Science Friday - What Should Astronauts Do First When They Reach Mars?

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a crewed Mars mission. Planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who co-chaired the report committee, joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the plans to send people to Mars.We’ll also get an update on the mission to survey the asteroid Psyche. Elkins-Tanton tells us how she managed the team that made the Psyche mission possible, and what she learned from her mistakes.  Guest: Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist.  She’s the head of NASA’s Psyche mission and director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. When someone steps off a spaceship onto the surface of Mars, what should they do first? You know, after the selfie. My next guest and 100 or so of her scientist colleagues have thought a lot about that question. And they've come up with some recommendations. It's all in a new report just out from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Here to talk with me about it is the person whose name is at the top of that report, Dr. Lindy Elkinson, Tanton is a planetary scientist, a very busy planetary scientist. She's the director of UC Berkeley's

Space Sciences Laboratory and the head of NASA's Psyche Mission, a $1.2 billion program to investigate the psyche asteroid. And she's the co-chair of the committee that came up with the Mars plan called A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars. Lindy, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. It's great to join you. This new report suggests that the top of priority for going to Mars is searching for life. How do we do that? Yes. Searching for life is a part of a number of top priorities. NASA asked us to put them in priority order. Number one is search for life. That doesn't mean that number two isn't super important. And the great thing about this is the samples and the investigations we need to do to search for life are also going to teach us so much.

much more about Mars and also about habitability and what it's going to be like for humans there. Because in the end, isn't this all about humans? It's about this unbelievable, gigantic, aspirational, inspirational moment in human history when humans go to Mars and we actually become interplanetary. And so... But wait, can I ask, can I press on that? Is that what it's all about? Because you also have dedicated your life to an asteroid, which is not about humans. Here's what I believe from the bottom of my heart and the way that I've thought about my whole life is that everything that humans do is an endeavor about humans. Okay, fair. Look, I'll be optimistic. When we do send people to Mars, there we go. There we go. What would that mission look like? Like, how long would they stay? Where would they live? I don't have any sense of how to picture it.

So here's the image that we're coming up with in concert with NASA. Humans are going to go, launched by a really big strong rocket, and there are two options for going to Mars, depending on where the orbital dynamics put the Earth and Mars relative to each other at the time. There are certain ways to get to Mars where you get to stay on the surface for just 30 to 90 Mars days, let's say. And then there's other ways to get to Mars or another way to get to Mars where you end up spending 300 to 500 Mars days on the surface before you can come back again. So there are the short stays and the long stays. Wow. And what, right, it's quite a choice. It's quite a choice. And so what we're

imagining is that our first human campaign to Mars would be three missions. And the first mission would be a 30-day stay just to make sure stuff works and look around and get some initial. measurements and pick up some samples and take in what it is to be on another planet. And then two more missions on top of that, either a cargo mission or a short mission or a long mission, it's going to look like staying in the lander or having a sort of permanent habitation. So there's options and it would certainly be a building exercise, one mission building on the next. What about the premise itself? I mean, if the top priority is looking for life on Mars, do we need people to do that? There's a cool sample return mission that we could send back.

Oh, I know. I know we so hope those samples come back. That would be so good. Everything that we do in space with humans is done in concert with robots. We call them agents in our report. You know, anything in that giant spectrum of our technological helpers, it's going to be humans and agents together. but there are still things that humans do so much better.

And it's been shown over and over again in studies, actually. Humans eyesight, for example, so much more effective in person than when relayed through a robot. Our ability to make decisions and change our minds and deal with unexpected events so much more agile. And so we need humans there to be looking closely at the things that we're sampling. We need humans there to repair things that are difficult to repair, to quickly change the plan when something unexpected happens. And so going with humans and robots is going to be so much more effective. Would you go yourself? Would I go?

Oh, my gosh. I struggle with that. I think if it was me, just me, I would absolutely go. I love the extreme. I love the unexpected. I love something that's new. It's not been done before. But because of friends and family here on Earth, I think I wouldn't go. I'd rather stay with my friends and family. Live your life here on the planet we know and love. Yeah. The Earth is always going to be the nicest place to live that humans know of.

Let's talk about your baby, the Psyche Mission. The Psyche Mission. So this is a robotic spacecraft launched to the Psyche asteroid. It left Earth in 2020. it's on its way due to arrive 2029. Yes. Why, Psyche, what's special about it? One of the great things you get to try to do when you propose a mission to NASA is try to imagine what is the most important science we could do with these precious taxpayer dollars. What's the thing that really hasn't been done?

And you think about the places that humans have sent robots or in some cases other humans. So rocky objects like the moon and Mars and Venus and Mercury, we've investigated, objects made of gas and ice, icy moons and gas giants. But we've never seen an object with a metal surface. And that's what we think that psyche is. And to me, that was just irresistible. It's a way that we can, we think, although who knows when we get there, it could be a total surprise. That's part of the thrill. We think it's probably the part of a metal core of a little tiny planet that didn't become part of our bigger.

growing planets early in the solar system, but instead got broken up and stranded in the asteroid belt. Really? It's the center of a planet? That's what we think. Well, what we call a planetesimal, a little tiny planet, something the size of a city or a continent, of which there were thousands in the early solar system. They were the feeding material that built up the Earth and the other rocky planets. But some of them didn't get properly incorporated, and they just got stranded, like the leftover bits and pieces of planet building got stranded in the asteroid belt. And so that's what we think it is. We think it's part of the metal core, the first generation of cores that ever existed in our solar system. And if we're right about that, it's the only core humans are ever going to

see because we're never going to get to the cores of our planets. Journey to the center of the earth, but to psyche. Exactly. My husband says we're going to outer space to explore inner space, which I kind of love. Why is that interesting? It's interesting for the fundamental questions of how do we build rocky planets? What are the insides made of? And then because our magnetic field is created in the Earth's metal core, and it's part of what makes our planet habitable, we really want to learn more about the core as we try to learn about what makes other planets habitable in other solar systems. Okay, we got to take a quick break, but don't go away, because when we come back, how do you actually pull off a mission like psyche? What is

it take to get hundreds of people growing in the same direction? We'll find out. I'm really interested in the timeline of this mission because it was launched 2023, right? Right. But you must have been dreaming it up for many years before that. And it's not going to get there till 2029. So that's a long time to wait. Is that you, are you good with delayed gratification? Is that part of your personality? No, not it, not even in the slightest, not even in the tiniest part. No. And I guess I would say when I got into this business, I really had no idea what I was in for. I had actually never really thought about being the lead of a full-on NASA mission. I was leading academic departments, companies. I was leading teams of people. And then I got an email from two scientists that Jet Propulsion Laboratory saying, We really thought that paper you just published with your colleagues, Ben Weiss and Maria Zuber, was so interesting. We wonder if you'd like to work on a mission proposal to test your scientific ideas in that paper. And so, you know, speaking of not delayed gratification, my instant answer to that is,

yes, I would. Let's find out what this is about. This sounds great. And so we started on this process back in 2011. And let's see, three years later, we entered into the NASA competition process with our proposal. And we competed for three years. And we were so excited and was unexpected and thrilling to get into step two. And then we had to write a thousand page proposal with over a hundred people, everything that this mission would be. That's a nightmare. Can I just stop for a second? A thousand page proposal with a hundred people is my definition of nightmare. And anyone who's ever written or edited anything thinks that that is a nightmare. I mean, I'm interested in this sort of teams aspect of this because collaboration can be hard, you know, rewarding but hard.

I know you care about teams. You have got a book coming out on teams this year. But there's also this, there can be a tritness to like, teamwork makes the dream work. So what interests you about teams and what have you learned about what makes a good team? I know. It can seem like one of those inspirational photos with the kitten hanging from the bar or something like this. No, but what teams are, that's the fundamental unit of human experience is relationships with individual other people and those relationships get networked into a team. And we were fundamentally in our brain. We are village people. We work in teams. We live in teams. Our brains are constantly thinking about the people around us. And that has ended up being, I think, the most interesting thing of everything that I do. I really love the science. But getting people to work together is the hardest thing of all and the most rewarding. Well, what's your secret? What's the secret sauce, Lindy? I have no secrets, but I have lots of anecdotes. Yeah, so I have this book coming out in the spring. Thanks for mentioning it. It's called mission ready, how to build teams that perform under pressure.

And here's, I think, my most fundamental secret about teams is that you've got to drop the status signaling and the internal sense of hierarchy and go instead with a deep respect for every other person's individual expertise and what they've got to bring to the table. that way you end up with the best solution for your project, but also the best outcome for every individual. And I'll give you a little example of how important this is. On a spacecraft, we're building a spacecraft that you're going to launch off the earth and it's going to fly through space for a decade or more, and no one's ever going to repair it again and it has to work. So you've got to know what's wrong soon enough to fix it before you launch.

And we used to say on Psyche, we still say, and the best news is bad news brought early enough to fix it. So when people bring you problems, that's a gift. Yeah. But bringing problems forward is, you know, notoriously dangerous because the messenger, you know, often gets shot, as I say. And so you have to make it safe not just for anyone to bring forward a problem, but for the most junior people to speak up and be heard. because it's actually the person who is writing the line of code or soldering the wire who actually knows what's wrong. They're the ones who can tell you when something is actually wrong. And so making sure that the people who sit along the wall at meetings instead of at the table

get invited to speak, making sure that all the managers listen. And I would say we were 80% successful with Psyche Mission Team. But we had some big fails that more or less proved my point. What? Give me an example. Yeah. So one of our most painful moments on the mission and one of the most difficult work moments of my life was when we missed our original 2022 launch date and had to slip to 2023. That sounds like, you know, so many missions slip. It sounds almost like par for the course, but it's very expensive and very stressful. These are people who have been working flat out seven days a week to make it to this launch. And now suddenly they're told, not only aren't, aren't we ready for this launch? But you have to keep working just as hard for another year.

Meanwhile, we're going to be reviewed and we might just be canceled. And trying to keep team morale up during that, whoa. I mean, that's really hard. And I struggled internally and learned a lot of painful internal lessons. But here's the point of the story. The first, like the canary in the coal mine that let us know that we weren't going to make it is that it turned out a part of our flight software called guidance navigation and control was not going to be fully tested in time. You don't have to know anything about spaceflight to know that you don't fly without guidance, navigation, and control. It's totally central. And the lesson was that that team, incredibly hardworking, absolutely on top of everything, experts did nothing wrong, missed nothing,

had been warning us they weren't going to be ready for a long time. But the word was not coming up through the team in a way that we could understand. So they would say, we absolutely absolutely cannot do this. We need more experienced people in more time and we need this equipment. And the manager would say to the next manager, you know, we are worried about hitting these metrics. You know, I'll update you again next week. And then that manager would say up to the leadership, they're, we're pretty confident they're going to catch up on their metrics. Yeah, the telephone game of. Right? Because nobody wants to bring the bad news. And so that failure of that fundamental idea that everyone needs to be able to speak up and be listened to when there's a problem,

we failed at it. The leadership failed at it, and it caused inexpressible pain for the people on that team who were absolutely spectacular. And it caused us to slip by a year. Okay, I want to land with this question. I've been asking this a lot of our guests lately because the answers are varied and really interesting to me. And it's kind of big and thinky. Okay, I'm ready. I'm sorry in advance. What's the purpose of science, Lindy? Oh, yeah, this I have thought about a lot. And knowing that I think about science as a set of tools by which we try to understand what's around us, one of the ways that we make progress as a species is to understand more about how the world around us works, how we work, how our universe works. And if we can get slightly more lasting answers, slightly more true answers, that give us a little bit more of a foothold toward understanding the next step. I think that is what science is good at, is that kind of knowing. It's a misunderstanding if you think that science is just about making absolute truths and knowing all the answers because really science is knowing all the questions

and keeping asking them. Almost everything that we discover as scientists is going to be amended, attitude, changed, or completely overturned by new knowledge. But it is a way by which we can keep taking steps. We can grind inexorably closer to some kind of truth and absolute knowledge about things around us. Dr. Lindy Elkins Tanton is a planetary scientist. She's the head of NASA's Psyche Mission and director of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Thanks for coming on the show today, Lindy.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Me too. episode was produced by Annette Heist, and if you like the podcast, but only if you like the podcast, please rate and review the show wherever you listen. It really does help. We'll see you next time. I'm Florida Lichtman.