. If you like loosely like, like your eyes kind of like lose focus, you can like sort of, um, just like it there I go works. So this is like fish, right? There's fish. I don't know. I'm not. Can't see it.

I can't see that. Yeah, sure, but I mean that they were shot. We need to do that for. We could, if we don't have aerosibo anymore, we should put asteroids into these instead. And we can make it more fun. The background image can be. The other image can be basically anything. So the carrier signal, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah. So you could take whatever picture of Mars and hide Dinkinus in it or something about. We can make a book. True. Magic Eye planets. I'll write that down. We got to bring it back.

Magic Eyes got to come back. This is so dated, Magic Eyes. It's really one of those things that had like five year, five year window where it was a thing. Yeah. Then now it's not there. Yeah. No, I was definitely that age bragged.

I got like a book for this like every Christmas and every birthday. Like here's your new magic guy. Like all the magic guys and that was it. And then yeah, I guess then the internet came and it wasn't a thing anymore. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I forgot about that. I mean, there were these stores who would sell holograms and maybe some other weird

kind of esoteric stuff and magic guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our sample return, obviously, I'm assuming was a big topic there. I think I thought there was like a couple of sessions on it, but I'm kind of curious, this is the thing I'm most interested about because there's, you know, there's some science going on.

They'll do the sessions about the samples and what they're doing with the, and why they're picking them and all that kind of good, crunchy stuff. But I'm kind of curious to know what it was like on the ground because like, compared to just a year ago, like things are tense with Mars Sample. or return and you know I'm kind of curious to where see where the scientists stand on it because like it's one of those things where like everyone kind of agrees that it's like a good thing to go after right but the implementation is all over the map and if you're not a mars scientist I'm really curious to see you you know what those perspectives look like but I don't know what's your

what's your vibe check on the ground for for scientists and I'm a marsh scientist so I should be excited but then I'm not a geochemist so I'm maybe shouldn't be too excited but i was surprised that people had um let's say call it say a bit more become a bit more serious about it uh i mean you did see people walking around with shirts like bring them bring the samples back uh they didn't have home yeah bring them home they didn't have walk or bust um but uh and the i mean of course there are no a lot of different um a lot of different layers to it. So I think due to the fact that it became so critical over the last year, most of the science community has now agreed that we can't oppose it on the grounds that we'd rather have whatever another Venus mission.

And also because now it's really dangerous. Now it's not you just grandstanding, oh, we should go to Venus more often. It would be great. MSR is so expensive. But now it's actually if U.S. scientists are complaining about it a few more times then then it's not going to happen and so therefore people decided okay i mean if we're now just out of vanity killing MSR then we're really damaging the whole process of the decadal review that we're otherwise so proud of because i mean two decadal surveys in a row have set mass sample return is the biggest science goal of at least the american community and also the european and the japanese to some extent community and now we now we need to live with it and now we need to somehow deal with that

situation and so that was there was actually a lot more serious conversation about it basically everywhere with all almost all people even those i mean of course you know paul burn who has been been on the show yeah been on the show and quite vocal about correct criticism on MSR but i mean for example in the NASA HQ session, I mean, in the end, after one half hours or so, Laurie Glazer answering questions, I mean, in the end, he stood up and said, oh, everybody in the room needs to support mass. Simple return. Now it's our thing.

We need to support it. All. You changed your mind. It's because he put his name on the Decadal Survey, so now he's got up to line. Yeah, I mean, I asked him afterwards, and that's what he said. I mean, sure, we can't on the one side say, oh, this Decatural Survey is such a great peer-reviewed process. that really comes out with the one thing that the science community wants.

If at the next part we're falling again into all our little fractions on, oh no, can we please first do Venus a bit more or another. And but of course on the other hand it is it's a tough situation now. And we're probably, what are we, a few days away from NASA's answer to the IRB report. in which they will... Coming soon, yeah. Where are we now, right now they are receiving the architecture report and they need to come up with an answer within a month or so.

I honestly can't keep track of the specific milestones because like there's so many reports and they all have different acronyms that I can't keep them straight. I'll just wait for what, like we'll know when it drops. The news will tell us, right? So we'll be able to know for sure. Okay, now it's ready. But yeah, soon.

I think it's like it's supposed to be. It's spring, right? So like we're there, right? So yeah. And at least my understanding is that this report is actually then, man, it's of course not binding, nothing's binding, but somewhat binding document that actually tells NASA how to move forward and how to, sorry, how much money to spend this year, how much money to spend next year,

and whether to pick up the samples in Jezero, pick up the samples somewhere on the delta, outside, come with one helicopter or two. And the thing is that in the current budget as it was proposed, which is of course also, I mean, it has been proof in a way. It has been a reduction of almost 5% compared to the previous year. And so these in this budget in a moment MSR is not even fully in yet. So nobody has really felt the pain of this budget as I understand it. But people will feel it once MSR is fully budgeted in. And so this is, people were actually quite surprisingly relaxed about the budget situation.

I expected a lot more controversy and Laurie at the beginning of the NASA HQ session. She said, okay, everybody, we do this now and everybody stays polite. And we ask questions one at a time and we're not shouting, even if you're unhappy about it. But then everybody was actually super friendly and super relaxed and constructive. And so I think. I think we're in this together, yeah, and we'll get out of it together, I hope, as a community. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see where they decide to go with it, right?

Because, you know, like you said, the criticisms have been very valid. Like there's just some wacky ways that they tried to put this together, and it was not working, clearly wasn't working, it's running over budget and stuff. So I'm just, I'm very curious to see, like, so far NASA's been very, like, sincere and, and almost, you know, very upfront about the fact that it's broken and like shown a lot of at least on paper willingness to change it and I'm kind of curious to see where that ends up translating like are we looking at a completely new architecture are they just going to spread out the timeline are they going to cut you know they're going to descope or how are they going to how are they going to handle this in a way that that gets

what we need you know I know some of the some of the advocacy is like very much like yes we need to get the samples and to be clear we need to get all the samples like don't don't do this like grab the half of the best one. Like don't we got we said a two and a half billion dollar over there to pick the the absolute best bespoke contextual like you know for years and years and years all these very highly qualified scientists on special teams picked out these rocks. Don't throw half of them away. So like there's that whole thing to deal with right you know. Absolutely absolutely and this was a this was another concern that a lot of people voiced that that perseverance mission would be cut short.

I mean, start with, as you say, do not bring back all the samples or cutting short perseverance in a way that is the safest option at all to get any sample into the send lender. Like for example, driving back to the crater floor in a year or so and then stay there and maybe drive back and forth 10 meters every week or so so that you don't rust but otherwise do nothing, which is, of course, the safest option. But then you're losing all the signs of actually leaving the delta or going through the delta and getting into the noacian terrains. Yeah. Up there where I mean, this is one of these things that even though I work on Mars so much,

it strikes me only every other week. It strikes me again. I mean, we've never been to the highlands on mass really. I mean, every mission has basically been on this lower, as a, north of the dichotomy, or at least somewhere in the boundaries, terrains, but we've never really been to these ancient terrains, which we don't really understand why they formed, why the southern half is so much higher. We see from the, I mean, for example, we also find almost no fresh meteorite craters or new meteorite craters in the south, maybe because there's less dust and therefore you don't see the blasts so on so well. And we, as well, in the inside mission, we never found a mass quake from the southern hemisphere, only one or two weird candidates. But so all the current

tectonics seems to take place on the northern hemisphere. And it's just weird and we've never been to this place. And it would be great. And of course, we with perseverance, we'll only drive a few kilometers into that, into that region. But it would still, it would be the ground truth for the first time. And there was this funny session about the perseverance results where you had different talks, like four or five different talks. And on the last one or two slides, all these, they all took a turn to, and by the way, Carthago needs to be destroyed and we need to go to the Noakian terrains. Don't cut our mission short. It was really just, it seemed a bit orchestrated. Some organizing happening.

Yeah. Yeah, they're right. And this is, of course, the thing that is so difficult now to accept about MSR, I mean, I understand it that they need to make the mission as simple as possible and really not at any crazy extra instruments or something. But then on the other hand, I mean, it's a perfectly good lender that will land and will then, it's basically inside lander upgraded and it will stay there forever. And why can't it carry a meteorological station or two physical station with it? I don't get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember I'm now thinking back to like when we were picking the landing sites and stuff

for perseverance, right? And now I'm remembering they had, there was the, there was another landing site candidate that was not too far from Jesro. It was like, you know, far, too far to drive, but pretty close like geographically there. And it was a whole other kind of mission and it didn't win, obviously. But then there was like this, in the kind of last minute, there was like a hybrid candidate landing site that was like the best of both worlds. those marketed like a little bit of Jezero, a little bit of the Noakian terrains.

And it's like kind of in the middle. And if you go here, you can do kind of all of it. And I think that that middle ground candidate is actually drivable from Jezero. So I think that was kind of the plan was to like get out of the crater and just go for it and see if you can, in your extended mission, see if you can get there. And to me that seems like a smart idea because like, you know, like, okay, so there's always like these stories of, say like the Indian space program or the Japanese space program. They're very good at like taking like a really simple, inexpensive spacecraft and like knocking out of the park, right? You know, like the Mars orbiter mission from India was very, very cheap. It didn't accomplish great science, but it was very cheap and it got to Mars and it's orbiting.

And then you have like these Jackson ones like, you know, the most recently Slim's pretty great story. And then Akatsuke Venus, right? Like these really, Ayibusa was fantastic for the, especially for the price, right? I think NASA's claim to fame for like how they really get their value is that their missions have incredibly good planning and incredibly good longevity, right? And so they extend them in such a way that we add so much value after the fact that it was not in the original, you know, quote unquote business plan, right? And I think that's like really clutch for perseverance. It's like it needs to get these samples and set that whole thing up. And that rover can do a lot of science after the samples are done.

and i hope that we i hope that we do it yeah absolutely absolutely i mean i just try to see whether i can find a map that uh what i of the landing side where you would see this extra terrain that you can go to um but uh absolutely and then of course in in way problem is that now everybody is factoring in this long long activity so it's not anymore like this surprise you're doing a two-year mission uh and then nobody expected us to do to do two-year mission, but everybody expected us to do full opportunity and survive for whatever, 30 years. And then, oh, why are you dead after four years already? You were supposed to last two years, which means 15 years. Yeah, you got kind of stuck on the expectation game there.

Yeah, so this is. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, but I mean, perseverance is of course doing great and I mean of course this is this is one of the chances of being at such a conference that you can actually get an update on the on what these other missions are doing of course a lot of the talks are about tiny details but then in between there's always this one overview talk that tells you oh by the way we actually left the volcanic planes and now we're in the Delta and we're in this different part of the Delta and so oh wow oh oh oh oh oh oh shit you're really going through several hundred million years here and within two or

three years that did. Yeah, the, um, the perseverance trajectory, like they're like the course on the, um, you know, on their, their map here, like this, this happened really fast, I thought, right? So like, look how definitely, you know, so I, I remember like this, this landing site over here, right? So they landed here, they drove down, came and explored this and then they went back and then they went all the way over here. And this was like the first sample cache here, right? And then I feel like after this, the mission really accelerated because they went like so far like all the way across the delta now absolutely when was this this was uh uh it could have been almost two years ago by now or so four yes or words this will tell us it's all 700 and then yeah we're already at so that was only

you know that's like a year and change right so that's year and a half and the weird thing is i mean they So a person from the team told me that, oh, we automated our driving a lot more and therefore we're faster. But then then you look at this image and it's not as if the terrain would look any easier on the second half. I mean, before they were driving through this relatively flat crater floor and now they're driving through this crazy delta and they're still faster than before. Yeah. Yeah, they're looking down at the poor helicopter in this like ravine here, right? Yeah. Can't get to that.

That's so crazy that they were even able to fly into this Noreto-Retva-Valus inlet. Yeah, but I think the extra stuff is like here-ish. Yes. That's kind of where the extra candidate, whereas like the actual Northeast Surdus is far enough, like it's over here or something like that, right? True. They do good, so. Yeah, so this is... Hopefully they go there.

Yeah. Yeah, so this is a bit... Deep thought, deep thought. On the other end, then curiosity, I mean, I kind of expected curiosity to be shut down because of the... I mean, perseverance is needing a lot of ops and things. But apparently, you know, they're still going strong and they have no indication of being shortened, yeah, and they expect to do another 100 meters or so in altitude in the next few years. Awesome, cool.

I mean, of course, half of the half of the science team is on both missions, so therefore it's maybe, but it's still, I mean, I imagine it takes quite a strain on the people to be on two science teams where you actually need to do weekly or biweekly planning. Yeah, I think I remember I talked to Abby Freeman about that, like the talent problem, right? Because the perseverance pops online and everybody wants to go to the shiny new mission that's going to do the absolutely breathtaking sample return science. right? Like, why wouldn't you want to be a part of that? And she said it, I think I remember saying it was like, it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be. Like, you know, they obviously some people moved over or some people are splitting their time. But there's plenty of good scientists out there as it turns out. So the talent is in good shape.

Yeah, I mean, this is of course one of the things that everybody's worried about now that, I mean, with the Scentlander. Is it the Scentlander? Is it M.A.L. Right. Mars Ascent Lender? There's the MLV, the Mars launch vehicle. My launch vehicle. Anyway, let's call it as a sort of the lander with the crazy rocket inside.

The lander that throws the rocket in here and stays there for a second overring. Great video, great video. It's Martian gravity, don't want to be. True. The, um, no, but this will, when will that land realistically now in 30, 32? So there will really be a gap in and actually, yeah, having people working on EDL and having people, I mean, landing site selection, of course, you mean, you can do that already now, but then I'm working on new Mars missions. And I'm not, don't know whether everybody has really realized how, how this cadence of the last 15 years where you have a new large Mars mission. almost in every launch window, so therefore you can expect to have a continuous career in new Mars missions. I mean, this is how this gap will affectable community.

On the other hand, one positive outlook from European perspective is that I could actually imagine that this means that JPL has a lot more stakes in this Ex-O-Mars landing platform than people thought. Because in the end, it's going to be the only American lender or US-supported lender until 30 or 32. So I mean, of course, can still be shut down, but yeah, it's not like there's no benefit at all to JPL to it. Yeah, yeah, that will be interesting to see how that shakes out. And I'm actually, I'm a lot more worried about XMRs than I used to be. When it first, you know, when the Russia stuff first happened, I was like, it's fine. Like it's a setback, obviously, but there is no way that Europe and the United States are going to let Russia end this mission. Like this is a it's like non-negotiable but now I'm like less I'm less secure about that because we're you know the

the fiery anger at Russia has like excited a little bit like it's obviously it's still very bad what's happening there but like yeah it's just not it's not headline news as much as it used to be all right so that kind of that diminishes right that happens naturally with every news event and then you have budget problems in the US, like they are tight there right now. And so now I'm kind of worried about it. Hopefully it comes through and you know, US should at least be able to provide a rocket. That should be in the wheelhouse. But, you know, that's the easier part.

Yeah. No, and it was quite prominently on the slides of the budget request from NASA. I did see that. That gave me hope. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. X-O-Mars. Again, another thing where it would be great to put instruments on the landing platform, but I think nobody's going to risk that.

Nobody's into that. Yeah. So Simon, can we just send a starship to do all this? Tell me what you think of that. Yeah, that's a good question. And this is something where we, with a few people sitting there, I mean, at one point, we put a few timelines on top of another. And then we saw, when is the next, next new frontiers call is not earlier than 26 and then oh 26 is also the year when starship supposed to bring humans to the moon did anybody at the planetary science division actually factored that in so can we propose starship now for new frontier 5 or for the discovery calls afterwards and actually i and a few other people we asked lorry at various occasions or annoyed her with us by asking her multiple times, Laurie Glazer. And she at least acted as if she never thought about it before,

which I don't assume she really did not do. But yeah, it's a discussion that needs to start in the end because, and of course, nobody really expect Artemis 3 to happen in 26. But who knows when the next new Frontiers call will really be? And who knows when the next New Frontiers mission will be after that call? And so do we really want to propose a mission? for 30 that will launch in 34 or 35 basically on Atlas 5 okay atlas 5 is over but what are the allowed vehicles warkin uklan faken 9 well and that's what's interesting right is that like

okay so there's always been this and this is understandable but you know for a rocket that hasn't figured out its stuff yet like you know Starship's still in development we're still figuring it all out. Like the planetary science missions generally stay away from those. Like you make your proposals on sure things and established bits. And if you can, sometimes you can adapt it later. You know, okay, we designed this for Atlas 5, but we can fit on a Falcon 9 and it's cheaper we got a deal. Great, let's go for it, right? But, you know, starships kind of a different beast. And they haven't really on boarded that into the, into that pipeline, I feel like, you know, like even we had the whole Uranus proposal.

you know, relatively recently. And I don't think it really factored in Starship at all to it, right? Like it was all based on, I think it was based on basically Falcon Heavy and Vulcan, right? It was the two kind of rockets. It was baselining. So it's going to be really interesting to see

how that plays out, which is normal. But extra variable is that sure Starship is, you know, quote unquote, unproven, but like so is Vulcan. And so is New Glend. Even more, same. And there's no. And there's no Atlas and there's no Delta 4.

True. So like if basically is Falcon 9 just going to run the show? Like every proposal for the next like five to 10 year just going to be Falcon 9. Like I don't know. I don't know how that's going to look like, but it will be interesting to see. I don't know what your your feeling is on how long Falcon 9 would be around. Even if Starship is working, whether Space Ex will continue to keep Falcon 9 for legacy launches or something. I assume they will want to get rid of Falcon 9, like as soon as they can because there's no sense.

If, if, quote, if Starship can do everything Falcon can do and it's the same price or cheaper, then you do not ever want Falcon to exist anymore. Like it's just dumb to maintain a product line that is completely like less than all your other ones. You know, it's like still selling iPhone forms. for us you wouldn't do it so i assume that'll happen but the things you have to do for to make that true is also not like just to have starship working you got all the launch pad infrastructure all the customers have to get ready there's a lot of stuff that has to happen so i don't know how fast that will be but yeah it could be 10 years right and i think this is the thing that

that at least in an planetary community people also haven't really wrap their head around how starship will in the end actually work out i mean because as a just from the way, I mean, it's a two-stage rocket that can bring a ton of stuff to Leo, but basically almost nothing beyond Leo in a single Starship launch. So in the end, everything will have to be refueling Leo, then maybe refueling in a Mars orbit or something. I don't know whether anybody actually knows the answer to how you would make a Uranus Orbiter mission with starship. I mean, does it mean that three starships need to go towards Jupiter and refueled just before Jupiter fly by and two of them go into the Jupiter atmosphere and one continues to Uranus

or and it's completely refueled on its, I don't know. I'm actually, I'm less worried about that. I'm not too concerned about that because I think there's a couple options for them, right? Like, you can solve a lot of problems without mass. You know, like, so this thing can carry so much crap right like it's just such an enormous rocket so you know one one thought like the easiest thing you could do it's like okay so if you have a hundred ton launch capacity and your vehicle's 10 tons like your payloads so just like launch on a escape trajectory to jupiter deploy your payload and then turn the rocket around and unlaunch it back into leo and land you know like you can have so much fuel that you could just go you could just cancel out your escape trajectory again and come back

You know, you could do that. That would be like in the realm of possibility. Add 90 tons of fuels with it. Or you, you know, you start telling people like you, hey, when you're making your proposals, stop putting yourself in this brain of like, I got to make a miniature tiny scale, hyper mass optimized spacecraft. Like just make a giant orbiter. Like make it the size of a school bus and fill it up with fuel.

And you can fly all over the solar system even while. We can watch it. we'll put you on a, we'll put you on a geo trajectory and you take it from there and then give yourself three tons of extra fuel. You know, there's things like that you could do. These are the discussions that we need to have and in the end actually understand which which instruments are in the moment, Mars limited. But for example, we had the discussion and I mean, could you in the end do absolute age determination on Mars instead of the stuff on returning the samples to the to Earth to do the absolute date there? And then it turned out. that I mean of in terms of in the end you need to bring a something the size of a fridge probably an instrument that size but only then all the instruments that exist are so sensitive that there's no way you're going to launch them on a rocket at least currently and so this is what people who were in the conversations at but then it means okay maybe we need to develop need to develop the instrument to do this isotope separation that can actually survive the launch on on starship or put it into a

build a giant like fun house like bouncy castle things in case your satellite to keep it safe from the vibrations right we got so much space and mass like we can have so many interesting ideas that we could do that the other idea you fill it up with some vex that evaporates um you fill it up with some vexed to do really no evaporation point and then you open some little hex and wait a year until all the vexas evaporated. Nailed it. The bouncy castle payload there's yeah who know, I mean but these are the I think these are really the conversations we need to have as a community and so yeah we're trying to set up small groups to discuss that actually

because I mean everybody everybody starstruck is this one rendering of starship standing on the surface of Europa, which is of course in bollocks. Or maybe not realistic, or maybe it is, but we need to come up with the, yeah, with things that are not basically an existing bus with a few standard instruments on it and then send it to Venus series or... I mean, there's like the K2 guys are building, you know, big satellite buses that are designed for those things.

And I think it probably wouldn't be too hard. Like if you really had to find a way to like stop gap, like how do we, in the meantime, how do we launch stuff on Starship that's going to make use of this, right? Like, would it be really so hard to just like strap a Star 48, you know, upper stage, kickstage to your satellite and stick that? Like, I think that would be not too difficult of a thing to solve, right? Like, I don't know.

You tell me, but I don't really know. I can't tell you yet. But, yeah, as you said, we need to think about. about it because in the end I don't know maybe the budget will magically increase Esau's or NASA's patch will magically increase soon but otherwise we do have a certain break now for breathing before we think about new missions and then we might as well take the new options into consideration Yeah. Okay.

Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Lots of ideas out there. We just got inside on a few times out. It's an exciting time and you sometimes forget how exciting it is. I mean, like one older person at LPSC, he told me about LPSC, what was it, 94 or so, where the only new data that they had were having were a few meteorites that somebody had reanalyzed or in the 80s where they were, where they were tribal St. Wenker were coming up with the compositional models of Mars, which were also only based on reanalysis of existing meteorites.

And yeah, that was all they had. And now we're having, yeah, we're having mission to almost every object in the solar system in formulation or in flight or already arriving there. 94 was around the time when the Chick-Salube crater stuff was happening, right? That's when we were like locking in the dinosaur killer crater, right? There was always a theory before him, but that's about when they were getting all those like, what was it, the Aya iridium samples from all the KT boundary lines all over the world and someone put the, you know, they grab. And that Mexican company, the Pemex guys pulled the core of the ocean and the crater and they found it. And that's where you're living. I think all the, yeah, I'm inside of it now.

The LPSC merch at the time. I've seen pictures of it. It had like dinosaurs on it and stuff. Oh, really? Okay. Okay. And it wasn't this LBSC that the boring one. I need to get back to this person.

It was boring. Are you really not into dinosaurs? He hates dinosaurs. Planets. Create accounting on planets. Nothing else. Yeah. That's not me.

So what do you working on these days? What are you doing? So you're at ETH, Zurich, right? Yes. Insights done. So what's your job now? What are you doing? me say to tell us about your rest.

We're still wrapping up inside. I mean, it's, uh, so there are three, coincidentally early three grad students finishing within two months now, uh, who worked on inside stuff. So one, uh, actually a really clever guy doing for the first time machine learning in a way that actually pulled out 60% more quakes than we had seen before. Um, and before I was sort of, yeah, machine learning doesn't make sense. So many humans looked at the status. No, but he showed actually, well, they.

Sometimes when the wind just died down and there's a quake immediately afterwards. No human saw it, but his code saw it. Another one's actually updating the crater counting on Mars in new craters, basically with the seismometer. And we find actually that there seem to be more impacts happening on Mars than we thought before, probably because imaging is just so difficult sometimes in certain regions to discover new craters, while the seismometer hears these new impacts. So that's the thing.

And then there's this kind of, yeah, there's this about the deep interior, whether there's an extra molten layer on top of the core, deep in the mantle, which we don't have on Earth, which is, of course, in a way, esoteric, but on the other side, it really shows us how much our understanding of planetary interiors is shaped by Earth. I mean, we always assume, like, not entirely coincidentally here I'm wearing this shirt, you're having one layer somewhere inside the, inside the crust, then you have an interface to the crust, then you're having the core, and you're having the inner core. But it turns out on other planets, it's different. Yeah, different layers. Yeah. And we have 5,000 exoplanets where we have no idea about the interior, just an average density or so.

And so we better really understand two or three bodies in the solar system that we can get a hand on. So that's... I'm still waiting to find the planet that's full of Nutella. We don't know. We might be a Nutella or a giant chestnut in the middle or something. Yeah. And then...

The one, they always talk about the one that's made of diamonds. They're like, we're going to be so rich and we can finally get to this planet. With Starship, we'll go there with Starship. We'll go to the Starship and get all the diamonds. Yeah, we can really, yeah. Yeah, there was the discussion on the Discord about what you do actually with so many diamonds or whether they're good building material or not. Probably not so much.

Maybe you can burn them actually. Not good for CO2 reasons. Yeah, and then the other thing, I mean, beyond inside of course, you may or may not have heard that a certain Swiss former NASA employee joined ETH as well. So from Söbuchen after leaving NASA decided to return to Switzerland and came home. Yeah. Came to Zurich for the first time. So he's from a band, the capital and a much smaller city than Zurich and Syrac's biggest city in Switzerland. So everybody hates Zurich outside. On the other end, that's where ETH is, so the Federal Institute of Technology.

And so, yeah, he came there and it's really, it's been a curious situation because even though Switzerland has a space industry and, for example, payload farings for all ULA launches, for all European launches, they're actually built by a Swiss company and partially in factory in the US, but the European ones are actually built in Switzerland and then shipped on some crazy way out of the mountains to French, to Kuru. But there was no real faculty for space systems or aerospace engineering anywhere in Switzerland so far. Some people wanted to change that for a long time. And then basically with him coming in, there was a momentum of actually saying, oh, we have now let's do that. Let's just actually build, at least start with a master course and space system engineering. And of course we need to start from scratch. we don't have that yet, but on the other end, it gives us a chance to actually start with the space industry of 2004 and not the one of 1948 when a lot of other such faculties were founded.

And so yeah, that's the other thing I'm currently doing. I'm developing that master in space systems and really trying to focus as one thing on system engineering, because we feel that this is something that will become more important. There are a lot of engineers for subsystems, for propulsion and everything, but the market, specifically the new space economy, we will need more of the people with the system and understanding. And of course, it's something you often gain on the job over a few years, but can we actually maybe train the people to get that at university already? Another thing that we want to look into is data during design. and at least that's my understanding of one of the things that's basic x is actually quite good at with their iterative design just collecting tons and tons of data and i've pre-launch and there's computer modeling is like unbelievable and um and that's in a classical education often not such a focus also data then from the perspective of using it for example for earth observation um using it in the end to i mean what planet is doing or what other startups are doing um maybe also in a way of yeah

trying to tackle a few of the problems we're having here on Earth because that there wouldn't be a third thing, try to use space in a sustainable way and actually first maybe even understand what sustainable means in this case. Is it what's a trade-off between having a reusable rockets that on the other hand need more fuel? What's the trade-off between having a constellation and making sure that the constellation gets out of Leo quickly and not pollute Leo, but on the other end blow all that stuff up in the upper atmosphere? There's been this paper recently where they said, oh, we buy you. By now we find 30% of the stuff in the upper atmosphere is actually re-entered rocket stages and satellites, and only 70% is meteorites.

And so we were quite fast at reaching that number. And we look at the curve of how much stuff is new in space and needs to get down in the next years. That's a lot. Yeah, that's not great. And of course, sustainability is always a buzzword, which is not great, but on the other hand, I mean, we need to be sustainable with the new space situation. And we need to at least get an understanding of what are the dangerous things we shouldn't do and how we can avoid them. And that's the thing that in other contexts, a lot of people at DTH are thinking about.

So that's something we want to build into that course, actually. That sounds cool. The first students arrive in summer. And yeah, let's see how they do. Well, hopefully, hopefully Zerbukin helps you whip that place in the shape, it'll be. Yeah. From what I hear, he's a great, like, talent developer, right? So it should be good.

No, that's what I hear. You heard, too. No, and it's, of course, he's a great and ruthless manager in really looking at the situation and seeing, okay, when you told a lot about this 80% of the problem, of the thing. Why didn't you talk about the 20% where a few red flecks might be hiding? And he's really, he's really great at doing that. actually and you are really thinking oh shit this is where i where i hit my red flags and um problems and yeah it's cool it's always good to have a manager that challenges you a little

bit right so or a lot in some cases i guess is the yeah and then then the other thing of course we're trying to i mean having talked about all this situation with the roadblock that msr is i mean even if it's a if it's a good thing it's still a roadblock for a lot of missions and of course there's Artemis which is cool but also rudenessly expensive and so I'm just trying to think about hey we can we actually get small things in between for example where does Isa have room for doing maybe a mission on eclipse lender which officially they have not yet announced that they'll do but at least we're hoping that before the big argonaut lander and so there's one and a half

or more lender in 32 I think before that you at least get some European missions on a YouTube intuitive machines lender or I mean why not right it's just sent you just send some payloads just put them in the bucket yeah Kmart paint and Bay so you can see what's the thing were so we identified a little so we thought about what can you actually do on the moon and of course everybody wants to find volatiles these days and so we decided to stay out of that crowded part of the sandbox and look at lava tubes because on a way they are such a cool thing and i mean there are so many there are so many concepts of quite the humans the astronauts

would live in the lava tubes and for that we need a crane and a caterpillar and everything but then then you look at these images and it's a it's a small opening a hundred meter or a 70 meter opening with big slopes around it and it looks as if all those fell into it so you're not going to go there first with big rover or humans even. So there's a quite good here, a good group of lect robotics here actually. And so we're trying to develop a mission that has basically only a small legged robot that can actually walk to the rim, have some two physical instruments to see whether there's a tube below or large that tube is and maybe from imaging and some spectroscopic analysis.

Also say was it an impact that hit this tube and caused the pit that is now there or did it collapse? How stable is it? And then do that before we go there with a big, big rover and big bulldozers and everything to enter. So that's cool. Let's see whether Isa would like that or somebody else. Cool.

Well, we're about wrapping up here. So yeah, thanks for coming on. I miss going to LPSC. I mean, it doesn't quite make sense when I'm not doing we Martians for that expense, because it's not cheap even for being so close to it. It's not cheap for me to go there. I feel like those hotels get more expensive every year, which is wild. So, yeah, I'm glad to hear it went.

It sounds like it went exactly the way it always does. It's like just an absolute dump truck full of science that you just cannot consume in any manageable way. And a little bit of budget drama and a little bit of, you know, on the ground organizing. That sounds about right for LBSC. But that's what it's good for. It's great, but I agree. The hotels are too expensive and the roads are crazy and everything. But you do get food trucks.

True. We have food trucks now. And I noticed that there's a huge shopping mall and walking distance north of which is the least Texas thing. imaginable because it's very upscale and for some there's a swiss chocolate store that that sells chocolate for a hundred dollars per kilogram or something that that's not whether they find the customer you should you should bring it with you go there and sell it to the store for market because you could probably get a pretty good pretty good deal you could make a few bucks to pay off the hotel good good good good good before we go I'll write that down all right yeah good before we go

wanted to share a new project I'm working on. So I started blogging and there is now a blog with a blog post up here ready for you to see. I don't know, I don't have a lot of plans for this, but you can go to jakerobins.com and it's just got all my random thoughts, space included. This first thing here is it's about intuitive machines actually talking about clips, so talking about the lander and kind of exploring the idea of success because I've find that, you know, defining success in a space mission is very complex these days. It's not like it worked or it didn't. It's not true anymore.

So I wrote this little piece here to talk about kind of some of the things that I'm thinking about. And talks a little bit about our Discord, which you are a part of. So if members want to come and hang out with us for five bucks a month, I talk about you in here. Discord members get quoted in this. Go on, God. That's how much it's above. To be honest, on Discord, I'm doing a lot more shit posting than I should. No, I didn't say that.

No, but this was actually... Our Discord is a great blend of shit posting in actual information, by the way. But it's a great topic because, I mean, even at LPSC, I mean, this morning, we were thinking about, hey, should we drive down to Bukachika and to see the launch? And of course, we didn't do it because it's seven hours. Apparently a few people at midnight decided to do it and walked from the bar into their car. drove down there. I heard rumors that some people did it. But anyway, I'm saying it like Texas. Yeah. Then we watched and everybody of course watched the launch and we're so excited about it. And then I ran into one guy who said, oh, Elon's rocket exploded again. Huh.

That doesn't make sense. I mean, really, that's the thing you took away from this, from all of this that the rocket exploded again. It's not working. We should go with S&S or something. Anyway. That's literally the exact topic of this, right? So trying to separate the ideas of objectives, right? Like you have mission objectives, you have program objectives, you have technical objectives.

There are all these kind of different stakeholder objectives to look at these. And some of them are successful and some of them aren't. And you have to take all that into a account to figure it out. Cool. There's some thoughts. Looking forward to read that. Yeah. So that's it.

Thanks again, Simon, for coming on. It's good to talk to you again. I don't know what's happening next, everybody. Next week I am away and Anthony is back and I just, I really have no idea what the plan is. So stay tuned for news on the next episode. But other than that, we've got some great stuff coming up in April. But I will be in Ontario next week for the eclipse. And if you are in the area and you want to come and hang out with me to, you know, see the, see the eclipse and maybe have a beer. I will be around there. So I've got this up on

offnom.com slash events. This is our eclipse 24 meetup. So Sunday, April 7th, and you can come hang out with me. I have a beer the night before. I would love to see you there and hopefully we have a good time. That's it everybody. Have a great day and we'll talk to you later. Tom.