Mars Up Close, Part 1: Marc Kaufman

Marc Kaufman: Well, hello everyone. I... it's a delight for me to be here and to see all of you here. Ah, and I think this is going to be a very interesting and, uh, pleasurable evening. It certainly will be for us. So, I want to start by telling you a little bit about Mars. A headshot of Mars, taken by the Hubble and showing in, I think really wonderful detail what the place kind of looks like. In the modern era, when the Mariner flybys went past Mars, they found some things that were really interesting, deep canyons and so on. That increased interest in sending a real, sophisticated mission there and that resulted in the Vikings spaceships and before taking off, you may recall Carl Sagan who is a wonderful and incredibly talented person nonetheless wanted cameras on Viking to see the animals. There was a great expectation that there was going to be not only life, but like weird life, big life, you know, cool life. So when they arrived and they saw a lot of rocks, uh, it was kinda disappointing and there was a big debate about whether or not there was any discovery of microbial life, something that NASA itself has said 'No', one of the PI's says 'Yes'. It all ended in both confusion and disappointment, for the most part. As a result Mars funding and Mars exploration took a serious dip, ah, and it wasn't until 1997 that the next lander came on to Mars.

By the way, just an aside, there have been six successful landings on Mars and without being nationalistic about this, they are all done by NASA. It's like what we do really, really well.

Putting that aside, ah... so in '97... the Sojourner arrives and then soon after Spirit and Opportunity, the two little plucky rovers that could arrive and they do all kinds of things, however, they did not have capabilities to do anything like what Curiosity can do. But before we get into Curiosity, I want to tell you a little bit about what-- what NASA and other and scientists were generally looking for, which was... Remember the mantra, 'follow the water'? Well, initially that was like looking for little gullies and looking for, you know, maybe little streams or spouts that were coming out in some way or signs that there had once been large, catastrophic floods and so on. But, when first the Mars Orbiter camera went up and then later HiRise and others they began seeing images like these, which sure looks like a delta to me, doesn't it? You know, it's like that could be the Amazon, that could be, uh, the Potomac dried out. Badly dried out, bad drought. And the whole notion of 'follow the water' took on a very different meaning because it was clear that there were signs, many, many signs that there was significant water that had run on the surface. And all of the climate modeling said that wasn't possible but yet it was the case.

Also, this picture which is not a Jackson Pollock but rather an image of Mawrth Vallis, which is one of the oldest sections of Mars and after it became clear that there were signs of water, then they began looking for minerals. There are classes of minerals that are formed only in water, uh... phyllosilicates which are clays, sulfates, some others. And they began finding those.

Ah, so, they had this orbital information, now it was the time to do something called 'ground-truthing' which is Curiosity. Send Curiosity to the ground and let's see what happens. This is the heat shield leaving-- You may recall that Curiosity in its 'seven minutes of terror' where it hit the atmosphere with 32,000 miles an hour, it had seven minutes to stop to zero. Here is the sequence going down, the black is indeed black sand alongside of Mount Sharp, which is the big mountain in the middle of the crater. Here the thrusters are going, they are about to land, at this point, it's largely the rover itself and the descent device. And then, first picture ever of an actual landing. Look at it, that's the tire right there, that's the tire of Curiosity about to land. And it did. It became clear quite soon that this was-- that they landed in a place that was very different than other landing sites previously.

They found pebbles that were very interesting because they seemed to suggest the presence of water at some point. They found other... conglomerate rocks that did the same and also they were in the proximity to what appeared to be a fossil stream. All of which are beyond cool from the perspective of people interested in Mars. So, and the original plan was to go directly to Mount Sharp, which is this huge mountain in the middle. A two mile high mountain in the middle of the crater, but they decided against that, and decided instead to take a detour to what turned out to be named Yellowknife Bay. Now look at this. What does that look like? A dried up lake, right? What do you think it was? A dried up lake. You know that's kind of the conclusion that they came to probably. Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before or any other planet outside of the Earth. And it is an enormous breakthrough.

To your upper-left is Mount Sharp and that is where they didn't go. But they they will go, because that's what the program says they are supposed to go to. Alright, now the red planet, right? Mars, the red planet. Every story except for mine says it's the red planet. I say, 'No, it's not red. It has rouge on it'. This shows a rock that was run over by the Rover. And look what color it is inside. Bluish gray. And it turns out that most of Mars is colors other than red. That's just an iron oxide dust that kinda covers things. So, the red planet? I don't think so. The blue-green planet? Maybe.

Curiosity has an array of instruments that are unlike anything that has gone before. This was obviously taken before they took off. This is the arm. Seven feet long with a turret that has drilling equipment on it, that has a camera on it, that has a number of other instruments on it. Again, nothing like this has ever gone to Mars. Really, really hard, you know, to make this work, it's very heavy.

This is the first drill. Right in the middle, you see the thing go down, it's drilling a hole that's about half an inch wide, if I remember correctly, about two inches deep. And what they found it was something that made clear that the redness just covered over a level of potentially interesting, habitable, potentially habitable environments that we didn't know about before.

Alright, how does Curiosity get around? It's interesting. This is called 'driving blind', where what's blind is not the people or JPL driving this but rather the rover, which has its own autonomous abilities. But here it is driving based on a program that was sent up to it. Rover drivers are well-known to be among the coolest people on Earth, but in fact they don't drive. I mean they make programs, right? You know... they are not at the wheel. But it is nonetheless a remarkable and very, very difficult job. And with a lot of pressure.

It turns out that after a year and a half or so, some serious holes came up in the wheels, various punctures and rips. This came from going over sharp rocks that were embedded into a sandstone as opposed to being in something that would be like sand, where there wouldn't be as much force. And this is, you know, serious problem. They really did a lot of work figuring out how to deal with it and they determined that it would not ultimately affect the mission. That it would not shorten the mission in any way because they could drive backwards. And that's what they do now, they drive backwards. Unfortunately, the autonomous part which is what makes them go really far cannot go backwards and so they have to stop, going backwards. Then turn around, and then do the autonomous part forward, which is part of the reason why it's taken a long time to get to Mount Sharp. But in any case, there you go.

Very briefly, October 19th there is a comet that is going to go past Mars. Initially they thought that it was going to hit Mars or it could hit Mars, which considering the billions of dollars that NASA has on Mars and around Mars needless to say, it was not a happy thought. But they now believe it will go to the side enough that it won't be a serious danger, though you can never tell exactly what happens. The dust particles themselves, although they are just dust particles, are moving at something like 153,000 miles... an hour? An hour. Which makes them basically bullets, so they could go through anything. In any case, this is going to be passing by Mars.

And to me it was really an interesting reflection on where we-- where we are as people. There are-- we are now a space fearing civilization. We-- something can come close to Mars and it matters to us. And we can learn an enormous amount from that. This comet will come closer to Mars than any comet has come to Earth in recorded history. So, that is what we can really get a lot out of it because of having the assets that we have there now. And let me just end with this image from the camera that my colleague here, Ken Edgett, is the PI for it. You know those are little grains of sand. Those are little grains of dust. In terms of Mars up-close, I mean, they are getting really, really up-close and not just in terms of the images. In terms of the geo-chemistry, in terms of the geology, in terms of understanding weather and all kinds of, and radiation and the like. And that's what I think is... is the great message that comes from the Curiosity Mission so far, which is that they are learning an enormous amount because they have new tools and they are right there... really seeing stuff.