Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow many robots does it take to dig up rocks from Mars and deliver them back to Earth?
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Hey Daniel, have you been ordering stuff online a lot lately?
Yeah? You know, like everyone, I've been clicking on websites rather than visiting stores.
Yeah, you don't need a mass when you click. I guess it is pretty amazing how inexpensive it is these days to get stuff sent to your house from around the world.
Even if it comes from the other side of the planet. It can just be like a few cents per gram to ship it to your house.
Yeah, you know, I wonder when we can start ordering stuff from even further away.
I've been trying to order some moon rocks. I wonder how much is the shipping on those things.
Well, I heard NASA spend about three hundred thousand dollars per gram to get some moon rocks. But you know, I think it's cheaper if you have prime.
You know, Jeff Bezos is starting his own rocket company, so he's probably gonna link that up and make it super cheap.
Yeah. Why visit other planets when you can just order a little bit of them online? Or Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I would love to have a little bit of Jupiter delivered to my house.
He really, huh, Isn't Jupiter mostly gas? So you just wanted like a canister or just to like release it in your home to know that you breathe it in a little bit of Jupiter.
Well, you know, Jupiter is mostly gas, but some of that gas is in a really weird state, like metallic hydrogen, and that makes me really curious. I really want to see what metallic hydrogen looks like.
Hmmm, doesn't need to be like super under pressure.
Hey, these are all engineering details. I just want the metallic hydrogen order to my house. I'm just clicking and waiting.
I want a little bit of that gas from the red eye of Jupiter, like it is the gas. Also read what's going on there?
I think we did a whole pod episode on that one.
I should listen to it. But welcome to said podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in.
Which we let you stay at home and order it information about the whole universe delivered to your ears without any effort on your part. We talk about things in the universe that are super far away. We talk about the tiny particles that are swimming inside your body. We talk about everything and anything, and we try to explain all of it to you as right.
We try to bring the universe and the cosmos and everything in between to your brain free of charge.
Because wondering belongs to everybody, and the questions that you have about space and physics and the universe. Are the questions that everybody has, and the same questions that scientists want answers to.
Because we're all still learning about the universe, and part of that learning is exploring, is going out into the cosmos, into other planets and to the stars and figuring out out what's going on there and what is there for us to do discover.
And sometimes it's so depressing to think that we've explored such a tiny little fraction of our universe. You know, we've barely gotten off this planet to explore the Moon, to land a few rovers on Mars. It's incredible what a tiny little dot of the universe we have been able to explore so far.
But what a dot it is. It's a pretty cool dot.
And we're lucky that there is something to explore. I mean, right in our neighborhood, right next door, there's an amazing planet, Mars, that really has a lot of tantalizing and fascinating scientific questions.
Yeah, Mars is awesome, and so we'd like to know a little bit more about what is there on Mars. I mean, we can see it, but so far we haven't been able to really, I don't know study it up close.
It's pretty hard because it's so far away, and all we've been able to do so far is send our robots there and have them do science. But that's sort of like trying to do science with a ten foot pole or a ten million mile long pole. That's not easy to do.
That's kind of a philosophical question, isn't it, Daniel, Like if you send a robot out to explore something, have you explored it? Technically? Like if the robot touches Mars, did you touch Mars? Did humans touch Mars?
Yeah?
I mean if you have a robotic hand, you consider it part of yourself. If you touch something with that hand, then it's part of you. And so this is just like a spatially disconnected prosthetic, right, interesting, think about the rovers as part of your body. Then, yeah, philosophically, I've been on Mars.
I wonder if the Mars rover would disagree.
When it gets to the point that it can disagree, it's no longer part of your body.
It has its own Twitter account. Did you know that the Mars rover?
Oh?
Yeah, it has its own Twitter count. It has more followers than I do Yeah, we didn't get off its couch, Daniel, and actually, you know, went somewhere.
It has accomplished more in its life than I ever will, that's true.
But yeah, we'd love to know more about Mars and whether or not it had life on it, like bacteria or who knows what else we could discover that Mars had, but it's really hard to do it from here, and even to do it through robots.
It is challenging, and it's amazing to me how open this question remains. You know, through history, we thought, oh, maybe Mars has life on it. Then we took a closer look, where like, actually it looks pretty dry. They're like, wait, no, there is water on there. Maybe there are microbes, and so keeps going up and down, and it's fascinating to me that this planet, this one that's the closest to us. We still don't know the answer of if there is life on Mars, is it similar to Earth? Did it come to Earth from Mars, or to Mars from Earth, or to both planets from somewhere else. It's an incredibly important question and it's right there. It's so accessible.
Yeah, that's a huge question, right, whether or not life on Earth actually started on Mars, because it's possible that there was life on Mars and then got knocked off on an asteroid and then flew here and landed on Earth, and that's how life started on Earth. That's a theory, right.
That is a theory, and it's not just the plot of a science fiction novel. It's potentially actually plausible. And it's the kind of question that we could answer if we had deeper for access to rocks on Mars.
Right, we could all be Martians.
Martians could all be Earthlings. Who knows, we could all be Jovians.
Yeah, but it'd be great to answer that question. And I think the only way we're gonna answer that question is to actually go there and take a close look at the rocks and the soil and to like actually like take a super microscope to it and see if we see any little critters in there.
That's right, But sending scientists to Mars is unfortunately still many many years away, decades probably if ever.
It's really hard. But we've done it with some things in space, like, for example, we've gone to the Moon and gone in rocks from the Moon and brought them back to Earth. I think you can order them online, right.
I don't think you can order them online?
No, you can. Can you get on eBay and like a bid on a piece of moon rock.
I think anything you buy on eBay is not going to be actually moon rock, so please don't waste your money. But we did actually bring rocks back from the Moon, and those rocks have been an incredible treasure trove of science. We are like still thinking of new things to do to those rocks, to learn things to figure out answers to new questions about the science of the Moon. So it's incredibly valuable to have here in our Earth laboratories a sample from the Moon or from somewhere else.
Yeah, I have actually held a moon rock. I was at JPL visiting ones and they let me hold a little bit of moon dust.
And did you feel transported?
I accidentally breathed them in and sneeze. Had you go in there for a second.
That sounds like the opening scene of a terrible science fiction novel. Poor Hey gets infected by a moon based pathogen.
And that's why I have superpowers.
You gained the Moon's proportional strength.
Again, the ambility to moon people.
You cause tides, right, you'd be some sort of lunars superhuman.
That's right. I'm like the villain into next app Woman movie.
That's right, You're like the DC version of Magneto. Right.
You just insulted me twice over there. You just confuse the DC character with a Marvel character.
No, I'm trying to bring one from the other, right, Like Magneto controls metals, and so lunar Jorge controls tides right in the DC universe.
But anyways, so the question is can we just go to Mars, pick up some rocks and bring them back and then study them, and then we would know if life potentially came from another planet.
That would be incredible.
And so to the on the program, we'll be asking the question, can we bring rocks back from Mars?
Or more optimistically, how can we bring rocks back from Mars?
Oh? Oh, so you're feeling good. You feel like it's not an if question.
It's not a physics question, right, there's nothing in physics that prevents us from moving rocks from Mars to Earth. It's definitely an engineering question, and as you're here, it's a tricky one.
So as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question or wonder whether or not it's possible to bring something back from Mars. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to add ask people how can we retrieve rocks from Mars to study them on Earth.
So these are the answers I got from random folks on the Internet who were willing to speculate baselessly without any googling about the questions. I asked them, if you'd like to participate and hear your voice on the podcast some point in the future, please write to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Here's what people had to say.
I think that we should send a rocket to Mars and then maybe the Mars wherever that our coroner Mars should take the rock samples and put them inside the rocket, and then we could somehow program the rocket to flybacks on its.
Own perseverances on us where they are right now, and hopefully the next generation of perseverances will be able to bring them back to study.
I thought that that was part of the upcoming Mars mission, or maybe for the next mission to have some sort of return capsule.
It's really difficult to get things back from Mars. So I imagine.
That we probably have to send some sort of pro there that would then have to do a lot of the analysis there on Mars.
I think the new perseveremance wherever it can actually collect unstorm Mars rocks for a future mission to retrieve and bring back to Earth.
I'm envisioning maybe we send something to enter into Mars' orbit that can maybe send down an explosive. He's the surface sends out a bunch of particulates. The probe gathers these particulates and then breaks out of the orbit goes back to Earth.
We can gather samples from Mars for study on Earth, kind of how we went to the Moon, except all robotically, right, and instead of a lamb, we have a mem Well, I.
Know we already have a mission going there, and I believe what they're going to do is do little core samples and then somehow package them and leave them for a recovery mission.
All right, a lot of excitement about this idea.
I feel, Yeah, a lot of excitement.
People are like, I don't know, but sounds cool.
Somebody out there is like, let's just nuke Mars, and I have a feeling they were just waiting for the opportunity.
Was that a fellow physicist. I feel like that sounds like an efficient solution to a physicist.
You don't think an engineer would be like, let's just shoot a string of nuclear weapons at this thing to guide it back to Earth.
I think even a freshman engineer would be like, maybe there's a better way.
That's right, And also it probably destroy the samples and pollute them with radiation, so it might undermine the very science that we're trying to do.
Right, that's probably a huge part of it, right, like not contaminating.
Oh yeah, that's a big deal.
All right, Well, let's dig into this topic. Let's get some samples of it and retreat it and bring it to Earth. So Daniel, first of all, I guess talk about why we would want to get rocks from Mars. I mean, I know that it'd be great to study them, but you know, why can't we just study them there?
Well, we can do a lot of studying on the surface of Mars, and we have rovers that do that. But it's tricky. You want to do some science on a rover, you have to pick an instrument which can survive. I've like launch and transit and landing on Mars and then can get set up automatically without any like a grad students tinkering with it. You know, every cutting edge lab that I'm aware of here on Earth, the most powerful instruments are delicate instruments, and they require like experts tweaking them and massaging them to make them work and to calibrate them. So for something to work on a rover has to be really robust, and that really limits the kinds of science that you can do.
Yeah, I guess you need a lab, and it's tricky to handle these samples and to do the science right.
That's right. If you had your hands on Martian samples, like right now, this is like a hundred things you would want to do to it right away. But only a few of those ever make it onto a rover, so you're really limited. And then you get the answers back, you're like, oh, look it has this weird thing in it. Now I want to check with my other funky instrument. But you can't do that kind of thing all in advance. When you send your roverover, you have to plan very far in advance exactly what you're going to do to every sample, you can't respond to what you've learned with new ideas, whereas if you bring the rocks back, then you can keep coming up with new ideas. And also you have access to future instruments. Right, cool techniques we're going to develop in ten years or in twenty years that we haven't even thought of. Now we have the rocks here, rather than sending the machines there, then we can use new machines on old rocks.
Right, Because I guess it's you know, it's really hard to take stuff to Mars, right, I mean, like every gram costs like a million dollars or something, and these lab equipment machines are really big.
Sometimes they are really big, And a lot of the engineering challenges of building a rover are how to miniaturize, right, how to make these things really small. It's got to be like the size of a shoe box and fit on the edge of a stick, and be totally robust, Like you have to just be able to send it one command and it boots up and starts up. It's got to have a little bit of AI in there to get itself going. You can't just like crawl out there with your screwdriver and fix it right once you send it, it's gone.
Yeah, you can't just call it heat to fix it.
And they'll say, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again? Did you update your Windows installation?
You're like, I can, it's on Mars. I can't even turn it on and off.
No, And you can't even like drive something on Mars. Remember these rovers operate semi autonomously because Mars is so far away that it takes light minutes to get there, So you can't have the kind of feedback loop you need to real time drive something on Mars. It's like you drive forward, you stop, you take a picture, you send it back to the folks in NASA they figure out what to do next. And so having it be so far away makes it really limited.
It has to survive the trip too, Like launching from the Earth into space is not easy, right, Like there's huge forces and you know you're basically strapped onto giant explosion. It has to survive that, and also the landing on Mars, which can be pretty tough, like sometimes they just fall into the ground and bounce around, and it has to survive that, where like that's the landing strategy.
Design strategy, right. I mean, remember all those movies about astronaut training, Like they put those folks through some tough stuff. They spin it around, they shake them a lot. Basically, take your most sensitive science instruments and put them through astronaut training to see if they have the right stuff. Most of the time it's just going to fall apart. Like you go into a random geology or microbiology lab here on Earth. Most of those instruments are very delicate. They don't let people in there poking and products. So you're right, surviving all the shaking and the landing and all that stuff. It's not easy. So this whole categories of instruments, nobody's figured out how to miniaturize and make robust enough to send to Mars.
Okay, so it would be a lot better for science if we could bring some Mars rocks back so you can study them, and you know, you can do a whole bunch more tescent. You could on a robot in Mars, but it's really hard, and apparently you can't just study meteors from Mars, Like that's another possibility, but it's not, as I guess. Fresh.
Yeah, the amazing thing is that we actually already have Mars rocks, right, like what yeah, what you were talking about sort of as a joke, actually happens. Sometimes big rocks hit the surface of Mars right impact craters, and stuff gets thrown out into space. You know, these can be really big impacts and some of those rocks get tossed out into space and eventually a small fraction of them hit the surface of the Earth and then are recovered.
And how do we know they're from Mars? Do they have like a maiden Mars tag or.
Well they went through customs, right, and so we can tell And just look at the form.
I mean, can you tell like does it have a special like queue of red or something.
You can tell because of the geology. Every object in the Solar System has a different history and a different composition, and that tells you where it comes from. And so when you get a meteor from outer space, when you get a chunk of space rock, first of all, you can tell it's a space rock because of what it's made out of. It's made of stuff you don't find on Earth. And then you can tell roughly where it came from based on the details of what's in it. And so most of the rocks that land on Earth come, for example, from the asteroid belt, and we can tell based on the blend of metals and also the organization of the metals in them that tells you something about its history, like when it was last melted and how long it's been frozen for. And some of these things have composition and geology that's only consistent with the surface of Mars. So yeah, we have like dozens of these objects that have landed on the Earth from Mars, which is fascinating and incredible and wonderful opportunities to do science. But it's not good enough.
Right, Yeah, you need like fresh rocks, Like those asteroids are kind of stale. They've been floating around space and who knows where they came from.
It's not just that you need fresh rocks, it's that you need to know where they came from. Like it's just a random sample. You don't know where on Mars it came from, so you can't really like fit it into your science picture of what's going on on Mars. Which you'd like is to have a rover travel around and make judicious decisions and say, I'm going to get a little bit of this kind of rock and I see where it is. It's on the downflow of a slope. I'm going to get that piece of rock over there, and I know the scientific context. Just like getting a piece of pottery and having no idea where it was dug up from, it's much less valuable scientifically.
It's also kind of like when you go to a Las Vegas buffet. You know, you and judiciously pick a little bit from everything and know where you got it from, so you can go back and get the stuff you liked.
That's right, and so you know what made you throw up and what you actually enjoyed.
Yeah, yeah, all right. So it sounds like it would be a lot better if we can get go to Mars, get some rocks, bring them back, and then study the heck out of them to answer these big questions about life in the Solar System and about Mars and the history of Mars. But it's a tough problem, and so let's talk about how we would actually do that and what has been and is being done to do it. But first let's take a quick.
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All right, Daniel, we are souvenir shopping in the Solar system. We're trying to get some original, authentic rocks from Mars. But it's a tough problem because Mars is really far away, and you don't just have to get the rocks. You have to come back with them.
You got to come back with the rocks. Right, Like, we've done the one way thing. We've sent something to Mars and it's dug up rocks and studied them, but they're still on the surface of Mars. And so now we need to do the second bit, the round trip to come home and deliver them to scientists in a pristine condition, so that we can finally answer some of these incredible, long standing science questions.
Right, And I feel like the problem is it's not just double, it's like squared because you know, it's hard enough to take off from a planet and land on another planet, but now you got to do it again, take off from there and land here. But it still has to be the same machine that you send out, Like the same machine you send out has to do both of those things.
Yeah, it's complicated, and it's not just squared as you're going to hear. There's a lot of moving parts. It's more like to the ninth power or something. It's pretty ridiculous little dance of machines that we have to get working all together to get those rocks back from Mars. And you know what you just said, Nobody has ever done that before. We've never successfully launched a rocket from the surface of another planet, right.
Well, we've done it for the Moon, but the Moon is kind of easy to take off from.
That's right. The Moon is pretty low gravity, and it's not a planet, and it's not remote right, there's somebody in there driving that thing, right, So now we have to remotely launch from the surface of another planet. I mean, that's hard to to do from Earth. So yeah, it's a big challenge.
Luckily you volunteered to go. Tomorrow's right now.
I volunteered to press the big red button when the time comes. Oh yeah, I'm first in line for that.
I wanted to take off the take a button or the aboard one.
Whatever. Man, just put a big red button in front of me, and I will hit it. That's my job.
That's that's how these podcasts gets started. You hit a big red button.
Hey, you don't get to live your dream if you don't ask for it. So this is my official request to get invited to press the big red.
Button NASA button pusher. All right, but we've actually tried before. Like, this is not a crazy idea that you and I just came up with here on the podcast that you asked. The Soviets have been trying to do this for really like forty forty fifty years.
Yeah, and they've been trying and failing. But the failures have been political and financial. It's not like we've sent a mission that's attempted to do this and then not succeeded. The mission has been thought up and planned and organized and then canceled many times in the past. Really, the Soviets thought about it in the seventies, but they couldn't get their rockets to work. Now had a plan in nineteen seventy nine that was canceled because it was too complicated, and then recently NASA and the European Space Agency had a plan that was in twenty twelve that people thought was going to happen, but then it was aborted again because it was too complicated and too expensive.
This cancel culture is out of hand.
Daniel, Yeah, and I think that especially was really traumatic for the sort of Mars science community. People really believed that that one was going to be the one. It was finally going to come to fruition. So when that was canceled, it was a bit like the Superconducting super Collider was for particle physics. It left a bit of like PTSD on the community. There's a little bit more cynicism than there was before.
So it sounds like people get excited about it, they start the program, but then they realize it's too hard, so they cancel it. Is that, and it's happened over and over.
It's a little bit of a political problem though, because it's one of these projects that takes years or decades to pull off. So even if you're committed to spending a lot of money over many years. You need all the people who are in charge after you to stay committed to not have their priorities changed, And so it takes consistent support over many, many years for this kind of thing to actually happen.
All right, So there was a big program at NASA that got canceled in twenty twelve. But now now it's sort of been revived. Right now, there is some activity at NASA to actually do it.
That's right, it has been revived. There is a new plan, and it's a pretty reasonable plan in comparison with the other crazy plans, although I think you'll still find it fairly absurd and amazing.
This is the level headed conservative.
Yeah, this is the least ridiculous plan that we have.
Going to how they pitched it to Congress. We have a new, less ridiculous plan. You guys are going to love.
It now forty percent less crazy. And the most exciting part is that the first part of it has already launched. Like the first element of this multi stage plan to bring rocks back from the service of Mars is already on its way to the red plan.
Wait, what this is already happening?
It's already happening. They have a new clever strategy, which is they break it up into pieces and so they're easier to sell. And the first piece works no matter what, Like, the first piece is something you want to do, even if you're not going to bring the rocks back.
Oh, I see they're cleverer now about the mission planning.
Yeah, they're a little bit more cynical, I guess you could say, or more experienced. And so this first piece is a rover that launched on July thirtieth. It's the Perseverance Rover this year. And it's this year, yeah, just a few weeks ago, and it's on the way to Mars now, and it's an awesome piece of technology. You may have heard about it. It's going to be the heaviest rover ever landed on Mars. It's going to have a little helicopter on the top of it that can fly up the first helicopter operate on the surface of Mars.
That is so sci fi.
Yeah, it's gonna be really cool. It's gonna have a little laser on it, but most importantly, it's going to have a device that can drill into the surface of Mars and extract cores, which it can then store in a little sample contentment.
I feel like now we're getting to really transform or territory, you know, like we're sending a box and then when the box lands, it's gonna transform into a drilling machine with lasers and a helicopter.
That's right, it's optimist prime. That's what they should have called it.
That's right for getting perseverance or something inspiring, just go with optimist prime.
Yeah, So this thing is gonna have a year's long mission, and it's gonna drive around and it's gonna collect like rock course from maybe thirty nine different locations, and each one is pretty small, you know, they're like a centimeter wide and a few centimeters long. But that's gold for scientists down here. To have a few cubic centimeters of rock from several dozen locations around Mars, it's incredibly valuable.
So it is a rover like the ones we've sent before, and it's gonna run around and collect samples and then keep them keep them in like a box.
So it's got its own science mission. It's a good idea anyway, even if Mars sample return doesn't happen. But then it's gonna collect these rocks and it's gonna put them in a little sample container, and then it's going to leave them on the surface of Mars for the next stage to come and retrieve.
Wait what it's gonna be littering.
It's going to be preparing a gift for us. Man, it's not trash.
But why not collect them? But it's gonna really leave them out where it would found them.
Yeah, it's going to seal up in tubes and then it's gonna leave it out where the next mission can come and collect it.
Why not bring them all together so that it's easier to pick up.
No, it's going to collect them all into one container.
Oh, I see, and then leave the container there.
See it all nice, and then the next stage is going to come and pick it up. And so if you're keeping track, there's three major stages to this mission. Stage one is perseverance, Go and create the samples, pack them up in the container, leave it on the surface.
It's also going to study them, but also going to leave them there.
Okay. The next stage is to get it off the surface of Mars.
Wow, all right, And each of these is like a different mission. It's kind of I think that's when you're saying, like, yeah, don't put it all in one mission that could fail, but do one mission and if that one succeed, then do the next mission, and if that one succeed, to the next mission.
Yes. So there's three separate launches from Earth, like we are sending three different devices from Earth. They're all going to work together to make this happen.
Three different transformers. Uh huh.
The first one lands on the surface and makes these samples. The next one is I think maybe the craziest, and it's the one that's going to land on the surface of Mars and then it's going to deploy a mini rover, like a little rover that just runs out, picks up the sample container, comes back right, loads that into a rocket that it has landed on the surface of Marsh. It wraps that all up and then launches from the surface of Mars sends the sample container up into space. Wow.
So on a rocket will be sending another rocket and a launching pad and a launching pad and a little tiny retriever robot.
And a mini rover. Yeah, exactly. So the job of this thing is to land there, pick up the sample container and it has a robotic arm that will take it from the rover and put it into the rocket and then yeah, remote launch from the surface of another planet. Maybe the most valuable sample ever to be collected.
Wow, this feels kind of comical to me, like, you know, like this giant machine lands opens up. Oh there's another rocket in there. This little robot comes out, picks up something, runs back, sticks it in. The rocket just launches back somehow that it feels comedic, something like something out of a cartoon.
It does seem a little Loony Tunes. Yeah, you're right, and if this thing works, it definitely needs that sort of like comedic music in the background to inspire you, you know, poopoo l poo, poo, poo, pooo, poo, poo, loo poo, poo, poo poo. It'll be pretty funny. But this is not set to go for another five years or so, so we're talking about launching this next bit in twenty twenty six. Wow.
So wait, so there must be working on it now, like it's being built right now.
It's being built right now, So Perseverance will have years on the surface of Mars to collect these samples. And also we'll have an idea like, how did that go?
Right?
How well are things going? We could change our plan based on where perseverance is or how things go for perseverance, or what it learns, or how the sample container looks. And so that's another part of it. You build in these delays so you can change your plans as things develop. So, yeah, they're working on that now and they're'll launch it in twenty twenty six, and the idea is it would arrive on the surface of Mars in twenty twenty eight. Remember it's a two year trip, and then grab it and launch it out into space. But it only has the power to get it into orbit around Mars. It can't bring all the way back to Earth. Oh, that's still just phase two. That's just phase two, right, The actual Looney Tunes crazy comedic value comes in the next stage.
All right, So what's phase three?
So phase three as we launch a third rocket from Earth and this one at the same time as we're launching the second one, but this one just stays in orbit around Mars. This is called the Earth return orbiter.
So this one's concurrent, Like we're not going to wait for the second one to finish. We're gonna say two and three. It's like filming the sequels at the same time.
Yeah, exactly. So the third one hangs out in orbit and it helps communicate and do a bunch of stuff, and then its most important job is to catch the sample container. Because the surface rocket is gonna launch from the surface of Mars and get out near orbit, right, it can't go all the way out actually out into space, and the one that's in orbit has to lower itself down to lower orbit and then they're gonna pass the sample container from one rocket to the orbiter.
Robots are gonna do this.
Robots are going to do this in space, you know.
Sending Daniel is starting to seem a lot easier, I know.
And the sample container it has no like radio beacon, It has no tracker on, it has no transmitter, has no thrusters. It's just an inert white ball and the orbiter just has to catch it, have like a GPS on it even or nope, well it's just white. They're like, let's make it white then you can see it in space. Right.
Wow, that is audacious to say the least. Yeah, But I guess my question is why can't the rocket just go straight into orbit? You can't put enough fuel on it or something or what.
That definitely takes a lot more power to get all the way into orbit. And so yeah, I mean you have to launch this thing from Earth and then send it to Mars. And so there's a lot of risks and costs here that they're trying to balance, and this was what they decided was the least crazy plan.
I guess it would be a lot to like land a rocket that can make it all the way back to Earth. I guess this is smarter to like, you know, make this rocket smaller and then save the space shif part of it for another phase.
Yeah, and now the part the orbiter only ever has to live in space. It doesn't have to go down to the surface. So you have one thing that's dedicated to going down to the surface it's good at that, and another thing that's dedicated at orbiting Mars, catching this soccer ball with the most valuable cargo humans have ever created, and then flying on its own all the way back to Earth.
It sounds like, you know, kind of like a whole bunch of robots that together make one big robot.
Yeah, it's a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, right, they should have called this the Rube Goldberg Mars Mission. It's pretty hilarious.
All right. Well, let's get into what happens next phase three, But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we are talking about transformers in Mars and robots that we're going to send there and work together on their own to lend Mars, get some rocks, shoot them back up into space, hand it off, and then bring it back. So that's phase three is bring the samples from Mars back.
That's right, that's phase three. So it has to catch this soccer ball in orbit around Mars. Right, It like opens a door on the side of the ship and the ball just like drifts in because remember the ball is not powered. So it just has to like match it in orbital speed and get in front of it and then slow down a little bit and just sort of like mate with this thing. Yeah, it's gonna catch it. It's going to catch it, and it has to then keep it somehow sterile. It can't like let the sample container or anything that was on it infect the rest of the ship.
Oh, I see, that's to catch it and isolated.
Catch it and isolate it, fly it all the way back to Earth. Right, that's not that big a deal. You just have to sort of point in the right direction and have enough power left, and then it has to drop it off on Earth.
Wow, it's gonna drop it off or it's going to land.
It's not going to land here on Earth. It's just going to prop it off, and the sample container is essentially just gonna fall to the surface. They were like, should we add parachutes or something to slow it down? But that seemed too complicated.
They're like, no, can't you just call like uber to pick it up.
Or build a huge catcher's mitt or something.
Well, why not build another robot to go up there and catch it? Why not?
Well, they thought this was simplest, and you know, they already used up their quota of crazy robots on this mission, so.
They're just gonna toss it into the ocean.
No, it's gonna land on the surface and land around ninety miles per hour on the surface.
And it's not gonna explode or vaporize.
It's not gonna vaporize that. It should be able to survive that. And you know, the samples themselves shouldn't be that delicate, right, It's not like they're glass containers or you know, anything that's gonna break. It's just rocks were bringing back.
I thought they were going to be on like you know, test tubes, but I guess you want something to more sturdy.
Yeah, But the question is like can we keep it safe and contained. We're basically shipping a chunk of Mars onto the surface of the Earth, and we want to isolate it so that we can study it for well a couple of reasons. One is like who knows what's in that thing? And if there really is like weird life on Mars, the last thing we want to do is like eradicate all life on Earth because we imported some pathogen and didn't wrap it into plastic bag. First.
I've seen that movie.
It's pretty good unless you're living it. But the other thing is we want to keep it sterile so that if we do, like find weird bugs in it that are similar to bugs on Earth, we want to know they came from Mars and not from like the Utah Desert where it landed.
Wow, well, this seems like a super audacious, an amazing and incredible plan. And Daniel, you actually got to talk to somebody who works on this, somebody from NASA.
Yeah, there's incredible excitement in the community for this project. People are hoping beyond hope that they'll get to get their hands on some of these rocks. So I reached out to doctor Nina Lanza. She's a Mars rover instrument scientist. She built some of the things that are going on Perseverance right now. And I are a bunch of fun questions about this project.
Yeah, it's a great interview, so we'll play that for you right now. So here's Daniel talking to doctor Nina Lunzon, Mars Rover instrument scientist.
So it's my pleasure to be talking to doctor Nina Lanza. Would you introduce yourself for our listeners.
Sure, I'm Lena Lanza.
I work at Los Alamos National Laboratory and I'm a planetary scientist.
Awesome, And so our questions today are mostly about getting your hands on samples from Mars or the signs you can do with stuff on Mars. So our first question has to do with the rovers that we have over there and that we're sending over there. What do you think are the most important scientific questions that those instruments on the rovers are asking.
Well, it's important to remember that each of these missions had a different goal and they would they build on each other. Right, So, when we first started sending rovers to Mars and even Landers, you know, we didn't know a lot. We know a lot more after all the missions you've done. So initial missions were just to figure out, you know, what's on Mars, what's it like? And subsequent missions have been trying to find out the details of that. What has the history of Mars been like, you know, in terms of climate, in terms of geology. Now we're asking questions about habitability, is or was the Martian environment habitable in a way that we understand. So habitability is not looking for life, but rather places where life as we understand it could exist. And so now after our most recent missions, you know, we feel really confident that Mars was absolutely a habitable place in the past and is kind of habitable now for certain terrestrial microbes. And so our next goal is to find out whether or not life ever existed in the past on Mars, and so that's really exciting. So I think it's not that one of those questions is more or less important.
It's really that they are building upon each.
Other, and so are the questions that are being asked by these rovers or instruments designed for these rovers that are inspired specifically by things you learned on previous generations, like, oh, we saw this, and now we have a follow up question, Oh.
Certainly, gosh, And there's so many examples of that. I mean, there are some big questions. For example, we've seen from remote sensing these huge mineral provinces, specifically clay, minerals and carbonates, maybe less huge on the carbonates, right, We've seen these from orbit, and so the question is can we ground truth this and find this on Mars in a geologic context that we can interpret. We've certainly found quite a bit of clay on the surface with the Curiosity rover, so yay success. But now we're looking for those pesky carbonates. Carbonates are predicted to have formed on Mars, but we've never really encountered them in any kind of abundance, and so it's one of these ongoing mysteries. And so as we have moved forward looking at Mars in detail with curiosity, we still haven't seen all that many carbonates. So it's still this question and why not. We're hoping to answer that with a perseverance rover in its new landing site jezuro Crater.
Cool. So, I know, when you start a project, you have sort of like optimistic hopes for what might happen, or fantasies about data you might collect or whatever. So if you let your imagination run wild and you hit all the home runs, what's like the best case scenario for what you could discover using these rovers?
Well, I think it would be just incredible and paradigm shifting if we could find signs that life existed somewhere not Earth. Right, we know there's life on Earth, you know, but how did it start? We don't really understand a lot about our own origins, and we don't.
Know how common it is.
Right now, we only have one example of life on a planet, and that's our planet. If we could find evidence of life on a different planet, how to be remarkable and incredible?
What would that look like in terms of the rovers that we have now or the rovers that are en route. What would that discovery look like. I mean, we're not talking about little critters waving that to the cameras, right, I mean.
I think it's pretty clear that there is a macroscopic life on Mars.
Right the trees.
There's no dinosaurs. We would have seen those things. So now the question is microscopic life.
Was it there? And is it there?
So those are actually two different questions and we have to have different approaches to answer those questions.
Right.
The Perseverance rover is looking for signs of past life and there's a lot of ways.
To do that, and we use the same techniques that we do on Earth.
How do we know when life began on Earth and what were the signs that it left? So that's our best way of analyzing Mars rocks to find out if there was life in the past. I think our best bet is going to be bringing these samples back to Earth. We have some incredible rovers and they having great payloads of these instruments that just do great things, and they're doing them remotely. It's just amazing what we can do. But it doesn't compare to our gold standard instruments that we have on the Earth, and so there are questions that we can never answer with our current payloads. So we're going to need to just get that sample back into the laboratory, take a look at it, and then we'll probably want to do different analyzes. Right, we don't know what we're going to see, and so we don't know what the next steps will be. And that's the excitement and the fun part about doing science like this is that you can only predict the first few steps, but it's the next steps are all dependent on what you find.
And why can't we just do those studies on Martian mediors, you know, bits of Mars that have been blasted off and landed here already.
We're very lucky that Mars has sent us about one hundred and fifty pieces of itself, so we didn't actually have to go to Mars to get those pieces of Mars, So thank you Mars. The problem with those meteorites, though, is that they don't have any context. Right, they fell out of the sky. We don't know where they came from on Mars. It's very hard to make statements about geology in a broad sense if you only have a hand sample.
Right.
As a geologist, people come to me all the time with some random rock they're like, what's this. I'm like, well, I could tell you some things, but you know, you just pick that up off of the ground.
Where did it come from? What was the broader context?
We need that context to really be able to answer these questions about Mars. That's why sample return is so exciting because we know exactly where it came from. We have documented that location very well, and so then when we get results from that sample, we can then integrate that into a larger context.
That makes a lot of sense. And so if there are craters alive on Mars and little microbes and we sample them by chance and those samples come back to Earth, are we imagining that those things could still be, you know, alive and wiggling. Can we measure like, you know, metabolic activity in the sample that returns to Earth from Mars.
If there are things living near the surface of Mars, they have got to be amazing because the radiation environment on Mars is terrible. You know, it's Mars doesn't have a magnetic field because it doesn't have a dynamo and its core and so this environment is just's pretty icky for life. There's a lot of life on Earth that could probably handle it.
But it's not that common.
So I would say the chances of us finding extant Martians in the near.
Subsurface where we can access it with a rover, it's very very low. But we have to prepare for that possibility.
So one of the things that's really critical that we do before our samples come back is to prepare their housing facility. There are a few facilities on Earth that already are ready for this. A notable one is at Johnson Space Center, which is the main repository for all the Apollo samples from the Moon.
Because we had the.
Same questions about the Moon, you know, who knows what's up there, And it turns out that the Moon is a pretty sterile place, it turns out, and maybe that was easy to predict in retrospect, but you know, we had no idea. So we had to take really a lot of precautions to protect both the samples and Earth from each other.
And so we'll have to do the same for a Mars sample return mission.
And so we know from our experience with Apollo and also just bioscience in general, you know the best methods for doing that. So I think that facilities are going to either be constructed or old ones retrofitted to be able to handle these new samples.
Awesome. Well, I hope that happens. I've been reading a little bit about the history of these missions, and I note that you know, Mars sample return has been discussed for decades and even planned and then canceled and replanned and recanceled. Do you think this latest plan by NASA and ESA is likely to actually happen or do you think the political climate where we change administrations and government every few years makes it difficult to pull off a long term project like this.
Well, it's certainly above my pay grade to make political predictions, so I can't.
Really speak to that.
But it's true that these missions are really big, they require incredible amounts of collaboration over long periods of time, and they require quite a bit of funding. So that is what we need the most. I don't think that anything is impossible for us if we work together. I think that we've really come up with a great plan that has a high likelihood of success. The question is whether or not we want to fund that, and that's not up to me as an individual if it were be funded right now, but you know, we have to make sure that this is aligned with our taxpayers desires. There's a lot of things that go into that, and is this where we want to put our priorities. I would note that NASA is not funded at the levels that most people think right when I like to play this game like what percentage of the total US budget is NASA getting, and people are like twenty percent, and I'm like, that's great.
I wish it were twenty percent.
I know, of like, that would be amazing, you know, but unfortunately, at its maximum, NASA has never gotten more than one percent of the total US budget.
It's much lower than that now, you know.
So we are doing all this work with really very little funding, which is amazing. We don't really need that much more funding to make a sample return mission from reality.
So that's that's what I would say.
I would say, you know, maybe it feels like it's a little bit of extra money now, but the I think the rewards would be incredible and it would absolutely be worth the price tag.
I agree with you. I think it's incredible when we have the capability to do something and the only thing that limits us is the money. It's like you're at the universe is like knowledge shop and you could just buy this information about the universe, and the money is there, but they're spending it on aircraft carriers.
So when we need those two, we need them all.
We need all the things, but we could just you know, I think people think of it as more expensive than it really is. It really is a bargain what we can do.
It really is. So let's say this mission happens. There are several parts to it which seem a little you know, nerve wracking. It's being transferred from one to the other. Say this happens. Which part is the most nail biting for you? Which is the moment where you're like, you know, holding your breath hoping that it works.
I think for me, the most anxiety written part of any mission is launching and landing.
Those are the hardest parts that we do.
It's really hard to launch something off of another planet and get it onto another planet safely.
And so you know, we've done this now for many.
Missions successfully, right, but we can't never guarantee that it's going to always work out well. I think we have a good track record, but we're gonna be trying to do some very different things with sample return that we've never tried before, and that is.
We've got to first get our rover perseverance to Mars. So we're already.
Launching, we've already launched off of Earth and now we're en route to Mars.
We're gonna land on Mars.
Then that rover has to gather samples, and then we're gonna launch another spacecraft that's gonna get into orbit around Mars. And then that spacecraft's gonna launch a lander with a little fetch rover, and that rover is gonna pick up our samples and then get back to this lander and then launch off of Mars. This is all by itself, by the way, no help from us. Then it's gonna rendezvous with that orbiting spacecraft, and then that spacecraft is gonna come back to Earth. And that's very complicated. I think we can absolutely, it's absolutely feasible, but there's quite a bit of risk there, and especially because we can't operate this in real time, these systems have to be somewhat autonomous.
So then imagine that it's here, we have Mars samples, they're steriler pristine, they're in the labratory, and you're the first person to get crack at them, right, what's the first thing you do to those samples? What's the first question you want to answer?
Oh, my goodness, that is such a I mean, if I'm the first person to see them, I don't know if I could keep it from my friends, I'd have to invite everybody over so we can all look at this together, I think. I mean, the first step for bringing back samples like this is you must triage them. So we need to get a general sense what kind of rock is this, what kind of minerals? You know, just basic characteristics, because that will then tell you what the next question should be. You know, if you have a rock that appears to be igneous, so from a volcano, the next questions are going to be, you know, more about how did volcanism evolve in this place? You know, what kind of volcano reduce this material? And then what happened to it? Now, if you get a sedimentary sample, totally different questions. You're like, okay, so now this is sedimentary. Was it in placed in water?
What kind of water?
You know, what's the nature of the properties of that fluid? And then what kind of other minerals were precipitating there? And what does that tell us about the habitability of that environment and what kind of things could actually utilize, you know, what are the energy sources that might have been there.
So I think like depending on.
The first canister that I open, you know, you go in a different direction. So I'm hoping that we get some sedimentary materials that are high in manganese and will know that before they come back from Mars, because we will select these very carefully, so that would probably be something that will already know. So I would pick, you know, my favorite canister to open first so that I could follow my favorite questions. And for me, I'm really interested in understanding you know, are there biosignatures that are preserved in sedimentary materials on Mars. So these are chemical or mineral, logical or even morphological features that are left by life that can tell us something about what it was doing. And then it can also, depending on the age of the rock, tell us when it was doing that. So those are the questions that I'd want to answer first.
All right, wonderful, Well, I can hear your enthusiasm and it makes me excited to get these samples back here. Twenty thirty one, So thanks again for coming on our program and for telling us about it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's been great chatting all right, pretty awesome. She's amazing. It sounds like it's totally possible, Like this might work, Daniel.
It's basically a question of politics and money and then you know a little bit of luck, Like if we actually commit to doing this thing and to sending this thing over there, we have a reasonable chance of it working. Really, you know, something like fifty percent of missions to Mars fail, but that's a reasonable.
Chance of fifty. Is that our hit rate?
Yeah, that's our hit rate, and I think we have the best hit rate of any country on Earth. But it's still it is tricky, it's far away. These things are complicated. But remember what NASA has pulled off, Like they have done amazing things like the sky crane landing on Mars and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, so there's some pretty awesome engineers over there. I trust them. I think they deserve a couple billion.
Yeah. Yeah, you're saying that the biggest challenge is just keeping this project funded, because you know, it takes years and years. It's like a twenty year project, fifteen year project.
Yeah, if the samples do return, they'll be back here in twenty thirty one. Wow. And so it just needs constant funding. And you know how it is these days with politics. New administration comes in, first thing they love to do is cancel the projects from the previous administration. And so it has to be consistently supported by multiple branches of government in order to survive.
Yeah, well sure, yeah, let's give them all the billions.
I mean not all the billions, but a few of the billions. Think of the things we could learn. I'm always frustrated when there are opportunities to learn something important and deep about the universe and the only barrier is money, money that we have. I would totally go into the Universe knowledge shop and spend lots of billions of dollars to learn things about the universe.
You would totally press that red buy now, but Mars rock by now, sample of gas from Jupiter, buy now.
Secrets of the Universe. Click click click, deliver.
Tomorrow please next day delivery please All right, Well, doctor LANSI was definitely excited. We're excited, and good luck to the Mars scientists who are working on.
This and tune in in twenty thirty one. Well, we'll break down for you the incredible discoveries made by Mars sample return.
That's right today on episode three thousand of Daniel and Horris Paint Universe. Remember that time we interviewed one of the scientists.
No, it'll be two robots. Two robots will have taken over the podcast by then.
Yeah, and together they'll transform into an awesome podcast.
Actually making good jokes a trunk.
All right, Well, thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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