Science Friday - Coronavirus And Schools, New Mars Rover. July 17, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

As we approach August, many of our young listeners and their parents are starting to think about going back to school. Usually, that might mean getting new notebooks and pencils, and the excitement of seeing classmates after a summer apart. But COVID-19 makes this upcoming school year different. Big districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego public schools, will be completely remote this fall. Other districts are looking at hybrid programs, with some time in the classroom and some at home. Still others want kids to return to the classroom full-time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says schools should adjust plans based on how many coronavirus cases are in the community. Schools with little transmission may be able to go back to the classroom, but with more sanitation efforts and no sports events. For communities with high levels of spread, the CDC says stronger measures are needed, like staggered arrivals and dismissals, kids staying in one classroom, or all-remote education. However, Vice President Mike Pence said this week that CDC guidance should not dictate whether schools open for in-classroom instruction. Joining Ira to talk about what to consider in back-to-school plans are Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Laura Fuchs, a high school history teacher and secretary of the Washington Teachers’ Union in Washington, D.C. In just a few weeks, NASA is scheduled to launch its newest rover in the direction of Mars. Perseverance, the formal name for the Mars 2020 mission’s rover, is now safely at Cape Canaveral, strapped to its Atlas V rocket, waiting only for the launch window to open. If all goes well, Perseverance will begin roving Mars next February. Once on Mars, it will join its cousin Curiosity in combing through the dust and rocks of the red planet—but where Curiosity hunts inside a meteor crater for water and other signs of suitability for life, Perseverance will scour an ancient river delta for the traces left by potential microscopic life. Ira talks to two Perseverance masterminds, deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan and aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo, about the challenges of building for space exploration, and what it takes to conduct science experiments 70 million miles from Earth. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. But later in the hour, we're going to talk about back to school, what it might look like for K-12 students this fall. Some districts are releasing their plans, and they all look a little bit different. But first, one big question about this pandemic is how long will it take to develop a COVID-19 vaccine? There are lots of candidates and clinical trials happening. The National Institutes of Health is running a trial created by the company Moderna. The results were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here to give us an update on that vaccine trial and other science headlines from the week is Annalie Newitz, science writer and author based out of San Francisco. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to have you. This vaccine has been tested in people and passed through phase one trial. So please, tell us what that means.

So what that means is that the vaccine was tested on a small group. in this case, it was 45 people of different ages. And it showed that it is not only safe, it's not causing any disastrous side effects, but it's also efficacious. It's creating antibodies in the people who have taken it. So that means that Moderna is hoping to quickly move into a phase three trial. And that means that it'll be a much bigger trial on lots of people and hoping to find out that it works once we have a bigger population taking it. Are they skipping phase two going right to phase three? So oftentimes phase one and two get kind of squished together.

And so what we're seeing here is a speeded up version of a typical set of trials. So phase one and two are designed to determine, as I said, safety and efficaciousness. And so now in phase three, we try to see how it fares in a big population. They're hoping to have that phase three trial done in October, but that seems like a very early deadline. So it may take a bit longer than that. And this is just one of many vaccine clinical trials out there, right? That's right. There's a lot of other vaccines. There's about 150 vaccines in trial right now. And there's a couple of others that are already ready for phase three trials. There's the Oxford

vaccine, which has also gotten a lot of attention, which also has demonstrated efficaciousness. It can create antibodies and an immune response in people who've taken it. So we're keeping a close eye on that vaccine as well. Just because it creates the antibodies, do we know if it's going to have a lasting effect? That is the big question that researchers are trying to figure out right now, because what we've seen is that people who've been infected with COVID-19 don't always develop antibodies. And so that's raising a lot of questions about whether these kinds of vaccines will last for a long time or will they be more like a flu vaccine, which lasts for a few months, and then you get it renewed every year. All right. Let's move on to your next story, the Trump

administration, sidestepping the Center for Disease Control and Prevention when it comes to COVID-19 hospital data. Just explain that. What's going on there? What is going on there? So it's a little bit unclear. The Trump administration announced this week that they would be asking hospitals who normally report all of their data on infectious disease to the CDC to instead report it directly to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC. Right now, we're not sure who they're going to be reporting it to, what system they're going to use. Is this going to be part of the president's coronavirus task force or something else? the presidential administration is saying that the CDC is just moving too slowly, and so they need to do this other end run around their data gathering techniques. The CDC, of course, is saying that this is going to be a total nightmare because they already have a whole network of hospitals who know how to report to the CDC and have a system. Suddenly now all of that will be thrown into disarray, and it's unclear whether the data that we get will be recent or robust. And so we're just trying to. Or accurate. Or accurate.

And, you know, this is coming in the wake of the president tangling with the CDC last week over reopening schools. The CDC recommended that schools not reopen. The presidential administration wants them to reopen. There's been this tug of war in news headlines. And so some people who are watching this unfold believe that this is just part of the presidential administration trying to put pressure on the CDC to do what the Trump administration wants. Let's move on to another study that looked at the risk of COVID-19 and vaping and smoking.

Wow, this one did not sound very good. No, this is a really interesting study that came out of the University of California at San Francisco, my home institution. And they did a study on a very understudied group during this pandemic, which is young people ages 18 to 25. And they got a large sample. And what they found was that young people who smoke or vape have a one in three chance of developing a very severe case of COVID-19, one that may require a ventilator or simply cause a very long-term sickness.

And this is in comparison to people in the same age group who do not smoke or vape. And they have a one in six chance of developing a severe case. So we're talking, you know, this doubles your chances, basically. And the way that they measured this was by asking participants whether they had smoked or vape in the last month. So this is not just people who are heavy, heavy smokers. It's people who smoked within the last month have a much higher risk of developing a severe case. That is very troubling. That's right.

So don't vape, kids. Oh, goodness. Let's talk about your next story, one of something that's a little more, a little change of face, let's call it. And this is one of our favorites topics, fossilized poop. That's right. Yeah. So you take it from here because you'll do a little better job at it than I will be asking about it. So this is a study that I love because, first of all, it allows us to learn the scientific

term for fossilized poop, which is coprolite, or plural coprolites. And it also is a story about how careful researchers are before making really big new claims. So the poop in question is some human poop that was found in the Paisley Caves in Oregon's high desert, so in central Oregon. And the poop is from human beings, and it's 12,000 years old. And it was buried in a cesspit. in the back of a cave where presumably humans were camping out. And several years ago, scientists sequenced the DNA in the poop to make sure that it was human because, you know, when you poop, some of your cells come off in your poop. So it can show up 12,000 years later. But the thing is that this poop is extremely old. It could have been contaminated by other

materials at the site. So this new study looked at lipids in this, in these turds. to see how much they may have absorbed from the site around them. So just to make sure that these human, these fragments of human DNA that they found really came from the poop and not from something else or maybe even from the researchers. And what they discovered is, indeed, there had not been a lot of transfer of lipids between the site and the poop.

So poop had integrity. The DNA really is from people. And the exciting part about this is that it adds to a really, complicated story about how immigrants populated the Americas. Many years ago, it was believed that humans from a group called the Clovis people came over the Bering Land Bridge and populated the Americas that way. But 12,000 years ago, that passageway would have been ice locked. Couldn't have made it. So these people who came and pooped in that cave had to have come over the ocean along the Pacific coast and then traveled to the interior of the continent along waterways. And Oregon's

high desert did in fact, used to be a very lush green area full of lakes and rivers. So that's probably how these folks got there and made their makeshift toilet in the back of that cave. So it's a great story about poop and science and how we all got here and who the ancestors are of today's indigenous Americans. You know, we have done stories about coprolite and scientists studying and looking for poop and it's it's always fascinating that how how they would know where to look first of all and and how you identify it is hey you know it's not just some mud sitting on the floor or old piece of who knows what how you know the training it must take to say I'm a copro spotting yeah I'm a I'm a coprolite specialist this is what I do it's very valuable especially in archaeology

and in this case you know the people who used the Paisley Caves made it easy by digging a toilet in the back of the cave and just leaving it all in there real nice for us to find. Oh, the mind could wonder. Let's move on to another really interesting story, and that is scientists found remnants of medieval glassmaking in Nigeria from a thousand years ago. Now, I know glassmaking is older than a thousand years, right? So there must be some time element that's important here. So this is actually about, probably about 900 years old. And what's really interesting about this discovery is that until now, scientists believed that the glass that they found in sub-Saharan Africa all came from elsewhere.

And what that suggested was that the people living in this region were able to trade for glass, but didn't have the technology yet to make it on their own. But the discovery of this workshop confirms what many people working on the ground had hypothesized for a long time, which is that a lot of these beautiful beads that we see in the region, and they really are incredible. They're these deep blues, and some of them are striped. Some of them are this incredible shiny red. These were all made locally in Nigeria with local materials that can be chemically identified. In this case, they were made with local snail shells and sand that came from that region. And, In the workshop, they found half-made glass beads.

So this really changes our understanding of the development of the civilization in sub-Saharan Africa and shows that they weren't just bringing in these high-status goods, these beautiful beads. They were producing them and trading them in a lot of different places. So it's a story about technology, but also about how these trade networks formed. Always interesting stuff, Annalie. Yep. I love beads and poop. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Natalie Newitz is a science writer and author based out of San Francisco. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about what back to school, what the pandemic might mean for making plans, what this fall might look like. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. I'm Ira Flato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflato. we're approaching August, which means for a lot of you, it's time to think about going back to school. Now, of course, in a normal year, that might mean getting new notebooks and pencils and the excitement of seeing your classmates after a summer apart. But COVID-19 means K-12 this year is going to be different. Sort of a big experiment with different systems around the country. Big school districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego public schools, are going completely.

completely remote for the fall. Other districts are looking at hybrid programs with some time in the classroom and some time at home. And some districts may return to the classroom full time. A lot of people have strong opinions about what the right strategy is for school in the fall. And here's what we heard from some of you on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. I teach 11th and 12th grade students at a career tech center where most of our work is hands-on. So online education is tough. What I worry about most is students who are not willing to comply with social distancing guidelines, especially here in Michigan. In terms of returning my high school students to school, I need the assurance that there's going to be testing at the high school so that they can tell immediately when there is an outbreak occurring.

I'm a teacher, and our school is planning to go back entirely as normal, which I strongly disagree. with. I think during this pandemic, the only safe way to return to school is to do it online. Those were listeners Jennifer from Michigan, Juanita from Maryland and Diane from Utah. So what needs to be considered for back-to-school plans? Joining us today to talk about this are Dr. Pedro Nogera, Dean of the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Laura Fuchs, a high school history teacher in Washington, D.C. public schools and Secretary of the Washington Teachers Union. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Great to be with you. Thank you.

Laura, let me ask you first, how are you feeling about the possibility of returning in person in the fall? Extremely apprehensive. We don't feel safe returning. Are you hearing anything about a possible D.C. public school plan? Yep. So it sounds like returning in a hybrid fashion where teachers would be present for four days a week, teaching two different rotating groups of students who'd be on for two days and then doing distance learning for three days, I suppose while also engaging in distance learning with the

students that aren't present. Well, tell me about your concern. What will you need to feel safe? To feel safe, especially in D.C. public schools, we need to build trust. And the only way to build trust is for teachers through the Washington Teachers Union to be at the table with D.C. public schools, creating the plans for how to carry out something as complicated as hybrid instruction. And until that happens, we don't feel safe returning. Apeb Jail, let's talk about that a bit. What approach would you like to see for K-12 in the fall? Well, I think it would really help if the federal government, U.S. Department of Education, put out clear guidelines rooted in science,

what we know about the virus and the risk, for how schools can reopen and when they should not. We know now that Israel, that they reopened too soon. It became a site for which the virus spread. So there's clear evidence you can do this wrong. And I think the teacher's concerns are valid. But neither the federal government nor most states issued any of these guidelines, despite the political pressure to reopen.

Pedro, what are the CDC guidelines for reopening? The CDC has offered guidelines. They are not that clear. If you're in a rural community where the infection rate is below 5%, it's probably safe to reopen schools. But there are lots of rural communities where that's not the case here in California, where there are many agricultural workers who've been infected. So you need to have a more nuanced, set of guidelines that speak to the conditions in your community on how to do this. In Los Angeles, where schools are already over-prouded, there's no way you could open school safely without risking infection to kids and to the adults.

And Lori, do you need physical partitioning and materials that you don't have? I'm not going to claim to be an expert on what we would need in a classroom in order to be safe. What I do know is that these are all details and need to be discussed. before students enter a building, and then we need to make sure that we have what we need in the buildings in advance of students arriving. So if it is decided that partitions are necessary, then we need to agree to those partitions and then have them in place before students come in. Pedro, let me follow up about the hybrid approach that Laura was talking about that she expect some sort of form of. Should certain students be prioritized?

to come into school if there is a hybrid approach? Yes, because we know that during this pandemic and during this long period of quarantine, there are many kids who have been really adversely affected, particularly kids with learning disabilities who require much more support, very difficult to provide that support online. But I would say there are a lot of young children who are learning to read who would benefit from being brought back into their classrooms so that they can get that support. Same is true for kids who are learning English for the first time, and for children who are homeless or in foster care,

whose living situation makes it difficult for them to learn at home. So I know these are tough choices, but there are clearly some kids whose needs are greater than others. Earlier this week we talked to Stephen Pruitt, who is president of the Southern Regional Education Board, which makes recommendations for school policies in 16 states. And this is what he said. Remote learning for a lot of our students is going to be very difficult.

And this is an issue both in urban and rural settings. In rural you may have the issue of actually not having broadband access, but in our urban areas, especially in our students in poverty, there may be one computer that our children have to shake. Pedro, you do a lot of research about the digital divide, this idea that not all children have equitable access to the internet or computers, is that a risk for not going back to the classroom? Well, it's certainly a huge problem with respect to access to learning.

And we've known this for a long time. There are a lot of kids in urban and rural areas who don't have internet access. It is not universal by any means, which is ironic, given that we're a tech giant in the world. So, you know, if we go completely online, we need to figure out what we will do. There are districts, New York and Los Angeles, that have really got out of the way to get hot spots to kids so that they can get online and make sure they're screens, so they're not working on their parents' phones. But I would say we have a long way to go. There are millions of kids across the country, literally, who have not had any formal education since the quarantine period began.

Laura, you had to do some remote instructions in the spring for a little bit. How did that go? Yep. So it was a difficult transition. So a lot of my students were accessing materials using their cell phone. We had not used a learning management system in my class because we were mostly a penit paper class. So trying to set up those systems when all the students had very suddenly stopped attending in-person class was challenging. is very time-consuming and very difficult for all the teachers that I know. And we weren't satisfied with the results.

I don't know very many people who are satisfied with the results. That being said, we've been pushing to get more training on the new learning management system or supports for our families so that teachers don't have to serve as the primary tech support when we don't necessarily know how. and that our students can have better access to a higher quality distance learning instruction because the fact is that our schools are not yet safe to be reopened in August in the District of Columbia. And it's not fair to put on the students who already probably have a lot of the greatest risk factors and have seen a lot of the greatest impacts of COVID-19 to then have them have to come back into a school.

because as a city, we failed them in terms of their housing, in terms of their internet access, in terms of the financial supports that the district can afford. And so it shouldn't fall on the schools and the teachers to put themselves at risk to solve structural inequities that we've been fighting to change in this city for a long time. This week we also talked to middle school science teacher Megan Sorensen. She's from Sue St. Marie, Michigan, and it's a remote area.

but there has been a spike in COVID cases because of tourism to the county. People come there for the summertime. Her school is tentatively planning to go back to in-person instructions five days a week. I'm very concerned about being around close to 100 students every day. It is really small community. Everybody is related to everybody else. So, you know, one person in a family is infected and you have anti-exam. and uncles and cousins, and everybody's just all together.

Pedro, do rural schools face these different challenges for figuring out how to teach in the fall than urban schools? What are those conversations like? You know, again, rural schools also face challenges with Internet. Anybody who's ever driven around into the rural areas knows you sometimes lose cell phone service. So that's been a problem we've dealt with for a long time in this country. And so online learning in many rural areas is a huge challenge and not really feasible.

At the same time, in many rural areas, though not all, it's safer to bring kids back in because there's lower risk of contamination. However, there are counties like Imperial County in California with the infection rate from testing is over 25%. And this is because many of the residents are agricultural workers who are being infected and bringing it home to their families. So, you know, can't generalize about the rural areas. Each one faces its own distinct set of challenges and risk. We got a message from listener John from Pleasant Hill, California on our Voxpop app. I'm a teacher, so is my wife. I'd say what we need is something like we had with SARS.

I worked in China then, and they used cameras to rapidly test huge groups of people. It wasn't perfect, but at least it was a gross indicator of whether somebody might be sick or not. Otherwise, I don't see how we're supposed to manage school with all the little kids. John is talking about thermal imaging cameras that can see heightened temperatures to see if you have a fever. And in New York, there are conversations about holding classes outside. So I'm thinking what kind of other novel or creative solutions are you hearing about for getting back into the classroom? I haven't heard that many. You know, California, we're lucky we have good weather, the year. So outside teaching could work in some places. Not Los Angeles. We simply have too many

kids in the schools and we don't have enough physical space. So it really depends a lot on the community. In places where you have a lot of land and where they won't get kids too much exposure to the sun, I think outside teaching could be feasible, but that's not going to work in many other places. Laura, do you have a reaction to that? To me, really, any discussion of a quote-unquote innovative idea has to be vetted through teachers who would actually have to implement it. Like Pedro said, outdoor learning could be a potential option, but it might depend on the

course. It might depend on the number of students. There'd still be a ton of contingencies that would need to be thought through and planned and prepared for, and then teachers would need to be trained. on it and how to do it in a responsible manner. So it's not to say that there aren't potentially some really great solutions out there. I'm sure there are. But anything that's being driven by a district at the top and not being driven from the teachers themselves is not going to be effective. Just a quick note that I'm Iroflato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

You're basically saying you want the teachers to have a voice. As we say, you want the teachers to be in the room where it happens, meaning the negotiations going on. Yes, I think teachers need to be a part of it. We're the ones who will be doing the implementing or the ones who know our students. We know our parents. We know our classrooms. We know the physical space.

We know what supplies we've had in the past, possibly, you know, not having soap in our bathrooms for year after year. And we know what it's going to take to be. safe. And so we need to be with the district helping think through all the potential problems and contingencies and plans for when things do go wrong because we're teachers. We know how to problem solve on the fly. But we need to think through all those details before we can talk about bringing students into classrooms because we have to keep them safe if that's what we're going to do. So you're very concerned that the teachers are not going to have the resources necessary to safely

bring the kids and teachers back into the classroom. In the District of Columbia, we have no reason to trust that when we've had to buy our own paper and that there have been bathrooms without paper towels or working soap dispensers for years. Our teacher's going to have to be nurses now, you know, be able to judge whether a kid is sick or not. That's not an acceptable position for us. We do believe that there should be a licensed nurse at every school site that is open for

staff and students. Do you think finally we could see teachers strikes across the country this fall? I think a lot of what we're talking about is that we've been doing distance learning since the spring. We wish that the district, and I think other districts as well, wish that their leadership had worked with them from the spring till now to be working on these plans together. But too many districts have chosen business as usual where teachers are brushed to the side and ignored. And so now we're having to make our voices heard. We want to solve these problems. We want to get our students back in our classrooms.

We miss them. We love them. Distance learning is not fun. But we can only do it if we're doing it safely. Anything else is irresponsible to our students and our families and those we love. Pager, what about on your side of the country out west in California are teachers this upset? And do you think that they might go on strike also? The teachers are very upset at both of the district level and the state level.

They've made it clear that they will not support a reopening of schools unless they have assurances that it can be done safely. And this, I think, speaks to why it's so shameful that we've allowed this issue to become politicized. And I blame the administration, the Trump administration, for kind of doing this because we should be using the science to guide our actions. There are countries like Denmark and Germany that have shown you can do this well, you can do it safely, and you can do it without spreading the virus further. But we're not learning from those countries. And we, I think, have minimized the risk. We had a district here in California, Orange County, which recently voted to reopen schools and not require a mask. And that's strictly a political decision.

It has nothing to do with the risk associated with bringing kids back. So this, I think, is a real lesson in the failure of leadership to provide the kind of guidance that's needed at this critical moment in our country's history. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. Please let me thank my guests. Dr. Pedro Noggera, Dean of the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Laura Fuchs, a high school history teacher in Washington, D.C. public schools, and Secretary of the Washington, Teachers Union. Thank you. Thanks.

We're going to take a break and when we come back, a trip to Mars. Sounds kind of nice right now, doesn't it? We'll check in with NASA's Perseverance Rover soon to be launched. That's coming up after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Are you tired of staying home? Well, pack your bags.

We're going to Mars. That's right. The flights are booked. The landing spot is ready. And NASA's next visitor to the Red Planet is nestled snugly aboard its Atlas 5 rocket. And if all goes well at the launch later this summer, Perseverance, the rover formerly known as Mars 2020,

will touchdown on Mars in February of 2021, and then, well, it's going to begin a quest to find signatures of microscopic long-dead life if it is there to be found. Here to join me to talk more about the mission are my guest, Katie Stack Morgan, Deputy Project, scientist for Mars 2020 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Deanna Trujillo, a JPL aerospace engineer and the domain lead for robotic arms science. That's the one that carries many

of Perseverance's scientific instruments. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Glad to be here. Thanks, Ira. I'm so pretty excited. Oh, well, we're excited to have you. Thank you. Katie, we're sending another robot to Mars. What's different about this mission? What are we looking for? Yeah, so this mission, it's the first mission in a potential Mars sample return campaign, and that's really what distinguishes perseverance from previous rovers. Our objective is to collect in cash samples on the surface of Mars for potential return to Earth, and no other Mars mission has done that before. Now, I know that Curiosity is up there already, looking for water, still chugging along.

Why can't that rover help with doing the same stuff? That's right. The main goal for curiosity has been to search for habitable environments, And it has done that and it has done that successfully. And curiosity has helped in the sense of expanding our understanding of habitable environments on Mars and what Mars was like in the ancient past. And so this mission seeks to build on that and taking it one step further, knowing that we're collecting samples with perseverance to bring back to Earth.

We're really looking for those samples that will give us the best understanding and in chance of finding ancient life on Mars. You mean you were looking for something that shows that Mars life may have happened in that spot. That's exactly right. We look for what's called biosignatures, which are textures, patterns, or substances that we see in the rock that could have only formed by life. Can you be fooled by that? I remember years ago they were looking at samples they thought were made by microbes. Remember that whole fiasco? Yeah. Well, yes. And, you know, that's a really good point because while we have a sophisticated suite of instruments on perseverance that I think better

enable us to search for biosignatures than any previous rover before, it's very likely that we'll have to get those samples back to Earth to say conclusively whether there was ancient life on Mars. That's cool. I can't wait for that. Deanna, what is different about perseverance as a rover, as an engineering advance? I think that there's a lot of things that are different. The robotic arm itself has a much bigger turret. So think about the arm as a shoulder, elbow, wrist, just like yours. But when it gets to the turret where your hand will be, it's way bigger. It also carries these instruments that we didn't have before, like Pixel, Sherlock, and Sherlock, which splits into Watson, which are pretty cool names, I will say myself, and then a drill, and then also

a gas dust removal tool. Now, I'm very excited because if you look at the pictures of the drill, it also looks like a massive drill that is going to help us really get under that surface and give her the answers of what she's looking for, hopefully, and the science team as well. Now, talk to me as an engineer now. What was the biggest engineering challenge you had to overcome? The biggest challenge for my team, really, is the fact that the arm is holding together all of those pieces that I just mentioned, where any of those instruments that need to be pulled out for rework or reinstall for rework or do functional testing or any capability or software update on any of those things, the robotic arm has to be involved. And it is kind of you're building your Lego set. And every time you think that you got it working perfectly,

somebody comes in and just takes a critical part of your Lego set. And then you have to rethink about everything again to make sure it works perfectly. And you're doing all of this in the floor, in the clean room, with a bunch of people waiting for you to nail it every time so you don't take their time for their functional. Diana just mentioned a lot of instruments. Watson, Sherlock.

What are these instruments doing, actually, to find traces of life? So the pixel instrument, I'll start there. Pixel uses X-ray spectroscopy to search for chemical elements and to make maps of those chemical elements. And that's a really important advance that our instruments have, that previous instruments haven't had. We can actually match up in detail a map of the geochemistry or the composition of the rocks with the very fine textures at an instrument like Watson, which is the can. camera provides. And it's by mapping those textures to the composition and the distribution of organic matter, which is what Sherlock can provide, as well as the minerals that Sherlock can

detect as well. They really give us the best chance of making a case for a potential biosignature. In the past, rovers have analyzed the entire rock all at once. And when you do that, you lose the ability to match the chemical signatures with the very fine textures. If you map and find something there, will your mission have anything to do with finding the spots for a return sample mission? Well, so what we're going to do is we are going to identify those potential samples that we think have the best chance of giving us evidence of signs of ancient life, as well as telling us about the evolution of Mars as a planet. And so we're going to drill and collect those samples. And our samples look something like a pencil or maybe your pinky.

And we're going to store those samples in tubes that have been engineered to be very clean and very protective to ensure the scientific integrity of those samples. And then we will either put those samples down on the surface of Mars for the follow-on mission to collect, or we'll keep them in the body of the rover, and we may play a role ourselves in handing them off to the next leg of the mission. Last time we talked, you had a science team in Australia to study the stromatolites left by ancient bacteria. Useful? Learn something? Yes, absolutely. You know, Earth provides a fantastic laboratory and range of experiences for us to explore Mars. Some things about Mars are very similar to Earth, and we can use our experience on Earth to help inform how we study and approach Mars.

But some things are very different, and we have to be thinking about that because there are surprises that Mars throws at us. Part of our team went out to Australia, and we talked about that about a year ago. And we also did another field test in Nevada with our science team this past winter. And that was a really valuable experience for our team and just, you know, prepares us really well for what it's like to do ops on the surface. And what about the rover itself? How do you test out whether it can traverse the terrain, things like that? So at JPL, we have a representation of how Mars looks with that terrain. We try to mimic that with the rocks, with the with the sand, with the inclination planes that we put in there to see if the rover can go up and down. So we do a lot

of testing there. We also are fortunate to have other labs in where we have, for example, the motors that we will be using for driving and we exercise how much life those motors have and how much can we drive for how long. But the now understanding of how we are going to do all this driving where Katie's team wants us to go, it's now an additional lab that we put together with, in some cases, spare parts from the rover that we didn't use, and we create this additional testbed. We call it the vehicle system test pet. The vehicle system test bed is almost a full replica of what is flying to Mars with flight spares or with engineering models. And then we take it for a drive. We take the cameras. We do the whole end-to-end and prove to ourselves that this is

going to work. Have the wheels been upgraded? I know we had problems with some of the wheels in the previous rovers and getting stuck on the sand? Are they upgraded models that maybe the tread is better or the traction? So a few things there. So, yes, the design of the wheels is different. We have also look at the software, as you might remember from curiosity, when we started to have punctures on the wheels, we also upgraded the software to find ways of how to drive it in a way that we wouldn't create so much torque that we were puncturing the wheels and

new ideas or strategies about how to drive. Now, with respect to where we're driving and getting stuck in sand, this is the beauty now where there's an intersection in between the engineering team and the science team, where the science team also comes in and helps us with the understanding of what type of terrain we're about to get into is the sand pack, is the sand loose? And if that is the case, how should we drive it? What's it like trying to balance the science and the engineering concerns in this kind of project, Katie? I mean, you hand it up to Deanna and say, it's all yours. Take it away, you know, but watch out for this. That's a great question and one that I think both Deanna and I will have a unique answer to. Of course, as scientists, we want to go to the best rocks that we see. But sometimes it's hard to get there or the slopes are too steep or it'll take too much time on a given day. And so there are all these tradeoffs and kind of compromises that you have to make.

at the end of the day, we want to try our best not to compromise the science of the mission, but sometimes we have to work with the engineers to figure out how to make that happen. And maybe it'll take a little bit longer than we had originally hoped it would, or maybe we have to take a different route. But in the end, the engineers are really our partners in helping to accomplish the science mission. And if I could add to the answer that Katie just gave, I will tell you that that's the fun part of my job, where you actually start thinking about, hey, my job as an engineer is actually to enable all this and not so much drive this. And so coming on with creative solutions to get what the

scientists won is the part that makes operations so much more fun, right? Because you need to go back to how do we design this thing? How do we engineering? What's the maximum capability that I can squeeze out of the rover and how creative can I get to get what she's asking? I love it. I love it. Let's talk about the exact spot, Katie. Where's the exact spot the rover is slated to land and why? Yeah, so the Perseverance Rover is headed to a location on Mars called Jezero Crater, and it's a crater that's located on the inner rim of one of the largest and oldest impact basins. You know, life on Earth evolved around 3.5 billion years ago, and the rocks that we're going to with Perseverance are also about 3.5 to 4 billion years old.

So when we think about Mars being different, you know, in the past and it is today, you know, we're going to the interval of time when Earth was developed, life was developing on Earth. And we think by probing that period of time on Mars, we have a chance to capture that potential evolution of life on Mars as well. And so we have an environment in Jesro that we think was really conducive to the occurrence and preservation of life. We have a delta, and we know that there was an ancient lake there. And we have some very interesting minerals that are really good at preserving signs of ancient life. And we know that from the Earth Rock record. And we're optimistic that we'll see similar things on Mars. I mean, you as a geologist, what's

it like when you're looking at this and you just, oh, I wish I could take my hammer out and hit it or pick it up or something like that. Do you get that feeling sometimes? You know, that's a funny question. And you're talking to two JPLers and we do robotic space acceleration. But it's true, you know, as a geologist, you know, sometimes you look at a rover image and even if it's giving you a 360 degree view or we're using the most close-up camera that we have, it just isn't a substitute for actually picking up and holding that rock yourself. And that's one of the reasons why the Mars community and the scientific community has been so supportive of Mars sample return,

because before we're ready to send astronauts to Mars, we have the robotic capabilities to bring those samples to us. So we'll be able to hold those rocks. So even though we can't be there in person, when we get those samples back, we'll be able to have all of the field notes that our science team has recorded in the data that the perseverance collected to help, us put the samples in context. It's similar to what geologists do. It's just broken up into pieces. Just a quick reminder, I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. We're talking about

NASA's Perseverance rover, soon to be launched to Mars. You know, one of the main bains to any mechanical object, wherever it is on Earth, on Mars, is dust. And I remember dust can get in the works of the gears. There were concerns that even on Mars, dust would cover the solar panels and keep some of the rovers from getting recharged. Deanna, are we still as worried about dust as we were before? I think that we're always worried about dust, but I think that the question really is, from the designing standpoint, yes, there's concerns that the Kagi needs to be taken into consideration. But when we now transition to actually operations, the operations is actually more manageable in a way because of the experiences, as you mentioned, from previous rovers. And the thing that I

feel like it makes it very concrete for us is that we start thinking about it in a way as if there was a human on the surface of Mars and you're walking towards, you know, a dust devil, you're going to bring your head down, you're going to cover your eyes, you're probably going to turn around. and we do those sort of things with the rover. The science team knows that there is a dust storm coming our direction, and then we command all the cameras to look down, or we turn the rover, or we do things to make sure that, you know, the dust is not hitting us on the cameras.

It is unfortunate when it hits us on the cameras, but at the same time we try our best to, you know, use gravity to help us and also cover ourselves by canting the cameras down. I imagine now your greatest thing, anxiety is you must be getting the butterflies about the launch, right? We've worked so hard on this. Let's just get this launch off the ground, right, Deanna? You must be just saying, okay. We're absolutely excited. I mean, we did every single test we can possibly think of. It's just

incredible to know that now at this point, we're just thinking about what do we not do? What else can we fit in? You know, we engineers are constantly trying to maximize everything that we can possibly think of. So I feel like at some point it's just launch because we will find other ways of continuing to testing and things that we didn't do that we could have done. But in reality, we don't need it because we're so ready for this. Katie, you too, a little bit anxiety. Absolutely. Of course, there's always anxiety, though. This is the one part of the mission where it truly does feel like we have to turn the keys over. And there's really nothing as scientists that we can do at this point. We sit back and we watch it happen. And once we land on the surface,

then we come in and we take over and then it's our responsibility. So, you know, it's hard. We're on the edge of our seats, but it's also you recognize that, you know, at this point, we put up our hands and we cross our fingers and say, you know, let's hope that we've, you know, tested it and we know everything that's going to happen and it's going to turn out well. So, of course, always anxious, but optimistic and hopeful that we've done our job. Well, we've been covering 30 years of rover launches on Science Friday, so we want to wish you the best of luck in this one.

Thank you so much. Thank you. You're welcome. I thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Great conversation. Dr. Katie Stack Morgan, Deputy Project Scientist from Mars 2020 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Deanna Trujillo, a JPL aerospace engineer and the domain lead for robotic arm science. That's the arm that carries many of Perseverance's scientific instruments. One last thing to do before we go. It's July, and kids around the country, well, you know, they are running out of things to do.

At Science Friday, we get it. So we're inviting those kids and adults to join us for a week of epic building and making challenges later this month. Try your hand at roller coaster construction, game design, and more. It is totally free, and there's loads of ways to participate. From a daily activity text to a virtual camp, here's how to join us. Visit sciencefriiday.com slash build to do. For more info and to sign up that sciencefriday.com slash build together.

Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Adabay Rodriguez Benitez. B.J. Leideman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again or tell your friends about it, subscribe to our podcasts. Or ask your smart speaker now to play Science Friday. Oh, our Science Friday Vox Pop question this week.

Have you had to navigate pregnancy or the first few months of raising a baby during this pandemic? Tell us about your experience. That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.