Off-Nominal - 39 - Europe Saved Cassini’s Ass

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Leo Enright, the guy from Irish TV, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about covering space from a non-traditional space country, how he got started covering space, some current topics including Perseverance, ESA’s new Director General, and to generally have a great time.DrinksO'Hara's Irish Stout - O'Hara's Brewery - UntappdO'Hara's Irish Pale Ale - O'Hara's Brewery - UntappdVisions - Offshoot Beer Co. - UntappdOld Cellar Dweller - Driftwood Brewery - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeSee Mars Like Never Before! NASA's Perseverance Rover Sends New Video and Images of the Red Planet - YouTube (Timecode at Leo’s question)New ESA director general sees EU relations and commercialization as priorities - SpaceNewsLeo Enright on Twitter: “@offnom @OHarasBeers”PicksWigtown Book FestivalLiftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger – HarperCollinsThis is MARS in 4K UHD - YouTubeMars 2020 Mastcam Z Sol 4 Horizon PanoramaFollow LeoLeo Enright (@Ollopa) / TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Oh, Miko, welcome to space. Well, Anthony, we almost didn't make it. I honestly, I said this is our 39th episode. I don't know why everything's off the rails. It's very early for this. It's Friday. We've never done a weekday episode of Omnominal.

We're all thrown off here. Everything's off. Yeah, and so my microphone apparently just died about 10 minutes ago as I'm setting this up. My volume was nowhere. So I may sound a little bizarre today because I'm going through the old-fashioned MacBook Pro internal microphone. Everyone's favorite podcasting microphone, but we're here. We made it. So welcome Leo Enright.

How you doing? I'm very well indeed. So we were just saying we didn't even realize that we had fortuitously planned our guest, our esteemed guests from Irish TV during the March episode. We do on every month. So this is kind of like our St. Patrick's Day episode. I guess that's pretty fun. Yeah, happy St. Patrick's Day a little bit ahead of time. But yeah, it's the month for St. Patrick's Day and for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It is, yeah. Don't remind Jake. I thought I was all the way through it. I was like, I finally

had some space to breathe after all the Mars arrivals and landings. And then there's, yeah, the LPSC conference is looming in the back of my mind. You know, it's like about a week away, right? So it's busy time but yeah I'm excited for it for sure all right so what do we do for drinks so yeah we should set the table here we are once again spanning the time zones of earth we emailed Leo he's been on our list forever and I think we shocked him by by emailing him and saying we would like to day drink with you because his first email back was like that's pretty early for you isn't it so it's like 11 a.m. in Jake's house. It's 2 p.m. here, but Leo's sitting pretty. Nice nighttime show over there. Can you, there was one thing in our email thread that really channeled the spirit of Off Nominal.

Can you just give us a quick anecdote on how you ended up where you're sitting right now in the year of our Lord March 2021 here? Yeah, well, I'm sitting in the beautiful city of Marseille in the south of France. and I've been here for the last 12 months. I came down to Cannes, which is up the road from here. It's a bit of a drive, but it's not far. And the European Exomars rover called Rosalind Franklin is being tested in Cannes at the moment and was a year ago. At that stage, they thought they might even launch this last past summer.

So I came down to say goodbye to Rosalind Franklin and the COVID epidemic hit and everything shut down. So I suddenly found myself stuck here and I'm kind of cautious guy. So I'm not getting on an airplane any time soon. The most generous usage of the word stuck. That's my favorite. There are worse places to weather a global pandemic. than the south of France, I agree. Yeah, I guess you and Roslyn Franklin are stuck down there.

Yeah, well, Rossey, yeah, she's just gone for a spin this week. Great news. They did the final integrated testing on the spin table. So Rosalind and the lander and all that stuff took a spin down here at Cannes. I wasn't obviously allowed near it because I might give her COVID. but they did successfully do the spin tests so she'll head up to Turin fairly soon for final integration so it's a it's a big milestone this week people are pretty happy about it yeah big news for sure so Leo what are you drinking today why don't you talk a little bit about

what you got in your glass okay well I'm afraid I started early because I was doing an an event earlier today with the wonderful people at the Whigtown Book Festival. Whigtown is a tiny little village in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, way over in the kind of south-west corner of Scotland, beautiful, beautiful place. I've gone there many times for the book festival because they do a science segment, as it were. And this week they're doing the space segment. So we were talking today about dark matter and dark energy

with scientists from the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere. And I had the function of explaining to the Great Unwashed the nature of dark matter and all of that. So the way I explain it is, with a pint of stout. So this bit here at the top is everything we know about the universe. Everything we can see and detect within the universe is this bit at the top. And everything else is dark matter and dark energy.

It is absolutely mind-boggling. how little of the stuff in the universe we even know exists. It kind of forces me every time we discuss it to pour a drink. And so the more you learn about dark matter, the more you drink, the less you know. It is inversely proportional, exactly, yes. I think that's the phrase the mathematician's use. That's awesome. Anthony, what do you got?

I went down to the beer store and I found one called Visions and it is a double dry hopped hazy IPA. I got a double hopper for in honor of serial number 10 that has completed its double hop this week I felt it was only right and it has like a I can get it to focus on here.

It's got like this desert desert scene and it just kind of reminded me of all the Mars pictures I've been looking at and I love the desert and it attracted me it called to me. So that's what I got. It's from off-shoot beer Co. I didn't really research. This is only 6.9%. So really a nice wind up here. Because Jake, I would like to know two things. I'd like to know two things. What time is it? It is 11.06. And what

percentage is your beer? He froze. 0.6. Wait, he froze for the punchline. I'm here. You're here now. How many percent is your beer? It's 11.6. Yeah. So I accidentally got a very strong beer.

So I bought this actually in anticipation of this show and I did not know when it was going to be. And then. You've never made that mistake again. I know. It was a couple weeks ago that I bought. And I was like, oh, this is a nice beer. I'm going to put in the fridge and save it for the next top phenomenal. And then, yeah, I'm just.

I'm pulling up the screen before we started to look at a little bit of the backstory of it. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is 11.6. Anyway, so I went across the water to Vancouver Island last week. And there's a brewery there called Driftwood Brewery, which I drink a lot of. And I saw this thing here, which is like the super fancy old cellar dweller, it's called. And it's a part of line style ale. Wow. So it's like awesome, like art on it, this like skull thing.

And they even do the fancy wax top on it. Yeah. So I've never had it. So we're going to see what it's is. And I'll have to kind of take it easy, I think, because I've got work to do this afternoon. So let's see how it goes. I can't get it open very well because of all this wax.

This is already my favorite episode. This is such a good episode of this podcast. It's already after a great start. Can I explain? The stout that I'm drinking, I shouldn't properly explain that. Yeah, you got so wrapped up in the dark matter thing. You totally forgot about the beer. Yeah, I totally forgot to plug the beer, which is important because they're very good people.

I should explain, everybody has heard of Guinness. But there is more stout in Ireland than just Guinness. For two centuries, there have been three stouts in Ireland. There's been Guinness, Murphys, which is. brood in cork and beamish which is also brewed in cork and then about ten years ago suddenly came on the market yet another stout and this one i think is exceptional i rate this as the best irish stout available in the world today and it's called oharas it's brewed in carlo which is a market town about an hour south of Dublin

and they do excellent the I was trying earlier their Irish pale ale they're not paying me for this by the way I hasten to add they also if I'm not mistaken although I might be mixing them up with another brewery there used to be a very fine ale when I was last in Ireland

which is over 12 months ago which I particularly wanted to show you today but I haven't had time to to Google it. It's called 51st state. It's an American pale ale, not an Irish pale ale. And what's funny about the 51st state ale is that it's kind of a snide comment that people make when they criticize the Irish government for being too close to U.S. foreign policy. People throw their hands up and say, oh my God, we've become the 51st state. So let me go on record and say I would love that.

I would personally love that. Just to make that very clear. So they've turned it into a great name for a beer and it's actually a very, very good American pale ale. But the O'Hara's one is an Irish pale ale. And I must say, this is the first I've had in, I guess, more than 12 months. And having been trying out the pale ales, available here in France, I have to say it still rates as one of the best I've ever had. Awesome. I can report that this is strong.

Just going to take it easy on that one. Well anyway, cheers everyone. So welcome. I'm really excited to have you. Leo, maybe we can start just by, I'm really curious to kind of know how you got into space reporting. We're kind of interested in the idea that like Ireland is not exactly a country super close to the space, you know, economy and the space beat, right? And so when we started hearing you on the press conferences, we were really interested to know about that. So maybe you can just tell us a bit about what you do. Sure.

Well, I mean, I'd begin by just explaining that Irish space research goes back three and a half thousand years. Some of you, everybody has heard of Stonehenge, but some of you will have heard of New Grange, which is a thousand years older than Stonehenge. And New Grange was the earliest roofed building in Europe, but was effectively a solar observatory designed so that the sun would shine down the passage at the winter solstice, at the morning of the winter solstice. So Irish astronomy dates back literally three and a half thousand years. Throughout most of the Victorian era in the 1800s, Ireland was mission control for exploration of the cosmos. The biggest telescope in the world was in the middle of a bog, I kid you not, in the middle of a bog at the geographical center of Ireland.

And they didn't get to see a lot because there isn't obviously a lot of times when you can see the sky in Ireland. It wasn't for lack of trying, that's for sure. It wasn't for lack of trying. But they did actually for 50 years, they produced the best imagery. In those days, they were actually making drawings. So the first detailed drawings of galaxies were made at Burr Castle in County Offaly. So Ireland has been very much involved. We had an experiment landed on the moon by Apollo 16.

The following mission, I was in mission control. Well, I was at the Cape when they launched Apollo 17, which was a religious experience, I have to tell you. And the night launch of a Saturn moon rocket is something to behold. I don't think you have to specify a night launch, honestly. For us, people of our age, you do not need any more adjectives other than Saturn 5 launch. Well, I've seen many, many night launches and many shuttled night launch. But none of them compared remotely to the experience of seeing a Saturn light up the sky. I mean, it literally lit up the sky for most of the state of Florida.

So I then traveled to Houston via Huntsville, actually. I met the great Werner von Braun in Huntsville. He was very polite, Germanic. That took a turn. But then I went down to Houston and was in Houston throughout. the Apollo 17 moonwalks on the surface. So that was my first introduction. I got involved. I was interested because I wanted to go into space as an academic. I wanted to study geology. But and I was enrolled shortly afterwards. I was still at school at that stage. But I enrolled

shortly afterwards in University College Dublin to do geology. But by by that point, having been exposed to the to what journalists could do and the excitement of it. I'll be I'd be completely blunt with you guys. I was I was a 17 year old school kid during Apollo 17 and I had a press pass. So they let me into the science support room. I was in the science support room during the EVA when they arrived at Shorty Crater and discovered the orange soil. Get to hang out with Jim. If I was to go to college, I would have to wait probably 20 years if I was to even remotely have the chance to get into the science support room of a major mission.

So that's why that's basically why I did it. You are the equivalent. I was at the baseball game when the Phillies won the World Series. I think I lost you again, guys. Uh-oh. I know you're hearing me, but... This is great. He's out. He'll be back.

I was at the game when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, and there was this little kid that was sitting behind me. It was his first baseball game ever. And he got a ball signed by the pitcher before the game, who eventually was the World Series MVP, and then watched the Phillies win the World Series. And I'm pretty sure that kid never went back to another. the baseball game because why would you? And this is, Leo is now the, we are verified that he is the

equivalent of that. He is a geology nerd who has stumbled his way into mission control at like the most historic geology moment, maybe ever. I don't know. Oh man. Yeah, that's, that's quite the story. We'll see if he comes back. But if not, I feel like that was a pretty, pretty successful session with Leo. Just call it a show after that. All right. Well, sorry everybody. We're, we're dealing with some interesting latency problems because Anthony's the hub and he's reaching across North America to me and reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to Leo. So it's a difficult pattern here. We're working the issue, as they say. But we clearly did not prepare any content for us to have both hands of the wheel of this podcast at the moment.

No. This, this hits you, man. I got to say this, like every little sip is challenging. Oh, he's back. I think he's back. Let's see. I'm baffled. I've never, I never have a problem. Well, I've brought us from this setup. Oh, he's in here twice, Anthony. He has to grab the other. I know, he's in there's looking at just a static Leo, I think. But boom, there's moving Leo. We're good. We're back. on the rails, everything's fine now, nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Literally the best mic drop moment ever was Leo telling us that he was there for the coolest moment in space geology history and then disconnecting from the internet. Yeah, wow. That's pretty cool. I mean, yeah, I can totally relate with that, Leo, because even just in my short, very, very small J. Journalist career here, we, and

Anthony I joke that we're small J journalists, not capital J journalists. But I've been able to be exposed to some pretty cool stuff too. And I would totally agree. I would be really hard to like pull back and be like, well, now I want to do this like professionally and then go to like journalism school or geology school because that would be, yeah, I don't think I could do it. So who were you, you were there as a student? Who was able to hook you up with the connection to get there?

Were you writing for anyone particular at the time? Or was this more of like an educational? trip. Yeah, no, I was actually, I can say that probably I am still the youngest foreign correspondent ever accredited by the US government. It was quite extraordinary. There was an editor in the Irish Independent, one of the national newspapers here, and he took a shine to me, if you'll excuse the expression, because his name was Bill Shine. Bill said, okay, if you're, you know, you You know, kid, you're interested. I had been involved in the coverage of the moon landings in Irish television throughout the mission,

from Apollo 11 onwards, even as a school kid, because I went to them and said, look, I know about this stuff. And they said, okay, come on in. So I was in the control room, in the TV control room, telling them what was going on during the EVAs throughout the Apollo. program. And so it was only kind of natural to go for the final one and be there, which was just a made, blew my, blew my mind. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you, like, what do you normally consider your beat in terms of space? Like, because I kind of see you all over the place. You're popping into, you know, Rover press conferences and launch press conferences. And like, so I'm

kind of curious what you consider your domain of things that you cover and what you don't. Well, I mean, at heart, I'm a planetary science guy. I really do. That's what I enjoy. Now, you know, it doesn't have to be robots, but it's, as we know at the moment, it's mostly robots. But, you know, as Jack Schmidt always likes to describe the moon as a planet, and I'm with him on that one. So, lunar exploration, you know, Artemis really interests me because it involves women and men. on the surface. You know, I hope that the first mission of the Artemis program lands the first woman and the second woman on tomorrow, out to the moon, and to hell with all these men.

I mean, why do they have to keep saying it's going to land the first woman and the next man? I mean, why does it have to be a man on it at all? I mean, I don't get that. It just doesn't make sense. It's a stupid slogan because it may be that Samantha Christopheretti of the European Space Agency, you know, if the Americans decide that they want to get deeper into the international aspect of this, Samantha Christopher etti could be the second person to set foot on the moon this century. And that I think would be wonderful because she'd be a terrific person to have on the surface. I'm co-signing that. I'm all here for this. All of your initiatives I'm here for. 51st State Ireland, Samantha Christopher

Ferretti is the second woman on there. I'm for all of this. I'm signing on to the Leo Enright platform. I don't know if they've announced the NASA administrator yet, but I'm putting Leo up into the running here. No, that's a really good point. I mean, that's, so Leo, I think we're on, we're on the same beat you and I, because that's, that's, that's where I kind of live to, planetary is my love. And then there are certain things that sort of touch that and are like adjacent to that could that come into my, my, my, uh, my world because like I I look at big rockets because I think they're going to take us to those planets and I look at human spaceflight because they can do the best science on those worlds

and cool well we're gonna have to we're gonna have to hang out more I think well we'd be I I gather you were planning to be in Houston is that right for you would have been in Houston for LPSC I think next week yeah yeah I go every year so I haven't missed one since 2017, which was my first time that I went. Obviously, last year they didn't have one because of the pandemic, hitting it just the worst time for them, you know, two weeks before it happened. So, but yeah, so we're doing the virtual thing next week. I don't know what that's going to be like.

We'll see how good that plays out. They've had a year to prepare for it. So I hope it kind of is awesome. But it's going to be fun. There's going to be perseverance updates, you know, curiosity updates. Insights got a big round. of stuff coming at this LPSC. I'm pretty excited for.

We're going to see some really good interior structure things. There's a whole bunch of lunar science sample stuff coming through. And it's going to be good. It's smaller. Look at the schedule, it feels less overwhelming than it has in previous years because I think just fewer people are going with the format. But I hope it's a lot of fun. Yeah, my first LPSC was LPSC 2.

where did you miss the first year what was that about what did you do the first year that was when it was just the lunar science conference right and those days it was in in the manned spacecraft center what's now the j cc and it was in a classroom you know we all just gathered in a classroom and you know there are about 50 people in a room and in those days of course the many of the astronauts were still active on the astronaut core. They were, you know, kind of heading out. They weren't going to fly again. Most of them, although, you know,

there were some who spectacularly managed to get to fly, you know, yet another space type, spacecraft type. But, yeah, it was really crazy. You know, I mean, I do remember one stage, I think it was Dave Scott at some stage putting his hand up and saying, excuse me, I can't quite remember where I picked that

rock up? Could you remind me where? I mean, that's surreal. They still do that because I went to one, I think in 2019 or 2018, and, you know, there was, I think there was like this poor grad student. She was like, I'm thinking, you know, 24 years old or something like that. And she was doing, you know, something on Shorty Crater like that. And this rock here. And then they took questions. And Harrison Schmidt, no, Jack Schmidt got up and said, okay, well, actually, That one is actually part of this thing. When I picked it up, I noticed it was there. And she was just like, okay, thank you for, yes, I agree.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. And then just like reevaluated her entire career right there on the podium. It's like the best and worst moment of her life, right? Because it's both, it's both experiences. Like, wow, this is the coolest and worst thing that will ever happen to me. Yeah. Oh, that's always great.

I mean, he's so active. And it's wonderful to see him at these meetings. He was at a session on lunar surface planning for Artemis the other day, and it was really wonderful to see him. You know, he's always been very giving. He's been enormously helpful to me over the years, never ever, you know, turned down a request. He's always gone out of his way to be helpful. He's a particular passion for young people and getting the message out. And, you know, look, I'll be honest, guys, he and I, we part on the politics.

But that's another story. Yeah. Yeah, it's always a little bit bizarre when he drifts into his climate change stuff where he's got this whole theory that it's just the sun is getting warmer or something. And it's, yeah, it's not great. It goes zero to 60 pretty quick. Yeah, when he's in the lane of lunar science, just, you know, the rocks and stuff, it's great. Leo, I'm curious to hear from you.

I'm curious to hear like what, you know, Jake was asking how do you decide what your beat is? I'm curious to hear, like, the response from readership or other people that you work with on what particular things are exciting to your readership today, right? Because, like, Jake and I have a pretty good sense of what's interesting to, like, people our age and our areas and whatnot, things that excite us and not. But as someone who is, you know, over in Ireland or south of France, and you're kind of writing about Issa and then a little bit of NASA and your national global politics and, you know, more of the sciencey side of stuff.

What particular things do you feel like you get the best or biggest response from when you're writing? Well, I think there's a difference between the politicians and the general public. The response I get from politicians is always NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA. They're all of a certain age, and they cannot see beyond NASA. I mean, Ireland is a founder member of the European Space Agency. I mean, we signed up at the very beginning, and we've stuck with it despite being a small country and also despite two periods of very serious recession when, you know, we could have spent the money on something else. We've stuck with the European Space Agency. And to be fair, they've stuck with us. They've been very good partners. So it's annoying for me to sometimes talk to older politicians in Ireland who talk always about NASA, this, NASA that, NASA, the other thing.

Whereas the younger generation are much more acutely aware of the European element of this. And of course, that's very largely because the whole European thing has changed completely. You know, 10 years ago, I spent, I would say, you know, probably three months of a year in the United States at the various space centers, at launch sites and so on. now, you know, 10 years later, Europe has become so much embedded into this international effort of space exploration that for a lot of missions now, it really doesn't make sense for me

to be traveling, you know, long haul to the United States. When I can go, for instance, to the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, where they have the super cam space, centre operating today. Now obviously I'm not allowed in because of COVID but the team in Toulouse have been active and of course also needless to say the all the insight stuff the seismometer and the sadly the probe the the heat probe has very very unfortunate what's happened there but boy is that a learning lesson as it were we've learned

something weird about the Martian soil that, you know, I don't think anyone would have guessed. So that's interesting. It's not necessarily applicable to future missions for complicated reasons, but it's still definitely telling us something new about the Martian soil. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the Insight mission gets undersold as like an international collaboration. Because on the North American side, it's just, it's a NASA mission. That's all they really talk about, but all the major instruments are made in Europe.

So I don't know why we don't talk about that more as a European or international mission, for sure. It's interesting. What's your vibe on Xomars having been around the, you know, attempted a visit. Maybe you did end up visiting. I don't know if you actually were successful in your visit. Do you have any particular vibes around that now that we're, you know, clearly past the last year of craziness with COVID plus the delays from parachutes and all of that? what is the confidence level heading into the next cycle here? I think this test, I mean, it obviously, you know, shake and bake tests are bog standard for spacecraft.

But there was a definite sense that they were putting this out. I think really to just basically demonstrate that there's a bit of momentum behind the mission. and that they're determined not to let another launch date slip. I mean, that would be really not very helpful if that were to happen. It would make it more difficult with the whole Fetch rover project. I mean, they're not comparable, obviously. The Fetch rover is a different animal. But still, I think it would make a huge difference for Europe,

as well as for our American partners, if this was successfully rolled onto the surface, having been placed on the surface by the Russian lander. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's had a difficult history, as we all know. This is not new in our experience with the United States. It's not been, it's not that unusual for the US to pull out of projects, which is one of the reasons why European diplomacy has pushed really, really hard when we're doing deals with the Americans, and I'm talking here about the United States, obviously, when we're doing, because our relationship

with Canada, of course, is wonderful, but when we do make deals with the Americans, we try and put ourselves into the critical path so that it's more difficult for them to break the international treaty. I've noticed. At least in one area, I've noticed. Europe saved Cassini's ass. The Americans would have pulled out a Cassini if they hadn't signed an international treaty with the Europeans and they were forced to go ahead with it, basically. Can you imagine a world without Cassini? Yeah, indeed. I don't want to do that. That'd be pretty depressing.

You can thank us later. It's funny, like, as a Canadian, I kind of feel like I have one foot in Europe and one foot in NASA because, like, you know, we do so much work with NASA. Our astronauts are basically NASA astronauts, and we are, you know, we've got scientists funded and instruments flying on tons of these missions, but we're also an associate member of ESA and we're, you know, we do work with that as well. I think, you know, one of the XMR's program managers is Canadian, and we built the, mobility system for Rosalind Franklin so like we're pretty heavily in that too so I always feel like

it's it's like I don't know it's like two two parents that we don't really always get along but and we're trying to steal Chris Hatfield from you as well you know Chris has this love affair with Ireland he's he's he's an honorary Irish astronaut at this stage oh yeah okay I didn't know that oh yeah big time big time well there's there's a family connection his daughter studied at Trinity College. Okay. So Chris used to come over regularly. He still comes over.

I would meet him regularly in Dublin. And so the family, you know, they feel very close to Ireland. And Chris has always looked for any opportunity he could to come over. Chris sees Ireland as the 11th province in a lot of ways. Yeah, the 11th province. Yeah. Just be careful. You can't have him because he's, he's,

way too popular here. He basically can do no wrong Canada. You're not going to make him the next Governor General, are you? Apparently astronauts as Governor General's does not work out very well. So maybe we'll try something different on the next one. That's an insight to do for all the things. That's a deep cut. That's a deep cut. There's some questions in the chat

for Leo specifically that we're talking about Issa. There's a new head of Issa as of like 4. days ago or something. What do you make of that situation? Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting. He's Austrian. So that's actually being read with, you know, reading the tea leaves. The European Space Agency is a bit like the European Commission, the European Union. Now, I want to emphasize there are two different things. The European Space Agency is not part of the European Union. It's a separate international entity. But the way they do their business is

very similar. They tend to, both tend to have a selection process that is somewhat opaque, shall I say, when they're picking their leaders. And so there was a lot of interest in the fact that they picked a small country, basically, to run the European Space Agency. And that gave some hope to countries like Ireland, I must say. Yeah, I don't know much about it. It's Joseph Achbacher, I don't know how to say, Ashbacher, I think is how do you say. We've got some German listeners that will correct me on that, I'm sure. But yeah, I don't know much about him. And I guess he was pretty deep into the ESA bureaucracy already,

so the transition is pretty smooth. I think that was the reckoning. They've a lot of major projects in the pipeline. and I think they wanted a degree of continuity. There was a lot of annoyance and there had been serious questions raised about why there wasn't a woman consider it seriously, at least that is how it's viewed by some. So, you know, there is a question there,

but the choice of somebody from a smaller country kind of neutralizes that criticism for smaller countries like Ireland. Because, you know, it's quite interesting. The small countries do have an outsized influence within ISA. We don't, obviously, we can't put up big money to fund the big rockets or, you know, the big human space flight programs. It's, you know, it's just not, we're not going to become big players in those fields.

And so from that point of view, we have less influence. But the big countries, Germany, France, the UK to an extent as well, are quite keen to be seen to being paying deference to the smaller countries. So it doesn't appear like the program is being run from Paris and from Berlin. Yeah. You mentioned the UK. There's obvious, like, drama always there. There is this whole thing where they bought one web. They are talking up, well, maybe we'll make our own Galileo system instead of going with the actual Galileo system.

Is there any vibes you're getting there on how that would fit in long term to Issa? Is this more of bluster and not actually stuff that you're worried about day to day? I haven't really been paying a lot of attention. There's an awful lot to come out in the wash with this. one web thing. The British have done some good stuff with their National Space Center. They've definitely got more coherence. They're putting serious money into projects that they previously were not involved in, particularly in the science field. So I wouldn't be in rushing to criticize the British. But I haven't been playing too much attention to.

this one web thing, I'd like to see how that plays out a bit more. I would, you know, instinctively raise an eyebrow, let us say, but I haven't been following it closely enough to provide any sort of serious analysis. Yeah. Was that a suitably political answer? Oh, yeah. I mean, the fact that we got to you instinctively raising eyebrows, I feel like we nailed exactly what we're looking for out of that question. So we're all good. I feel great.

More stout. How's the 11% beer going, by the way, Jake? Quick check in. I'm halfway through it. My face is hot again. This happens now often on the show. My face gets hot. So, yeah.

Oh, man, yeah. Hmm. Okay. It's good. My face always runs hot. I have this thing called. rosasia, which makes me look like I drink whiskey when, in fact, I don't. So the new cameras are more, the more modern cameras are actually more sympathetic to me. But in the old days, I used to have to lather green.

I mean, it was really bizarre, this green stuff that I had to ladder across my face to take the red out. You were like manually white balancing yourself? That's very strange. So I got to ask, so we moved this show forward an hour because as we, after we had set it up, NASA scheduled this press conference, you know, which is at 45 minutes from now or so for the perseverance from over. And Jake's halfway into an 11% view.

Yeah, I know. Great questions coming out in this briefing. Workday ahead of me. But it made me think. So I wanted to ask you because you show up on these NASA press briefings and you get a question in. And your questions are always very. very thoughtful. I feel like in the in the press briefing question period, there's always like some questions that are just like someone's got a quota and they got to just like write an article.

Can you just make a comment about this so I can write it down to publish, right? Which is like fine. But your questions are always very like, you know, you unpack an idea that maybe the briefing didn't quite get to, but you also weave in, you know, there's like a fine line. There's like interesting questions and then ones that they won't answer. And you always weave, a good spot between them where they do give you information but it's not something they would have given had you not asked it so I wanted to just ask you how do you plan that how do you think through your your briefing questions because I just I'm always fascinated by them yeah I well it it's actually something this

relates pretty specifically to JPL but but also maybe APL in you know in Johns Hopkins There is a very different ecosystem. The ecology of the press room at JPL is very different to the ecology of the press room in headquarters or in Johnson or at the Cape. There are two different species in the press room, in the Van Carman Auditorium at JPL.

One group, and I mean this is not to say that one group, is better or worse than the other, but there's one group who are there to get the quote. They want to know, how do you feel, you know, does the, is the rover a boy or a girl? You know, they want those questions because they really, that produces good copy. So these are not, this is not illegitimate. This is perfectly good journalism. And it's important, you know, how do you feel? How did you feel at that moment? And you'll notice that people, particularly the engineers, generally, although the guys and gals in JPL have got pretty good at this,

but very often engineers and scientists try and avoid the touchy-feely answer. Less so, now let's face it, less so with some of them, and we can think of some of them at J-DL, they've all got, they're all pretty, you know, they're pretty wise to this now. But as I said, I'm not thinking of anyone. particular. But anyway, there's the other group, and they're a sizable group, maybe not quite as large, and that's a group who are more interested in the science and the discussion of, you know, what's going on. Now, you know, people like Kelly Beattie, obviously, and, you know, that group.

There's a very long history of this. When we're allowed to gather at Van Carman, this is the group that would break out after a press conference and sit in a huddle. We pull a group of chairs around and we put several of the mission scientists in the middle and we just drill, drill, drill for the real. And it's all well understood at JPL

and it's all very well organized. These telecons, like the one tonight, are, I think, an attempt to try and recreate that. But it's not the same when you're not there. The advantages is that, you know, I don't claim to be a great expert on this, but there are people of my colleagues who really are experts. Like, as I said, Kelly Beatty would be a good example. And their questions at these little gatherings, these round robins, Their questions often inform me as much as the answers that they get.

So I'm kind of trying to straddle both of these. I do try very much to try and get some science answers. But I'm also looking for the headline. You know, are they going to head straight for the hills? Or are they going to head over towards that outcrop of the exposure? of the Delta remnant. You know, that's really interesting. I find that very interesting.

And if they would answer my question directly, you know, I'd definitely be jumping up and down and talking about it on air. But, you know, they, you know, they obviously can't answer some of these questions directly. Jake's writing all these down. Like, all right.

Yeah. Like, I'm like, who can start one faster? If I may say, my favorite comment that I'm really proud of It came to me in a flash, as it were, during the New Horizons Pluto flyby. We were at a press conference.

And, you know, again, these were very much like very much in the same spirit as the JPL press conferences. And of course, as you can imagine, Alan Stern was very giving and, you know, was willing to answer questions. But a thought came to me, which ended up being tweeted quite a bit. And that was that I like flybys because they're science at the speed of journalism. I was very proud of. I thought that was kind of a pretty good line. It's such a good line. I definitely remember that.

That's stuck in my head somewhere, but I would not have been able to pull it out without your reminding me. And now I'm going to just make sure I keep that top of mind because that's incredible. So if you don't want to put it on my headstone, that's it, I think. Science at the speed of journalism. journalism. Yeah. I mean, that's actually a pretty legitimate concern, right?

Because a lot of these, especially with a longer mission like perseverance or curiosity, there is a ton of stuff where the process is very slow. I mean, you know, there's so much excitement about the landing of perseverance. But, you know, my experience of this means that I'm excited for LPSC like a year and two and three years from now because that's when we're going to get the answers I have to the questions right now, right? that's the tricky part and the whole landing video thing

was like a microcosm of that right because they wanted to roll this video out as a as a legit full video if they started posting thumbs people would have put them together on Twitter and they needed to have this moment it drove everyone nuts but like I totally get that they wanted this grand unveiling

of what is arguably the most epic video that has ever been sent back to Earth from interplanetary space it's tricky yeah yeah I think MSL was, I mean, for anyone who wanted instant gratification, MSL was a real slow burner. I thought it was wonderful, and in particular, I want to pay tribute to John Grotsinger,

who was absolutely wonderful. I mean, he was so good when we wanted to, you know, he would sit with us for hours and answer questions and explain what they were doing. But I do know there were people even in headquarters who were tearing their hair out because, you know, John was doing the science. He was following the science to use a current phrase. And there were people who were saying, oh, go head for the hills. We want the pictures of the towering buttes and so on. And John was adamant.

He was going to follow the science, which really, I think, was the correct approach. But it made it tougher for us hacks, I have to say. Yeah, yeah, because it took a couple of years for curiosity to get out of that flat area, you know, into the hills, right? The Perump hills and the Bagnol dunes and stuff. All those boring rocks from river flows, you know, and lake riverbeds and all that boring stuff, you know, that they kept stopping for and these amazing, you know, stratified pebbles, you know, different sizes.

So you could calculate the speed of the speed of the... the water that brought them down. You know, oh God, you know, let's get to those nice pictures of the hills. It's going to be the same thing now with the Delta, right? It's going to be the same thing now with the Delta. They're going to want all, everyone's going to want to just get to that Delta because this gorgeous 200-foot cliff and they're not going to be there for a bit. Oh, I think, I mean, there is a different, I mean, they've already acknowledged.

there is a very different ethos to this mission. And that is simply because they cannot afford not to collect a representative sample set and have it safely on board before the thing breaks down. They cannot risk that. So they've got to get the samples quickly. That's really going to limit. It's going to be shoot and scoot all the way. It's going to be a very, very different experience.

And, you know, unless they actually find trilobites, I don't see them hanging around this area of the, you know, the Canyon DeShay. I don't see them hanging around Canyon DeShay that long. Yeah, just get the helicopter up and move on, right? Yeah, literally, as in the chat is saying, get to the chopper. Literally get to the chopper. Put that thing down there. I'm still, I mean, I'm sorry if this is too geeky, and I actually have been apologizing at press conferences for geeking it. At what moment between 50 minutes ago and now, did you think you could say something that was too geeky, is what I'm trying to figure out.

But for those, you know, for people who may not follow it that closely, I mean, the rover landed in an area that the geologist called Canyon DeShay, which is an area in the Navajo Nation, that is very geologically productive, interesting. I think there's an amazing irony in this. Have we time for a quick story about Spirit landing? Yes. I was just blown away. I hope I've got the right rover here, but I was blown away by the fact that they landed in Canyon DeShay.

Because when Spirit landed, I hope I haven't got myself completely mixed up here. It's a long time ago, but when it landed an eagle crater and it opened its eyes and we saw these concretions, these marbles lying around on the surface. Within a day, they looked surreal because they looked like marbles. They looked like they'd been made in a factory.

And Ray Arvetson of the geology team explained to us that these were concretions and that he was very familiar with them from the three corners site, which is also a Navajo Nation site at the three corners where there are these concretions. And what I found amazing when I googled these concretions and the Navajo site was that there is this story in Navajo folklore. These concretions are indeed marbles for playing with. And they are left for us on the surface by the ancestors so that they will, so that we will know that they are happy. And when I read that and I looked up at the live, almost live imagery of these concretions on Mars, I thought, wow, doesn't the world move in, you know, everything has a cycle to it. We go from the Navajo story of, you know, the Marbles telling us that the ancestors are happy.

And now we're back in Navajo country. So I haven't had a chance yet to reach out to the elders of the Navajo Nation, but I'm dying to hear what stories they can share about deltas. And there must be very, very rich Navajo tradition that we can incorporate it to our stories about Canyon DeShay. Sorry, end of rant. I think they were tweeting about it, though, right? Because one of the team members is from Navajo Nation. and I think there was like an official tweet.

Congrats. I don't know. I might have made this up. Wasn't this something? Did you see this on Twitter? I'll go search for that and I'll drop them a note because I'm very keen to what the stories are that we can incorporate. Because I've certainly used that story many, many times in broadcasts. That's awesome.

Cool. Well, should we get to some picks, Anthony? What do you think? We should get to some picks. Yes. who wants to go first? Do you have anything that you would like to recommend, Leo?

Maybe some of the stuff from the festival earlier. Is there anything that you've been reading or watching lately that you want everyone out there to make sure they pay attention to? Okay, well, I think, I mean, I was certainly,

I'm sorry I hadn't twiged that I should come with a little show me. So I would definitely recommend the Wigtown Festival because, as I said, this is a small village in Scotland, which has made itself a big footprint with this book festival. And all this week, they've been doing space-related stuff.

So I would definitely recommend just do a web search for Wightown is archived on their YouTube channel. So you can check that out. No, I would definitely recommend that. I think at the moment that's that would be my main pick. Yeah, yeah, I don't think of anything else particularly

at the moment. I got a link to it so I'll put in the show notes for everyone to check out as well. Looks like they do have some videos on YouTube that you can catch up on too so even if you weren't there live you can make sure to peep in. Jake, do we have the same pick? I don't know, I have two.

And so we'll see. Oh, no, I don't have that pick, no. I'm plugging it. Eric Berger's book came out this week. I have not had a chance to... I looked at the middle fold where all the epic pictures are that he got, like, sent directly to him

from the team members. I bought both the Kindle edition so I can read it and the paperback because there's, like, amazing photos in here. He told us about this when he was on the show last time, that he was writing this book. But did he tell us about it before? It was even announced. I forget.

Because Lauren Grush announced that she was writing a book on this show. I believe Eric Berger was pretty close. So, Leo, I don't know if you're writing a book, but if you are, this is the show to announce it on. I believe. I must say, I'm glad you mentioned Eric's book because I knew there was something in the back of my mind that I wanted to mention. And it was actually Eric's book, because that's definitely top of my list of things that I want to read when I have a few minutes to bear. Yeah, I haven't popped it open this yet. So did you start listening or anything, Jake?

Yeah, I'm two chapters in. It's pretty interesting so far. So I'm excited to, it's not very long. It's a pretty easy read, I think. So it's good to see. But yeah, I'm excited for it too, because there's some wacky stuff from those early days for sure. So, yeah, so I have two picks, and it's related to perseverance. As you know, since my whole month has been about perseverance or so.

So the first one I sent you, I sent it over to Anthony there. Yeah, let me pull this up on a sec. Because sometimes when I load really epically large things like this gigapen, you're going to drop out for a second. So let me load up this insanely large image. Start with the YouTube video first. So some of the best early science we have is from the instrument, mask cam Z or mask cam Z,

I would say it. So it's the, you know, the mass camera that's, that it's the good high-res one. And it has Zoom capabilities. So the 360-degree panorama of this thing is unbelievable what they were able to do. So this is a video by Sean Doran, who is amazing. An Irishman. He is an Irishman, yeah.

And so he put, he just an amazing image process. I've talked about him before because he's got, he made the things on the wall, behind me which I can show again too but he took these mask cam Z things and put it into a 30 minute movie with videos with music and and you can pan through this whole area in Jesro crater from the landing spot and it's just stunning like it's an amazing thing to throw up on a 4k TV and just watch and listen and chill out because it's very very relaxing so I wanted to share that as my first pick and then if you like this picture and you want something a little more

interactive. This is a gigapan put together by Doug Ellison. He's a GPLT member. So this is the same data, but you can actually play around with it. You can zoom in, you can you can pan, you can go right to the maximum resolution and check out like individual rocks all loaded right into your browser. So it is a ton of fun to play with. You can see some of the crazy stuff that the rover can see and it's just awesome. I spent some time playing around with this the other day and there's something about like the

focal length that this was shot at because of the Zed part of Mass Cam Zed is it makes it even more like saying Zed thank you we're not confused thank you

there's something about it that makes it feel like you're more there than the other photos of Mars have been you know yeah just so much depth to them detail and depth yeah and the the slight haze that you just kind of, like, I can see some rocks in the distance or some mountains in the distance that you can't quite make out, but it feels like you're standing there. And it's definitely worth popping on it. I'll put these links in the show notes too because it's worth exploring on your own. Yeah, totally. So those are my picks. And obviously, I'm obsessed with mass cams. I just put a private message over the airwaves. Just to say, Doug, I'm sorry we're not in lucky bald ones getting completely thrash. at this stage. Next time, Amigo, we'll definitely do it next year.

Yeah, totally. So yeah, so that's my pick, and I'm excited about it. Well, that's pretty much all we got. I don't know if we have any more you want to share. Anthony, do you want to talk a bit about what you're working on lately? What's going on in your main area of work? Well, I spent most of the week talking about Rocket Lab, because they had all these announcements.

We talked about, they announced a new big launch vehicle, Neutron, they're going public, they got all these announcements. So I talked about all that and then convinced Peter Beck to come back on Miko for the third time. So we sat down for like 40 minutes yesterday

and he's awesome to talk to because he's super open and he will give you coy answers to things that he doesn't want to answer, but you can read a lot into what he answers in that. So I think if you listen to the interview I did with him, there's some of those moments where he's like, well, these are the three words that I will tell you about that question,

and you can read into a lot of that. So if you want a lot about Rocket Lab and 40 minutes with Peter Beck, main engine cutoff.com is the hotness this week. What about you, Jake? Yeah, I mean, I've been all Mars all the time, right? So we did an amazing live stream with your help for the Perseverance Landing. So thank you for that, which just went swimmingly. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

We had so much fun watching along with the live stream. And then I was able to sit down with Dr. Swati Mohan, who was the voice of EDL. She was the guidance control navigation. Guidance Navigation Controls Operations Lead for the Mars 2020 mission. So she was, you know, she's been on the mission since 2013 handling all of crews in EDL with the rest of her team, you know, with Al Chen and them. So she had a lot of cool information to share about the EDL process for perseverance. You know, just a little bit about the two new technologies like range trigger and terrain relative navigation,

which are the things that allowed perseverance to do the, you know, the pinpoint safe and accurate landing that it did. It was an awesome interview. And I'm so excited to have been able to talk with her. And, you know, I don't want to brag, but after she was talking to me, she, you know, leveraged that on her resume to be able to be able to talk. able to talk to the president of the United States earlier this week. I don't know if they're related, but one did follow the other, and I can't help but read a little bit into that. So, yeah, that's the, that's the recent one.

Oh, and I got stickers now, too. Look at that. I made stickers. You can buy these now in my shop. Oh, the parachute. Yeah, I got the rover wheel, and I got the parachute design, which was, you I put this on a shirt too and it got pretty popular. So lots of people were picking this up. I'm seeing some cool pictures show up on Twitter and stuff of the JPL parachute.

Very good. Very good. Leo, if people are not like us familiar with you coming into NASA press briefings with Gumpshin, would you send them anywhere in particular on the internet to find more Leo N. Wright into their life? Well, I tend to, I'm more of an old school guy, so most of my, most of my work is live broadcasting, I'm afraid. I've never really, I don't know why, it's never arisen to get involved in podcasting or any of that stuff. you know I tend to just do you know mostly radio but television also of course and you know the reason they call me the guy from Irish TV is that over the years I've worked for different TV channels and it just gets really confusing if we start trying to say which one so they all said oh just we just say Irish TV that way then

everyone knows. I'm just saying if you did want to get into podcasting, I think we have a good line in on just story time with Leo and you just pour these stories out because they're all incredible. So I'm pitching it if you want to do it, I think we can help you do that. Well, I tell you what, we could do one where we just talk to Irish people involved in space. And I tell you, it would go on for 100 years.

We start with Sean Doran, but I mean there's loads of others. You know, it's an amazing number of people. Brian Harvey, who you may or may not have come across, but Brian is one of the world's leading experts on the old Soviet space program has written all of the major books on the subject. You know, I mean, it's just amazing the number of Irish people involved in this. And as I like to remind people, Everyone says, oh, there's been no Irish person in space.

Rubbish. There have been six Irish citizens in space. Six. I think that's more than the Canadians. I was going to ask. Mind you, they're all Irish Americans who took Irish citizenship. It's a 51st state, baby. Yeah, exactly.

I think we're at seven. I'm counting. Seven or eight. I'm doing the math now. I can't remember. This is good live quizzing. A couple of other citizens since I'll ask you the count. Oh, man.

We're still working on Chris Hadfield. Yeah, they're going to steal one and take the lead. Yeah. Give him Irish citizenship and then take all the credit to the flight. He loses one, we game one. That's how it's done. Well, I think that's a great place to end it, Andy. I don't know what you think.

I think you are most of the way through an 11% beer, and you both have to make it to a NASA briefing in a couple of minutes. So thank you, Leo, for hanging out with us. It's been awesome to have you on the show. My pleasure. Slauncha.