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Another week, another review of space missions in the Solar System. Today we set our sights on the red planet. What are all the active missions at Mars today?
Transcript
(This is an automatically generated transcript)
Fraser Cain [00:01:47] Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact space, journeying through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. And with me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?
Pamela Gay [00:02:05] I am doing well. As soon as we are done recording this episode. I’m going to start flipping my studio to get ready for this coming Saturday is hang out athon, and you and I are going to actually be recording our next episode during that event.
Fraser Cain [00:02:24] I’m excited, and I’m sure you’re going to be into all kinds of other things as well. I’m ready.
Pamela Gay [00:02:29] Yeah. Okay.
Fraser Cain [00:02:32] Now you got an email. Someone was asking if we would ever do our question show again.
Pamela Gay [00:02:37] So? So on Sundays, I do office hours. I with with our patrons. Y’all are welcome to show up. You get the link. And Sean stopped by and he’s like, I remember your question shows, and they were really awesome. Can you do them again? And I was like, no, because Fraser does. Really good one. I don’t want to compete with.
Fraser Cain [00:03:02] We kind of do them though, which is that we record this show live every Monday at 11 p.m. Pacific, 1 p.m., I guess 11 p.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. your time. Yeah. And we do the show part, which is like the first half of the hour. And then we stick around and we answer questions for the second half of the hour. And so if you’re a patron, you get the full audio, don’t you?
Pamela Gay [00:03:29] Yeah. So so patrons get the edited show. No ads, no one. That’s right. And YouTube has the complete show.
Fraser Cain [00:03:37] No ads. Right? Yeah. So the complete show is always available on YouTube. And then, as you said, I do a question show every week on my channel and that goes on my podcast. So if you aren’t already subscribed to the Universe Today podcast and you want those question shows, they’re not with Pamela, they’re with me. But but they’re a good time and we get a lot of questions.
Pamela Gay [00:03:58] He’s learned most of what’s in my brain.
Fraser Cain [00:04:02] Thanks for teaching me. I appreciate that. Another week, another review of space missions in the solar system. Today we set our sights on the Red planet. What are all of the active missions at Mars today? All right. Again, we decided that there was just too many missions. We had to break these up. So today we’re going to talk about Mars. And there’s a lot going on at Mars.
Pamela Gay [00:04:25] Yeah, I was really naive when I thought we could review the solar system in three episodes.
Fraser Cain [00:04:31] So adorable.
Pamela Gay [00:04:32] I admit to my folly. Mars is truly a world occupied by so many robots. Not all of them live. And I’m loving that. There is now sci fi out there where people are taking advantage of the robots, either as like we saw in The Martian, a site where they can grab resources or as as we saw in, one of Alister Reynolds series, as something that can come alive and potentially hunt us down later.
Fraser Cain [00:05:11] I haven’t read this one, which was just pushing ace.
Pamela Gay [00:05:15] oh, man. It’s it’s his his other really long series of books and I took I can’t remember the name or I will tweet about it later.
Fraser Cain [00:05:23] Okay, okay. I’ve got to not this is not the Revelation Space series, but I will I will definitely. I’m so into Alister Reynolds at this point.
Pamela Gay [00:05:30] It’s amazing.
Fraser Cain [00:05:31] It’s so great here. What I find amazing with Mars missions is they just last forever. Yeah, like there are Mars missions that are undead. Oh, well, more than 20 years old at this point, and they’re still going strong. And then even the rovers on the surface that were only supposed to last a few months lasted for over a decade. So there’s something about Mars, like, yeah, Mars eats spacecraft for breakfast. But if you can survive the arrival, then you may very well have a very long and successful future ahead of you.
Pamela Gay [00:06:05] Mars Odyssey was the first Mars mission I ever wrote a journalism article on, and it. It launched in April 2001. I was still a graduate student when it launched. I had just started a job as a journalist when it landed and it is still functioning. And they thought I had in the 90s to make it so that it could work as a communications relay. And it just blows my mind that they had this plan. We need to figure out where we want to go. We need to figure out how to enable rovers to send us more information, which means they should spend their energy getting stuff in large bandwidth to orbit. And then the orbiter sends stuff to us here on Earth. It’s just it blows my mind how well everything with Mars has been planned out, even if we don’t know the plans ahead of time as the public right.
Fraser Cain [00:07:15] So with Mars Odyssey, should we just start with. Or we can start all this first. We start with two orbiters, then then landers and rovers. All right. Let’s talk about Mars Odyssey. Like what is the purpose of Mars Odyssey.
Pamela Gay [00:07:27] So Mars Odyssey today exists primarily as a relay satellite. It is orbiting round and round as you do, unless you want to crash into the surface of a world. And it’s listening for the signals from all of the various landers and rovers that are working at any given moment. So today it’s out there listening to curiosity and perseverance, and it has worked with the Mars Exploration Rovers. It has worked with Insight and Pathfinder. It’s capturing their signals and sending them back. But I mean originally its its goal was do what every other orbiter does map the surface of Mars and. It’s expected to keep doing it at least until 2025. And I never believe NASA when they give an expiration date for something at Mars.
Fraser Cain [00:08:30] I mean, there’s been a lot of really interesting maps of the surface of Mars talking about the locations of water ice. And Odyssey has been the spacecraft that helped identify where all of these deposits of water ice are. And show us that Mars actually has a lot more water ice closer to the equator than anybody ever thought.
Pamela Gay [00:08:53] And this is because it’s it’s looking at how high energy particles are interacting with the particles beneath the surface, or in this case, the molecules beneath the surface. And it also has Themis, which is, anytime you see thermal images of Mars, it’s probably from Themis.
Fraser Cain [00:09:12] Yeah. And and so just again like you get these like multiple spacecraft collaborating on science about Mars. But shortly after the Mars Odyssey spacecraft arrived at Mars, you got the European Space Agency’s Mars Express.
Pamela Gay [00:09:30] Also still working.
Fraser Cain [00:09:32] Still going? Yeah. There was a video that we just shared a couple of weeks ago that was this really amazing flyover of the region around Valles Marineris. Like, not specifically, you know, the big valley on Mars, but the region in between where the vowels Marineris is and the Tharsis bulge, where all the big volcanoes are. Yeah. And it was just like it was like, this is what it would be like to fly low over the surface of Mars, over this region. And you just saw just these amazing valleys and plateaus and and. Oh, man. Which is crazy. And just to think that this is a, again, spacecraft that has been at Mars since 2001.
Pamela Gay [00:10:13] And it was a collaboration primarily with the European Space Agency as lead and also with, it was a Russian space agency. They have changed names since the beginning of Mars expresses planning through to when it launched. So I’m just going to go with Russia. And, yeah, it’s it’s one of the missions that reminds you how the current Ukrainian Russian war has really affected the European Space Agency’s exploration of our solar system, because there’s this tremendous history of the two agencies working together. And now they’re not.
Fraser Cain [00:10:59] Yeah. Yeah. And so again, same thing, you know, equipped with a suite of cameras, other instruments and has just been taking image after image like orbit after orbit after orbit. And it just keeps taking more and more images at high resolution of the surface of Mars. And it had a partner.
Pamela Gay [00:11:16] Beagle, which was you.
Fraser Cain [00:11:18] Well, so does that count?
Pamela Gay [00:11:22] It didn’t survive landing, but they were.
Fraser Cain [00:11:26] Like.
Pamela Gay [00:11:27] A pair that traveled together. And Beagle was a project of the United Kingdom working solo to try and do their own tiny lander. And tiny versus Mars doesn’t necessarily work. I feel like it was kind of a precursor to all of the Google Lunar XPrize missions that we talked about last week that were small and endearing and small teams, and just didn’t quite make it. It tried, it tried.
Fraser Cain [00:12:01] So then let’s talk about the flagship of or imaging the surface of Mars. And that’s the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Pamela Gay [00:12:09] So so Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter I came in 2005. It was actually after the Mars Exploration Rovers. And so you had the Mars Exploration Rovers, landing and then Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got there and was able to see them. And, and that moment of, oh, we can see what the rovers are doing from space that that was new and amazing. And in the years since then, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are actually twin spacecraft for the most part. And Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has high res camera. Has been tasked with things like trying to catch spacecraft in the air so we can see their parachutes as they descend through the thin Martian atmosphere.
Fraser Cain [00:13:13] People always ask me for examples of of images. They’re like, you know, you see a picture of of a satellite and you’re like, who took that picture? You know, like, well, it’s an artist’s illustration. Like, this is not a real picture of a satellite. And then there’s the picture that MRO took. And like the one that is the most mind boggling is you can see the parachute of curiosity as it’s like like they timed the landing of curiosity and then perseverance when they knew that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which can be flying directly overhead. And so they could get these images and you legit see the parachute of the spacecraft as it’s landing, you know, descending to the surface of Mars. And so that is one of the very few examples of a satellite taking picture of another satellite. It’s crazy.
Pamela Gay [00:14:03] And and the resolution of this telescope is the kind of thing where we’re, we’re just going to keep being able to accomplish new science with it, because there are so many images at such high resolution that you really have to postage stamp them out and expand out just a section of each strip at a time. And my favorite high res story is there was a researcher with the mission that just had been working on, like mission ops, the kinds of stuff that makes researchers sad and sent just random images to the printer, picked them up and was flipping through them, and the orbiter had caught a landslide in the process of happening. And because to accomplish color images, it flips through different filters and does a picture in red, a picture in blue, a picture in green. Moral equivalent of that was broadly associated. Each color caught the landslide in a slightly different state, and this was the first time we’d seen that the surface of Mars is geologically active in cool ways, other than just getting hit by new meteorites.
Fraser Cain [00:15:31] Yeah. I mean, the resolution on that camera is it’s a it’s the most powerful telescope that’s ever been sent away from Earth orbit.
Pamela Gay [00:15:40] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:15:41] I think it has. It does have the same one that’s on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, so. But but still, it’s a it’s a pretty beefy telescope and it is in orbit around Mars, and it’s capable of resolving objects that are down to tens of centimeters across. And so if there’s a monolith hiding on Mars, we would have trouble would find it.
Pamela Gay [00:16:02] Yes. It was in a permanently shadowed region. I realized that after we said that about monoliths last week. Don’t ask me. I have since realized it, right?
Fraser Cain [00:16:11] All right, so there’s one more NASA satellite that is in orbit around Mars we should talk about before we sort of move further. And that’s moving.
Pamela Gay [00:16:23] Even. So so Maven is perhaps the least sexy in terms of what journalists need to do our job mission. And I use that term because there is a Reddit forum called Earth Porn, which is the most beautiful imagery of our planet ever. And and the, the data coming from from high rise. You can just like, stare at it and it’s glorious. Trace. Tracing out the gases in the atmosphere of Mars does not produce the most beautiful data. It produces the most intellectually interesting data. But in general, it’s it’s not the kind of stuff that’s going to make the cover of National Geographic. What Maven is doing is it’s trying to confirm some of the the readings we’ve had of the atmosphere from the surface of the world to see what the the total basically gas column looks like. And it’s also looking at the rate at which molecules are leaving Mars atmosphere. So it’s able to sample things, measure things. It’s it’s basically a. Crime lab investigation unit designed for atmospheres. And it’s doing really good science. It’s helping us start to figure out things like the mystery of the methane, but no pretty pictures for us unless you like spectra.
Fraser Cain [00:18:07] Right? But you have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter right there able to take those pictures. And so to understand, like when did Mars lose its atmosphere? Is it still losing its atmosphere? What did it look like in the past? What is the composition. And as you said, is there methane being generated somehow on the surface of Mars? These are all really important questions that, if answered, can give us a much better history of of just like where Mars came from. Why is Mars a cold dead world when Earth is warmer, has liquid water in its surface, and, you know, a lot of it comes down to the loss of its atmosphere, its protective blanket, which was keeping it warm. And.
Pamela Gay [00:18:46] Exactly.
Fraser Cain [00:18:47] And what’s that process?
Pamela Gay [00:18:49] But there are other orbiters.
Fraser Cain [00:18:51] Yes. So let’s move on to other orbiters. Let’s move on to to ExoMars.
Pamela Gay [00:18:56] So, so ExoMars, was was the mission that carried the Trace Gas Orbiter, which is another don’t take pretty pictures. Let’s measure the atmosphere and what’s changing over time. Mission, as well as the poor chaparral lander that didn’t quite make it.
Fraser Cain [00:19:19] It looks shades of beagle to that. It was this European mission with a lander on board, and the lander died, but the orbiter was fine.
Pamela Gay [00:19:30] Yeah, the lander is a reminder that it takes roughly seven minutes to successfully get from space to the ground. And it only survived the first five.
Fraser Cain [00:19:42] Right.
Pamela Gay [00:19:43] Because it didn’t take seven minutes would be the problem.
Fraser Cain [00:19:46] And so what is ExoMars trying to accomplish?
Pamela Gay [00:19:50] ExoMars is it’s an astrobiology program where they’re trying to to figure out is this and again, this is an Isa, Roscosmos mission here. And it’s trying to figure out are the things necessary for life, specifically looking at the methane tied to potentially life. What do they look like in the atmosphere. It’s also another telecommunications relay. It would have been more effective had the shop early. Lander not died five minutes into attempting to reach the surface, which it reached too soon. That’s a different problem. But but it’s it’s another one of these ones that’s out there looking at the atmosphere and looking at methane. It worked with curiosity Rover to figure out that there is actually a day night cycle in the release of methane from the surface, which is wild. And it was basically a matter of the one mission was able to do all of its work during the day. The other mission did all of its work at night. And in combination with trace, they they figure figured out, oh, this this is this is a day time, a mission that we’re seeing. And I just love that tie in.
Fraser Cain [00:21:14] So we’ve got another couple of orbiters from other countries. So first let’s talk about the Hope mission from the United United Arab Emirates, which is really cool.
Pamela Gay [00:21:24] And it is a mission that nobody ever talks about. Have you come across any science papers from it?
Fraser Cain [00:21:31] I’ve interviewed the director, or.
Pamela Gay [00:21:34] If you speak well, I mean.
Fraser Cain [00:21:38] So so they’ve actually got a pretty interesting list of, of missions. So after the Hope mission, which is their first mission to Mars and orbiter. Yeah, they’re they’re working on an upcoming asteroid mission. They’re going to be following up with that. But, you know, I mean, there’s not much to it. I mean, it’s it’s like their first attempt at homegrown building a mission to Mars and then, getting it launched, had it launched on a Japanese rocket, and they’re able to arrive and start taking pictures. And. Yeah, the pictures that came back from Hope look quite different from the other spacecraft that are there. And they released a really interesting kind of, Full Planet atlas about a year ago of the entire surface of Mars and was a lot of interesting surface features. So, you know, this is not an extremely ambitious mission. I mean, although it is really, you know, it’s an ambitious mission.
Pamela Gay [00:22:36] It’s still alive. It’s still going.
Fraser Cain [00:22:40] Exactly. You know, it’s it’s looking at, you know, because it’s on this, this very like. I orbit. So it sort of flies out to this really high apple and then comes down, does a close flyby and then comes back out. And so it’s able to take these, these full images of the entire planet in one shot that we don’t see very much there. Because Marty’s Reconnaissance Orbiter is like looking through a straw.
Pamela Gay [00:23:09] To close.
Fraser Cain [00:23:10] You very, very close with a giant telescope. And so we don’t get a lot of those missions that are able to give that that higher perspective.
Pamela Gay [00:23:16] So when a really big dust storm to hit a really big dust storm that leaves Percy and Curiosity alone, they’re fine.
Fraser Cain [00:23:23] They’ve got nuclear, you know, they’ve got radioisotope thermoelectric.
Pamela Gay [00:23:28] Generator need to be left alone because, I mean, we did. I don’t need them to, like, get stuck in sand dunes. We know that’s a thing.
Fraser Cain [00:23:39] No we don’t.
Pamela Gay [00:23:39] Yeah, but. But hope is a mission that will actually allow us to see the full spin up and evolution of the dust storm. And I normally it’s actually amateur astronomers here on Earth that are like dust storm coming because they can see the whole planet.
Fraser Cain [00:24:01] Yeah. We talked about the discover satellite, which is sitting at the Earth one L1 Lagrange point or sun L1, the ground point that takes these entire shots of the whole Earth. Yeah. And it’s nice to get that sort of farther perspective at the same time that you’re dancing stuff that’s up close. So. So good job to that to your team. Yeah. And then the other one is the Chinese Chen one orbiter.
Pamela Gay [00:24:23] And they did something super clever. I don’t think we’ve seen before or seen again except from their moon lander. They took a separate camera that that they were able to take full on pictures of their rover with the separate camera, so their selfies don’t require them to, like, edit their own rover arm out of the selfie. I guess it’s not really selfie. It’s a friend taking a picture for you. Sorry, that was just something super clever that I am overly excited about. They’ve also been exploring the same region of Mars where we know there are active quakes. And so there’s the potential as more and more data comes in, that we’re going to be able to understand why is this a extreme area of of Mars so, so active? We just don’t know. And we want to know.
Fraser Cain [00:25:25] All right. Let’s go to the ground.
Pamela Gay [00:25:28] So so I had already hopped there with even when one.
Fraser Cain [00:25:33] Goes to one and then we’ll we’ll continue on there. I mean they’ve got their the Jurong Rover is theoretically operational. So it like just barely makes the cut because it hasn’t been officially declared dead, but it has gotten clogged with sand on its solar panels in the same way that that.
Pamela Gay [00:25:54] Opportunity that.
Fraser Cain [00:25:55] Opportunity did and and insight. And they haven’t heard back from it. And, you know, probably it’s done for. So does it count for our operational missions at Mars? I mean, if it’s.
Pamela Gay [00:26:11] Still listed as operational.
Fraser Cain [00:26:14] Yeah, it’s not doing great.
Pamela Gay [00:26:16] So it’s not doing great, but I’m willing to give it time.
Fraser Cain [00:26:20] Sure. If you want.
Pamela Gay [00:26:22] All right. So so I it’s in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars. It’s, it has its own orbiter, Tianwen one. That. And please correct my pronunciation. I am so grade ten one. Yeah. And it it was exploring vigorously with a little camera that could see it, which I found overly exciting. And this entire mission, I saw lots and lots of people going. Well, it’s not as. And then comparing it to Percy and Curiosity, which is really unfair. This is their pathfinder. This is their sojourner. This is their first attempt. And iterative design says you, you don’t start by doing the most complex thing. And they succeeded on their first try.
Fraser Cain [00:27:27] Yeah. Yeah absolutely.
Pamela Gay [00:27:28] That’s insane.
Fraser Cain [00:27:30] Yeah. yeah. And it’s been doing a lot of like they chose an interesting landing site, one that nobody had ever been to before. And they have been finding some really, you know, and one of the things that the Chinese do with their vehicles is they give them a, a ground penetrating radar. So they have one of these on the all of their lunar missions, and they’re able to measure the depth of the regolith on the moon. And they had a similar version of this on the Mars rover. And so they were able to measure the depth of regolith under and, you know, searching now, they weren’t able to we and one of things they were hoping to find was deposits of liquid water or even water ice underneath the rover and to the depth they were able to reach, they weren’t able to find any of that water. Yeah, but still, like an amazing accomplishment and a instrument that had never been on the surface of Mars before. And so, you know, every part of that I think has been great. And it’s too bad that they lost it, I guess. That’s what happens to solar panels on Mars. This is an unsolved problem in Mars exploration. And I know you’re like, why don’t they just. I can read your mind. You’re thinking, why don’t they just.
Pamela Gay [00:28:45] Because there’s not enough people in them to.
Fraser Cain [00:28:48] No no, no. Like, why don’t they try to brush off the solar panels? Why don’t they try to.
Pamela Gay [00:28:52] You know, now, this is the only mission that has tried to clean its own solar panels.
Fraser Cain [00:28:57] Yeah, by dropping sand on top of it, I.
Pamela Gay [00:28:59] Love.
Fraser Cain [00:28:59] That. Yeah. And so the the the thing that I always say is like, you know, like in the spring when pollen falls on your car and you get this sort of yellow film across everything on your car and there’s no.
Pamela Gay [00:29:13] No easily remove.
Fraser Cain [00:29:14] There’s no, you can’t remove without water, you got to scrub it. Right. And so that’s, that’s what that dust on Mars is like. And you just can’t brush it away. You can’t blow it away. You can’t tilt the thing and shake it off. This stuff just gets in there and hangs on tight and forms this film. Yeah, that is really hard to remove. All right. We got we’ve got like two spacecraft and a buddy left. So let’s do Cheerios first and then we’ll we’ll talk about perseverance.
Pamela Gay [00:29:43] All right. So Curiosity’s over in Gale crater slowly but surely climbing Mount Sharp. And what’s cool is as it climbs, it is hitting different geologic eras on Mars when water had hit different heights on Mars. And and so it’s documenting all sorts of super cool features, but it is showing its age because it takes forever to get from point A to point B, because it doesn’t have the same self-driving A.I. that we have over on Percy. It’s gotten better. They’ve installed software updates, but essentially it sends back all of its images. The researchers work on Mars Night, coming up with plans for the next day based on those images. And the rover will drive a little bit stop image and figure out, okay, Rove a little bit, stop image, figure out, go a little bit.
Fraser Cain [00:30:42] Where should I go now? What do you do about this rock? Yeah, that looks scary. What should I do? Yeah, yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:30:47] And they recently had to take a fairly significant detour because they hit a fairly dangerous part of the climb. But it’s doing good. It’s reached past all of its mission objectives, and it it is able to I think it has one wheel currently lifted up because it wasn’t doing so well.
Fraser Cain [00:31:13] No, I mean, I think you’re mistaking it for spirit. That was.
Pamela Gay [00:31:16] Spirit okay.
Fraser Cain [00:31:17] Yeah. Yeah I mean it’s wheels are wearing down. Yeah. But they’re they’re still fine but they’re definitely like there’s holes and chunks and and stuff in the, in the wheels on curiosity at this point for sure.
Pamela Gay [00:31:28] But, yeah, we’re regularly getting new images from where it is on Mount Sharp. It is literally seeing stream birds cut through the landscape as water pooled and escaped and flowed downhill. And it’s it’s like climbing the side of the Grand Canyon in a way where you can see different points in the Colorado River going through the Grand Canyon. It can see different points in the lake level in Gale crater, and it’s just cool and shows how alive Mars really was.
Fraser Cain [00:32:09] I mean, I think that, like, there has been a constant stream of news coming from curiosity. Like there’s, you know, we’ve done whole episodes in curiosity and there’s no way we could encapsulate, but it is still going strong, still doing science. Tons of new papers are being written about it. It’s a really exciting mission. Still is as exciting today as it was when it first landed 11 years ago or so.
Pamela Gay [00:32:36] And it’s getting high enough to get really good landscape shots. Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:32:40] Yeah, totally. All right. Let’s talk about it’s, not twin exactly sibling perseverance. It’s younger sibling.
Pamela Gay [00:32:47] It’s much younger later generation. I’m going to go with like, second cousin. I’m sure Percy is I. Part of what we hope will be a two part mission where it’s it’s collecting samples. And Jezero Crater has a river delta where essentially water burst through a wall and then just spread debris. So as it goes through all of this debris that was carried to the Delta represents a variety of different landscapes on Mars, all in one place. And so as it goes, when it encounters cool things, cool rocks, cool soil, it’s able to collect samples, hold on to the samples like eggs, and then it’s depositing them in different caches that hopefully future missions will be able to retrieve and bring back.
Fraser Cain [00:33:49] Well, those are the. So those are the backups.
Pamela Gay [00:33:51] Yeah. Those I was going to get to that. Yeah. It’s taking two of each.
Fraser Cain [00:33:56] Yeah. So the mean samples are always taking multiple copies of different places. It’s holding one set of them internally in this special sample container. And then it’s pooping out the samples out onto the surface. That then in theory, if there’s a problem with the main group, then a collection rover or helicopter could fly along the route, pick up the samples and bring them back to the sample return mission.
Pamela Gay [00:34:19] I like my egg laying analogy back.
Fraser Cain [00:34:21] Sure. Yeah, sure. Egg lay. That sounds good. And and as you said, right. Like artificial intelligence, machine learning.
Pamela Gay [00:34:29] It’s awesome.
Fraser Cain [00:34:30] Plays a big role in allowing it to cover a lot of distance compared to previous missions. It chose its landing site.
Pamela Gay [00:34:37] It can process its path as it goes. Yeah, it’s not going as fast as a Tesla, but it is using what has been learned through all of the self-driving car research to figure out how to navigate a landscape much more complex than what we asked Tesla’s to do.
Fraser Cain [00:35:00] Right? But but without cyclists riding around, you know, like nothing is nothing is moving quickly through its field of view. And of course, the most amazing addition to this mission was a helicopter.
Pamela Gay [00:35:17] Yeah. So after Curiosity’s success, NASA engineers were given permission to stash a helicopter. Ingenuity. And it’s not a quadcopter. It’s an actual helicopter. In the belly of Percy. And ingenuity is nicknamed Jenny. So it’s Jenny and Percy. And one of the things that you you run into with Rovers is there’s a lot of landscapes that you just can’t navigate through because, you know, there’s either risk of getting stuck in sand dunes or there’s cliffs, that sort of thing. But Jenny is able to go out and fly over these landscapes and send back data. So we’re able to essentially scout ahead, go to the places the rover can’t go, and get all this data that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. And this is an exciting new way of exploring that. The dragonfly mission is is really an inspiration for dragonfly is going to be going to Titan and flitting from location to location. And I look forward to a future where we can essentially learn from both Tianwen and Percy, and always have that second thing that can take photos of your rover after landing to do a are you healthy? And let’s just be cool and send back selfies, and then that flying sidekick that can scout around for you, it’s just awesome.
Fraser Cain [00:36:54] I can’t imagine a future mission to Mars not bring a helicopter with it. Yeah, yeah, it seems incomprehensible based on.
Pamela Gay [00:37:03] What value.
Fraser Cain [00:37:05] It has. Like they will all be equipped with helicopters because just having this aerial scout.
Pamela Gay [00:37:13] Weighs next to nothing.
Fraser Cain [00:37:15] That can fly around, that weighs next to nothing that is constantly flying around, searching the landscape, identifying interesting features to go and check out. It’s just is so much value for so little weight and cost. It seems like just the way to go. Yeah, you can imagine future Mars, like even human Mars explorers bringing these helicopters with them, setting them up, deploying them, having them scout the terrain around them and just helping them understand where they are and what they’re looking for, and interesting geological features that they should go and check out. Yeah, it’s game changer. Like, like, I think one of the most exciting developments in space exploration was the addition of this helicopter to this mission. I mean, the mission has been great, but that there is a helicopter flying on Mars just like every time I think. It blows my mind.
Pamela Gay [00:37:58] And it’s off the shelf. For the most part. They use a golf rangefinder. They use a cell phone camera. Yeah. It’s it’s and they’ve been able to debug it. It’s awesome.
Fraser Cain [00:38:10] Yep. All right. That wraps up our investigation of all of the missions at Mars. Thank you. Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:38:18] Thank you. And next week, we are going to go, to the asteroid belt or Jupiter. What have we decided?
Fraser Cain [00:38:27] Well, I think we’re just going to do everything beyond everything beyond this point.
Pamela Gay [00:38:30] Okay. That’s that’s that.
Fraser Cain [00:38:32] Is just like Juno. The interstellar spacecraft.
Pamela Gay [00:38:37] Psyche. OSIRIS-REx. Apex.
Fraser Cain [00:38:41] Lisa. No. Sorry.
Pamela Gay [00:38:45] We’ll figure this out next week.
Fraser Cain [00:38:47] Yeah, I think that’ll fit within more than one episode.
Pamela Gay [00:38:50] And if you are watching this before, the weekend of November 3rd, fourth and fifth, we’ll be recording our next episode over the weekend. I will be sending messages out to our patrons, and I would specifically like to thank all of you who have joined at the. Pamela will attempt to pronounce your name level and higher this week. I would specifically like to thank Nate that Wyler, Philip Walker, Shawn Matz, Frank Tippin, Lu Zealand, Benjamin Kehrer, Bart Flaherty, Nyla the Lonely Sand Person, John Drake, Brian Kilby, Jordan Turner, Arthur Latz Hall, Paulus, Zeppo Esposito, Robert Hundley, Bob. Ski, Daniel. Loosely, Sydney. Walker, David. Fogerty, saber. Lark, Hal. McKinney, Reuben. McCarthy, Daniel. Donaldson, Christian. Golding, Ron. Thorson, Frank. Stuart. Time. Lord. Iroh, Jason. Cade. Dorcas. Could. Marcus could, I don’t know. Will Hamilton, Jeff MacDonald and, Lee Harborne. Thank you all so very much. You let us do this show and pay all the people behind the scenes to just keep things going.
Fraser Cain [00:40:09] Thanks for one and we will see you next week.
Pamela Gay [00:40:11] Bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.