Mars Perseverance, with Jim Green, NASA Chief Scientist

We’re headed back to Mars – Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore NASA’s Perseverance rover and its red planet mission with NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and we're here with a Cosmic Queries edition. We love me some Cosmic Queries, ain't that right Chuck?

• 0:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir. Absolutely.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. You collect all the Cosmic Queries and I don't know if you bring them to stump our guests or what, you know, do you filter them or are they just randomly plucked from the?

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  They are actually taken by a randomizer, so I can't, I cannot take credit for pulling them, which means that, please don't send me your questions personally.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright. So Chuck, today's Cosmic Queries, we're gonna explore the Perseverance rover of NASA.

• 0:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, this month, we're recording this in February, it lands in February, and it was launched, you know, nine months ago, 10 months ago, and so, but I don't have particular expert, I know a little something about Mars, but not specifically about Perseverance, and I think you don't know about either, right?

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. Well, no, I know about Curiosity, and I'm not talking about a lander.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got our friend at NASA, NASA headquarters, Jim Green. Jim, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Neil. And Chuck, always a pleasure.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure to see you.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I was looking at, I was looking at your full bio, and I'd forgotten, I mean, I remember, but I forgot, that you used to be head of planetary science for NASA, but now you're head of like, all astrophysics.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just-

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  I'm just the chief scientist, so...

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, chief, not just astrophysics, chief scientist.

• 2:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Defying all categories.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass, I'm just saying.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've enjoyed that. I mean, it's really all about advising the administrator on new science activities and wonderful things that are going on in the agency.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the fact that you came to it as a planetary guy means you have good sort of geology sense as well. So, and if you did planets, it meant you had some good astronomy in there. So you've got enough of a diverse background to serve the scientific portfolio of NASA. Is that a fair statement?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  That is, that is. You know, I've got a undergraduate degree in astronomy. You know, in fact, I just finished my first exoplanet paper.

• 2:48Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  You know, I've been involved in a lot of planetary magnetospheres and done some solar physics. So I've touched on heliophysics. And of course, one of my favorite planets is the Earth.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  That's a good choice.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a cosmic queries, but before we get to questions that people have sent our way on perseverance, just remind us, why is this yet another rover to Mars? I mean, how many damn rovers are we gonna send?

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did you not learn last time that you're gonna pick up this time?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Well, of course, with Curiosity, we learned that Mars was really quite diverse than what it is today in its past. We explored the past of Mars. We found out that Mars, four billion years ago, had an enormous amount of water. And the conditions were such that it could have been habitable. We really didn't know that. And now we're gonna push the next step on that. And that is to go to an area and look for ancient life. And that's what perseverance is gonna do.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, so each rover mission stands on the shoulders of the previous mission in the questions that it gets to ask.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's the way it works.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 4:08Chuck Nice?

  And you have to send a whole new vehicle to do that?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Well, it turns out, of course, Spirit and Opportunity looked so much different than what Curiosity does. But at the end of Curiosity's building, we had many spare parts. And so I think we had like $200 million worth of spare parts left over from Curiosity.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  It's like an Ikea of furniture.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's if you don't know how to build it, you have spare parts. Wait, wait, Jim, no. What are you telling me? You're making a soul, a single object, a single thing called curiosity, and you're telling me they're leftover parts? This isn't some Heathkit that you bought from Radio Shack? This is, this, so what do you mean you have leftover parts?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Well, we have duplicate parts.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, God.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  When, when, when we buy.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm trying to picture, wait, I'm trying to picture the engineers, you know.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  Standing around. It's like this. Alright, so what are we gonna do with this?

• 5:14Chuck Nice?

  Guys?

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it fit here?

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  Guys?

• 5:18Chuck Nice?

  Any suggestions, guys, on this?

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry to interrupt, go on.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  For every one of our missions, no problem. For every one of our missions, we want to be able, indeed, to have spare parts around or extra parts, such that if there's a failure, we can immediately bring in the new part and not worry about ordering your supplies.

• 5:42Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  So it's a real critical, real critical, uh, thinking.

• 5:46Chuck Nice?

  It's a necessary redundancy.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay, you got me there, okay. I'll let you slide on that one. But that's the last time I'm letting you slide. Say, and, and tell me, you want, you going up there with a helicopter, so what's up with that?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  So, one of the elements, one of the important elements of this mission is actually enabling the future. And to do that, we're going to push the envelope and our understanding of getting around on Mars. And helicopter is really a unique idea to do that. You know, so this is what we call a technology demonstration. You know, we're gonna be able to, hopefully, uh, drop this helicopter off the belly pan of the, of the rover, drive away, let it unfurl, and then order it to start flying. And we'll do a variety of tests, and it will go up and then come down, and then we'll go up and translate, and then come down.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So translate means it will just go horizontally, when you say translate, in its position?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Chuck, you know what this would look like if a cartoonist drew this? The, the Martians would be watching this, and the rover drops the helicopter out of its belly, and it thinks it was pregnant.

• 7:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And gave birth to a flying object.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  It's like, guys, we're babysitting, all of a sudden.

• 7:07Chuck Nice?

  So now I'll ask both of you then, what kind of helicopter, if I'm not mistaken, Mars has a different atmosphere than Earth, so wouldn't we have to have a different helicopter?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Indeed, indeed. So it's drone-like in many ways, you know, it has a small body, but it has very long, you know, rotors, and they're about a meter, you know, about a yard or so long, okay, and there's two of them, and they counter-rotate. And that enables this small helicopter, which is, you know, a box like a cube sat, you know, it's about 10 or 12 centimeters by 10 or 12 centimeters in a cube, that enables this then to be

• 7:57Speaker 02

  lofted and fly great distances, you know, 50, 60, 70 meters before it sets down again.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but the real problem is, the Martian atmosphere is really thin, so you have to compensate by having bigger rotors, is that the solution here?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  That's right. And the counter-rotation helps the stability so that we don't need a rotor on the tail. So it's a design feature.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Now, if you can imagine this working, then the next set of missions could indeed leverage this concept and lay down additional helicopters to then survey massive regions up close on the surface of Mars. So it's what we'd call an enabling technology demonstration for future missions.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful, beautiful.

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, why don't we get to some Q and A here, and, oh, and one last thing, is this is landing on Mars the same way Curiosity did?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  It does, it does.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's this, it looks very Rube Goldbergian, you know, with a drug chute and retro rocket and a tit, and who came up with that?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Well, the JPL engineers are some really fantastic

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jet Propulsion Labs.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Jet Propulsion Lab engineers. Fantastic people that had a long experience in landing craft on Mars. And the whole concept evolved. You know, we started with Pathfinder. And Pathfinder is a platform for which the Sojourner rover rode on. We landed that and then the Sojourner rover came off the platform. And then we had Spirit and Opportunity.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't land that one, you bounced that one if I remember correctly.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  We bounced it, we bounced it.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You bounced it with some airbags.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  We did, we did. And we used that same concept for Spirit and Opportunity. You know, Spirit and Opportunity. And, and you know, they bounced the course and then when we deflated the bags, the rover sits upright on a platform and then drives off the platform.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just loved how, I loved how low tech it was for something to do something high tech afterwards. I, I just.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say, yeah, there's something really genius about using a hopity hop to land a sophisticated piece of space machinery. That's incredible.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Well, you know, for Spirit and Opportunity, we believe it bounced perhaps as much as 30 times before it actually settled down on the surface. Where we could deflate the bags and then move it off the platform. So imagine this now. Now we're gonna build a bigger rover. Okay, Spirit and Opportunity are less than 200 kilograms, okay? And now we're gonna do one metric ton, okay?

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 2,000 kilograms, a thousand kilograms.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  A thousand kilograms. Five times what Spirit and Opportunity were, okay? So the concept is, well, we start out with a platform. Can we put it on a platform and then figure out how to land the platform? The problem was, the center of gravity was too high. So if it's on the platform, it's gonna flip over. So now we can't land it on the

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want that.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Don't want that.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want that. I can tell that right now. Okay.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  So then the next evolution in thinking is, okay, let's put the platform on top of the rover. All right. And that gives it retro rockets all the way down to the surface and you land it. Then the problem is, how do you get the platform off the rover?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  So then, the unique idea is, let's hover it and lower the rover down to the surface while the platform is hovering at about 20 meters.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're lowering it like with a joist or something, right?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Well, yes. That's called the sky crane.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sky crane.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, sky crane. Yeah, yeah, the sky crane. And when you think about that, that's a process we do here on Earth with helicopters every day. Dropping off cargo, picking them up, going through that process. So why couldn't we engineer that for a Mars mission?

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Excellent. So it's brilliant to know, I mean, engineers, they live for this, right?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They know what has worked in one application and they modify it, add to it. No, that's, I love it. I love it. So Chuck, what kind of questions you have?

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  Hey, let's jump into it. Um, we'll start with Leslie Murray. By the way, let me just say, Jim, people love NASA.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  Like, you guys, you guys need to take a little bit more advantage of the public goodwill that you enjoy and get more money because people

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only domestically, but internationally as well.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  True. Yeah.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, people are so excited here. It's great. Yeah. Anyway, this is Leslie Murray.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is from Patreon.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Jim Green. Um, Leslie does not say, oh, actually Patreon.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Okay.

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  Thank you very much. Uh, these are Patreon, uh, these are Patreon folk first. And as we say, um, we certainly enjoy anyone who supports us on Patreon, uh, because we certainly enjoy, uh, money. So thank you.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  I'm just, I'm just being honest.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please forgive Chuck, he's still in training for, in this process.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  I, listen, I'm sorry, I don't know how to diplomatically say, "Thank you for giving us money." It's very hard for me to figure out the proper way to say that, but...

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll debrief you after the show.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so what's that first question?

• 14:02Chuck Nice?

  Alright, this is Leslie Murray, Patreon, she says this, "Jim Green, very excited to ask you, if you could have added just one more instrument to the rover, what would have, what would it have been?"

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that question.

• 14:17Chuck Nice?

  I, like, and then she says this, "Like every rover, I'm sure this one was on a weight loss plan."

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Well, I, I have to tell you, of course, I was head of planetary, we'd landed the Curiosity, that worked great, and, and we began the concept of, well, we needed, we need to bring back samples, we need to go and get the rock samples that tell the history of Mars, we need to bring them back, and, and that, that was the thrust of what Perseverance is going to do, and, and how we were able to convince NASA and the administration, and then Congress, to support this next move. So, the instrument I wanted, that I dearly would have loved to have on it, I actually got it on!

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And that is, an audio instrument. You know, we've, we've never landed on Mars and listened, you know, to, to the wind, to what we can hear, and now I have two microphones, uh, on, on, uh...

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, when you said "audio instrument," you meant a microphone?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  I meant a microphone.

• 15:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz, I gotta tell you Jim, when you said "audio instrument," I was like, "What a waste of money." You sent a radio to Mars? Who, why not put some cup holders on it? Who is listening? Who is listening to whatever? But, no, yeah, exactly, but no, the microphones, that's, that's...

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it adds another dimension to our senses...

• 15:52Chuck Nice?

  It does.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For what we think of and feel about Mars, very good, okay.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  So, oh my god, so, when, when this thing lands...

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  And you deploy these microphones. You're we're we're going to be able to like go to NASA uh uh and and listen to what Mars actually sounds like?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  But even before we land, even before we land, we're going to turn on one of the microphones during the landing process.

• 16:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  So we will hear what's going on inside the capsule as it hits the top of the atmosphere and and the in huge temperature variation just outside the heat shield is going on is it's burning away the material on the on the heat shield and then the sky crane all the way down to the surface. So we turn it on right away.

• 16:47Chuck Nice?

  OK, now, uh, since I've been zooming for 11 months now, I just want to make sure. Do you have a mute button? Because that can be problematic.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Well, um, not that I'm aware of. We do have an on and off button, but uh, our hope is that everything will survive intact and will be able to use this engineering microphone as it moves. And the reason why that's so important, what we found out with curiosity is as it went over some rough terrain, the rocks were literally breaking the aluminum uh uh wheels, you know, poking through them. And so, uh, the engineering microphone is designed to hear the creaking and the cracking and the moving. And then that's an element of the diagnostic of the environment that

• 17:43Speaker 02

  we're in that helps manage the rover and its assets to keep it going.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is that that old story. You take your car into the shop and they ask you, well, what's wrong with it? And you say, well, it's making this sound and and it goes like like.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The acoustic diagnostics.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  In this case, we'll be able to play it.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Play it back. Just before we go to break, is the carbon dioxide atmosphere such that frequencies will come across differently in the sound?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, really good point.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will you have to shift it to like an earth spectrum of audio? So we'll actually know what's going on or just going to enjoy the higher or lower frequencies commensurate with the?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Well, it'll be lower, you know, so turn up your bass. You know, the, the atmosphere is heavier in, you know, carbon CO2 is heavier than oxygen and nitrogen. And of course, as we talked about, it's a much thinner atmosphere. So sounds that we would normally hear as high pitched will be very low. You know, it will be base level. And of course, we, once we have that data, we can change the range and enhance it. But I think it would be absolutely fascinating to hear the real sounds of Mars based on the, the atmospheric composition and the pressure.

• 19:09Chuck Nice?

  I think it'd be more fascinating if you turned the microphone on and you heard, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning into Radio Mars.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. It'll be, wait, wait. And now, this is the Martian version of Barry White. And then it's a frequency so low, you can't even hear the frequency.

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're taking a quick break. We're going to come back with Jim Green, chief scientist of NASA. We're talking about the Perseverance rover of StarTalk.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Mars Perseverance Edition. I've got Chief Scientist James Green. Jim, just welcome back to StarTalk. It's always great to know you're there for us. And NASA has a huge social media presence. I think your biggest handle there is just @NASA, right?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got a squillion followers on @NASA, not only in Twitter, but especially in Instagram, where you're knocking it out of the park every time you put out something on the universe. Just congratulations to all of you for creating those images and the social media team for navigating them in ways that the public can embrace.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  This really, to me, shows that the public is very inquisitive. I mean, it's an element of our nature to really try to see and uncover new phenomena in new regions and take new views of the universe we live in.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Not to mention, seek out new life and new civilizations.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He left out that part. Yeah, thanks for... To boldly go.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, where no human has gone before.

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jim, not only does NASA have their handles, social media handles, but you have a podcast with the greatest name ever, Gravity Assist. Very cool. What kind of guests do you have on there?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Oh, Neil, I have some of the fabulous working scientists that are uncovering some of the secrets of the universe that, you know, really won't end up in textbooks for many years.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, he's compiling the secrets of the universe and not telling anybody?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  I am, indeed. So I just ended my fourth season, and the podcast is called Gravity Assist.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't lose with that. Okay, good luck with that. Good luck with that. So, let's move on.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Nathan. Nathan Hui, Nathan Hui says, "Will there be any live footage capturing the Perseverance's exciting landing and maneuvers? And if so, how will it be recorded and how can we watch? Thank you and good luck, Nathan." Well, you know, it's kind of cool because how do you, you know, what, how like, I, yeah, how do you record the thing that you're in unless you have some, something else recording it?

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, camera out on a boom or something. So what are you doing there?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So what, what, of course, happens is, uh, uh, we'll begin to unfurl a variety of things. So, and one of the first things that will come up will be our major camera. And this is as tall as a human is. In fact, if I stood next to, uh, perseverance, uh, I would, I would, I would just be looking into the camera lenses that are on the mast. This gives us a wonderful opportunity to view the area as a human would.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, okay, but that's after you've landed. That's after you've landed. But you got nothing for us.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's after you landed.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got, you got nothing for us while you're plunging through the atmosphere?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  We do. We have a whole series of cameras in many different locations. And so what we will see is we'll see the, this, the parachute deploy, we'll see that. We'll also see the heat shield drop away in the ground below us come up rapidly. And then we'll see, uh, that view of the ground as we land it with the skyprint.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 23:54Chuck Nice?

  Sweet. Well, that is cool. That, I mean, this is, this is really going to be an exciting thing to, to.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, one other thing, of course, uh, Mars is many, many light minutes away. So if we watch this, what we think of as live is really delayed by how much?

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Well, uh, light travels, you know, at enormous speed, but it's still gonna take, uh, close to eight to 10 minutes, uh, before we actually get the signal.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. So Mars is like 100 million miles away. Damn. When this is happening.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a ways, it's a ways away.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the whole thing could have just exploded and busted up on landing. And then we will just sit there and think everything is fine for another eight minutes.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Indeed. We won't, we won't have, we, we won't have any knowledge of that. And so that's, you know, what you're bringing up is a perfect point. Everything has to work the first time. Perfectly, and we can't joystick it. We can't make any mobs. When it hits the top of the atmosphere, it is on its own.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, hmm, hmm.

• 25:04Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Again, a shout out to the engineers who made that work. Okay. Chuck, give me some more.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Uh, Neil, Chuck, Jim. My name is Violetta. I am 12 and a half years old, and I have a very important...

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  12 and a half. Make sure you got that in there.

• 25:22Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  That's important.

• 25:24Chuck Nice?

  Right. I've, I am still using halves and quarter years. Um, what is your advice for the next generation of NASA scientists in regards to space exploration? What should we study and dream of now if we expect to one day be the first generation that travels to Mars? This is a 12 and a half year old asking this, so that's really, uh, that's really cool.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Well, it's really all about following your passion. Get involved in an element, whether it's engineering or some aspect of the science, and just immerse yourself. Enjoy it, and let it lead you to these different opportunities. Whether it's an opportunity to work in a company, or industry, or laboratory that are involved in building instruments, uh, or, or in one of the NASA centers, you know, and even getting involved in, in building space vehicles for humans.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, NASA, NASA collaborates with companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing and, and other places to build spacecraft. So NASA doesn't build all their own spacecraft and spacecraft, correct?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  For Perseverance, and of course, the Ingenuity, Ingenuity helicopter, we built those. NASA did build both of those. But it required instruments to be built by many different groups and universities.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what that means is, what we think of as NASA's budget... Goes not only to NASA, but to innovative corporate companies, engineering companies that also do work in the service of NASA. So they would get a paycheck that's not signed by NASA, but signed by their own company. But ultimately, it came from all of us supporting that enterprise. Did I capture that accurately?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yes, you did.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. Beautiful, beautiful. What you're saying, Jim, is that it's one thing to say, "Oh, they're doing this now. Let me train so I can do that when I'm their age." That's one thing. Another thing is, "I am so passionate about this thing, whatever it is. Maybe it's my passion that will create an opportunity that doesn't even exist there today."

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed. That is really the case.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so just want to make it clear.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, to dream big and then follow your passion. Follow your dream.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then maybe other people will be the path to the door of your passion. And then you'll be the leader, the next leader of the science at NASA.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have a badass business card.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, keep it coming.

• 28:13Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Toby Sonnenberg, who says, "Hey Neil and Jim, how can NASA predict which rocks may hold signs of an ancient biochemistry if that biochemistry is completely alien to us?" I think, yeah. That there may be some assumptions being made in that question, but still, yeah.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, they're excellent assumptions. So Jim, if we're looking for life as we know it, are you gonna miss life as we don't know it?

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  As we don't, wow.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Indeed, we don't want to just look for life as we know it. We need to be open-minded. And that requires getting the samples back. The ancient history of Mars is in that rock record. And we're gonna, you know, create a

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a core is basically a cylinder that you extract from the object and then you have the full record of layering within it.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  That's right. So somewhere in this time history, life may have arisen on Mars. All right? So now we have to bring this back because we can't in any way interrogate this sample on the surface of Mars.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where were you on the night of July 10th? You can't use the word interrogate in front of black people. They have a whole other understanding of that word. Okay? Sorry. Not your fault. Not your fault. I'm just saying. Oh, God, that was funny. Okay. Oh, God. You're interrogating your core sample. Go.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yes, to do that analysis, you know, we then want to put the, we then want to put the core in a sleeve and then we'll lay it on the ground for later pickup by another mission. And so we are, we're actually planning now to pick up the sticks, to pick up the cores. Yeah. And then we're building a Mars ascent vehicle to bring it back. Now, the analysis of the rock record is forever. If we get it back here on Earth, we can interrogate it, we can, we can create theories on, hey, we might see different types of life than we expected. The record is here to continue that discussion and then eventually prove your theories or

• 30:41Speaker 02

  disprove them and, and tell us about what Mars could have, could have harbored life in its past.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So at the risk of stating the obvious, the geologists can see back in time simply because the stratification of geologic forms and structures preserves that. And that is their analog to what we do in astrophysics, whereas we look out in space, we look back in time because light takes time to reach us. So the farther away we look, we can see a thousand years into the past, a million, even a billion. So I've always felt geologists were our kindred souls. One looks down, the other looks up in this exercise of decoding the history.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in the same analogy, you know, astrophysicists look at different frequencies of light, all right, because it tells them different things. When we bring this rock record back, we're going to use different instruments to determine the mineralogy. In other words, how material is put together, the composition of what those nodes are in the mineralogy, the state of the matter in terms of what we call isotopes. And so now we can interrogate all those different dimensions because we have the rock record right here at home.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a bit of, so it's geochemistry, geochemistry.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:11Chuck Nice?

  All in, yeah. So Neil, do astrophysicists ever interrogate the light that they find from when they're studying space?

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One day, one day, we will do an explainer video of all the stuff we extract from light. And it is a stupefying amount of information.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Contained within light. Yeah, yeah, we'll do that, Chuck, remind me.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  No use holding out on us x-rays. We know what you did. Okay.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know where you've been.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  It's the gamma rays you gotta watch out for.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're right over your shoulder there.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me another question, maybe we can squeeze one in before we go to the break.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  This is Rob Carter. He says, hello, I was wondering what protection this rover has from the Mars fine dust after the Mars digger issues last month? This is somebody who's following along, that's for sure. Is there a way of stopping the dust from gathering on the solar panels? And if so, what's another major issue that the rover will have to overcome?

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we will only learn about that after the commercial break. See what I did there?

• 33:22Chuck Nice?

  Stay tuned, Rob.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stay tuned. When we come back, more cosmic queries on StarTalk, all about perseverance on Mars.

• 33:45Chuck Nice?

  Hey, it's that time. Time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Yancy L. Sanford, Tyrell Carson, and Nina Barton. Guys, thank you so much for the gravity assist that allows this show to traverse the cosmos. Without you, we couldn't do it. And for anyone listening who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/stargtloradio and support us.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk. Cosmic queries. Perseverance. Speaking of perseverance, I had nothing to do with this show, but I gotta say it. This morning, took my 92-year-old mom to get her COVID vaccine.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Yay. That is amazing.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wonderful. Up at Harlem Hospital. So, so there it is. 92, and she's ready. She's ready for more.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  She's ready to rock and roll now.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rock and roll.

• 34:45Chuck Nice?

  She's ready to rock and roll. She's like, Neil, where are we going?

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where are we going now? Let's go.

• 34:50Chuck Nice?

  Where are we going? We can get out the house.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, Ma, I ain't been, I don't get my shot yet, okay? My category hasn't come up yet. Okay, so Chuck, give me some more questions for Jim Green, chief scientist at NASA.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so when we last

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we last left off.

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  Rob Carter had asked about the protection of the Mars rover from the very fine dust of Mars, citing the Digger issues of last month. We might, I don't know what that is. And then he says, is there a way of stopping the solar panels from gathering dust as well? And what other issues have you foreseen that the rover will overcome? So those are all of his questions.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  All right. So indeed, perseverance looks just like curiosity, and it has its own power system. It's using radioisotope power. It's using plutonium-238. And plutonium-238 is really hot. You put this against a thermal couple, which creates a voltage difference, which charges a battery, and then it's like having your iPhone plugged in the wall all the time. All your instruments work. So this can be coated with dust. We don't care because we've brought our own power supply.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you work at night as well, right? It doesn't matter if the sun is up or down, okay?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But what's really exciting from the question, I think your listener is interested in what's happening also with InSight, which has solar panels. And the solar panels, of course, will accumulate dust, but one really exciting thing that this InSight, the name of the lander on Mars, is seen, is the dust is being blown off. And it's not from, you know, the twisters that it has seen, Spirit and Opportunity does, but it's from the same phenomena, it's just not visible.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  So the atmosphere has these vortices that indeed blow the dust away, and we don't need a dust devil to do it.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, but how about the machinery and the moving parts? You know, you can't bring anything to the beach here on Earth because sand might get in it, and that ruins everything. You certainly don't want to ride a bicycle on the sand. So won't the dust get inside the moving parts, and isn't that bad?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good point, but indeed, the rover is really sealed well. And the compartments that it has, like Curiosity, would be meant to acquire material and then shut off. So we don't see that as a problem. You know, it's like keeping your windows up and your car doors shut, all right? And you can operate well inside, even during snowstorms.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me what InSight was?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  InSight is a lander that landed on Mars in November 2018 and deployed a seismic system that allows us to hear Mars quakes.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  And it's measured over 500 of them since then.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars quakes?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Indeed. And this is telling us a lot about the inside of Mars and the fact that we now believe that Mars, at least partial part of the core, is liquid. We didn't know that before.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice. Chuck, keep going.

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  All right, um, let's go to Mikey Taylor from Illinois. How do rovers, uh, most sensitive instruments survive entry? And is there a chance that they could be damaged?

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, that's a really important question because we now know that we have to build them to be rugged. So, understanding that right off the bat is critical in developing the right capability to survive what we call the vibrations and the loads that occur by moving quickly, you know? So there's the launch sequence and the shaking of the rocket and, and moving at high G. Uh, and then there's the landing, you know, where we're going to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface in seven minutes. Under, going through various loads. So you, once you know that, you have to design it and build it that way and then test it.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you have a bunch of shock absorbers for everything built into the structure of the system, right? Otherwise, the accelerations will be felt directly by the, the instruments themselves. You want to absorb that away somehow, I guess. That's what, that's the task.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Well, that's one method of doing that, you know? Yeah, other methods are let it shake and then you have to build it such that it will withstand those vibrations.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh, image stabilization, kind of.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I hadn't thought of, I, I hadn't, forgive me, I hadn't thought about build the sucker so that it can shake and bake. And then it doesn't matter. Then you don't have to waste weight on building cushions for it. That's interesting. I like that. I like that idea. Okay.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  Cool. All right, this is ST20IC says, will this take better quality photos? So are we talking iPhone 5 or iPhone 12 Pro? What are, what are we looking at? What are we looking at photo wise?

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Well, we're indeed looking at the beautiful Mars photos in higher resolution. We're also having, uh, high resolution cameras on the end of the arm. So that we can get up really close to the rocks, hit them with X-ray, look at the glow and image that and really understand a lot about the mineralogy and the composition before we decide to drill a hole and bring back that sample.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, is that that famous Alpha Proton X-ray?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  It's similar. Yeah, it's similar. This is called Pixel. It's designed to zap the rock with X-rays, let it fluoresce, but also image it, also image that, okay?

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that an acronym for something? Pixel?

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz I'm gonna tell you something. In the name department, you guys are losing. Alpha Proton, Alpha Proton, uh, X-ray spectrometer.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Geologists love that instrument.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  Cuz it sounds like, it sounds like my tax dollars went to do something. You know, you, you gotta, you gotta hype it up, Jim. You gotta hype it up. You can't just be like, so we got this great technology. It's called Pixel. Uh, you know. No, you gotta hype it up, you know?

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make it sound like a diabolical weapon on Batman, right?

• 41:55Chuck Nice?

  Alpha base, you know, bio aqua do loop something.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  All right, so, so this instrument sits on the end of the arm and fires a ray gun at really high intensities, glowing the rock, heating it up, and letting it tell us what it, what's, it, it's made of.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give that man an extra billion dollars just for that sentence.

• 42:19Chuck Nice?

  We're gonna call it our photo phaser.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Photo phaser?

• 42:23Chuck Nice?

  It's our photo phaser spectrograph like something. That, yeah.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just make it sound like something that would be, be on Batman. Out of Batman's.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  It, it's not the ray gun on stun, you know, it's on kill.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's on vaporize, yes.

• 42:40Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Vaporize.

• 42:41Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright Chuck, we're in lightning round mode right now, so how many questions you can get through? And Jim, you're in soundbite mode, okay?

• 42:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go, Samuel King, Samuel King wants to know this. Tell the truth, Jim, is this one of the first steps to terraforming Mars?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Could be, and the reason why is we're gonna learn so much about the environment that will then take that knowledge to terraform Mars.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, okay, foundational knowledge, I like that, good soundbite too, got A+ on that soundbite. Okay Chuck, give me another.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  Alright, Seisyo Shiro, Seisyo Shiro wants to know this. How do you guys pick the right place to land?

• 43:30Speaker 02

  We wanna go to the best place where we can get samples and that's why we're going to a delta, an ancient area on Mars where water and sediment is landed on the bottom and created rock.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A delta like the Mississippi Delta?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guaranteed to have layers?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's been sedimented, oh, nice. And implicit theory is of course, Mars has deltas, right? This is an interesting fact, alright? Delta's enough for you to pick one to land on, okay, keep going Chuck.

• 44:06Chuck Nice?

  Why I love the Martian Blues, okay, so Selku Kilman1 says this. What will happen to the other rovers? Will they just retire and leave it there as space trash?

• 44:21Speaker 02

  All rovers and all instruments that are working on Mars, we want to keep them working. Keep making new and exciting discoveries until they die. And they will be there for us to explore as humans when we land.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, you might need those to beam signals back to Earth the way, uh,

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Matt Damon did.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt Damon, Mark Watney. Was that his name, Mark Watney?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you need those. Yeah, yeah, you need those in case you have to rewire them and send signals back to Earth. Of course, duh. Okay, Josh, keep it going. Couple more, we got time for a couple more.

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  This is Beer Games, who says, "Hello, will this rover be responsible for any preparation for humans to travel to Mars?" So, I mean, yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  The answer is yes, because we have an experiment that brings in the atmosphere and creates oxygen that we can breathe.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  It's called the oxygenator on the movie The Martian, but we call it Moxie on Perseverance.

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oxygenator sounds a little better.

• 45:35Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, once again, you guys gotta work on these terms, man.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Work on, yeah. Oxygenator sounds way better.

• 45:41Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. We have to turn on the oxygenator.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we'll be back to get it.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, so what you're doing is you're breaking apart the carbon dioxide molecule.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 45:57Chuck Nice?

  All right. This is Chris Cherry, if you want. Chris Cherry says, "What is, for this mission, your chief and primary goal? And what is something you secretly hope to discover?"

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  We wanna search the past from the rock record to see if Mars could have supported life. And my secret wish is that we find it.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. What, like a fossil bone sticking out of the, the rock? I mean, what, like, what do you, what do you, what? A creature that crawls out from under a rock?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  No, we don't anticipate getting fossils. But the chemical composition is just right for which there's potential cells or microbial indications that life could have survived on Mars early on in its history.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right, I'm gonna take host privileges and ask you one last question. Uh, we launched Perseverance to Mars, was it, uh, June, was it?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  July.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In 2020?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  July.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, July?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  July.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And did anyone else launch at around that time? Because, you know, this is the months over which Earth and Mars are nicely configured for just that kind of journey.

• 47:14Chuck Nice?

  And can we shoot them down if they pick up?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Well, we have, we have the lasers, but they're gonna be used on Mars. Every 26 months, Neil, you're right, everything lines up where we can launch from Earth and make it to Mars as fast as possible, but we are not the only nation going. So the Chinese have launched a mission to Mars with an orbiter and a lander and a rover, all right? And in addition to that, United Arab Emirates has also launched a mission that will get into orbit and make atmospheric measurements and image the surface. So the road to Mars is open and it's busy.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  I, I love that. And are we collaborating? Are we sharing information with these, with everybody? So are, I mean, you scientists all love each other, so, I mean...

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that happening or is it more like governments?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  No, indeed, everyone knows about the other missions. We know when they're gonna launch, we know how they're gonna operate, you know, for, for instance, Perseverance is gonna be dropped right onto the surface. You know, we're not gonna get into orbit, so it's like hitting a golf ball in New York and having, uh, the ball go in a hole in LA. You know, it's just one straight shot. The Chinese have a different approach. They're, they will first get in orbit, spend some time there, and then drop their capsule with their rover down to the surface at a later time.

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody has different tactics.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  There are different tactics, yeah.

• 48:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool. Okay, so this is great, and it's a reminder that science really, at the end of the day, knows no national boundaries. Because it is the one true unifying language, not only of us all, but between us and what might be aliens that we greet one day. Because they will surely be using the same science we are to get around the house and around the backyard. And that's great, as long as America wins. America. Mer.

• 49:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta end it there. Jim Green, great to have you back on StarTalk. Anytime, Neil. Excellent, thanks, Jim. Chuck tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. Keep that going.

• 49:31Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir, yes, yes, I am.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.