Patterns & Paradigms | The Pattern Podcast
Patterns & Paradigms | The Pattern Podcast
Season 2 Episode 10: Perseverance & Ingenuity: The Mission to Mars with Rob Sullivan
Perseverance and Ingenuity. Sometimes it's all about alignment. It just so happens that this planetary alignment happened in the middle of a global pandemic. Mars reached opposition in October 2020, a "mere" 38.6 million miles away from Earth. A rare opportunity to launch a rover seeking signs of ancient life to collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for a possible return to Earth. So, the many scientists and engineers involved in the Mars 2020 Mission persevered, finding ways to continue their innovative work and successfully launch the Perseverance Rover on July 30, 2020.
On February 18, 2021, it landed. Now, more than 144 million miles away, this amazing technology is sending back incredible images of the red planet. Next up, the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, will test powered flight on another world for the first time.
This week we're talking about this spectacular accomplishment, one that sparks the imagination about humankind's capacity for perseverance and ingenuity, with Rob Sullivan, Principal Research Scientist at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, and Co-Investigator with Mastcam-Z and MEDA on the Mars 2020 mission.
We are experiencing a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the way we usually do things. We are intentionally choosing to see the silver lining opportunity arises. We can shine a light on the things that weren't working well on those things that weren't really working at all, we can regroup reevaluate and re-engineer it's time to explore new patterns and paradigms those that inspire us to rise above the chaos and explore how the conditions of today and take us to a better tomorrow patterns and paradigms the pattern podcast from Hudson Valley pattern for progress, your listening to season two, episode 10, perseverance and ingenuity the mission to Mars with your host pattern, president and CEO, Jonathan Dropkin.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, and welcome to patterns and paradigms. We hope you enjoyed the interview with access supports for livings CEO and president Ron Colivida in which we explored some of the changes that have taken place in working with people with disabilities in this new COVID world. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast and take a moment to share an episode with a friend bubble or trend. So in keeping with today's guest, we are in the midst of a I'm going to just have to call it what it is a trend. When it comes to space travel. We have NASA with projects to Mars and soon the moon. Um, there's a team of astronauts training now for three missions known as Artemis in which we will be landing the first woman on the moon. And in fact, all of the senior positions related to this project are being led by women. I really commend to your attention. The episode on 60 minutes on March seven is when it aired, um, to see what this project is about. Now, in addition to NASA, there is the efforts from the private sector like Elon Musk, and there's one in which he's collaborating with NASA. And then sometimes he is working on his own rockets, which appear to be less expensive, but very much, um, in this trend of space exploration. In fact, Elon Musk will shortly be putting civilians into space. So after what appeared to be a public hiatus of talking about space travel, it seems to be a trend that's coming back before I introduce our guests to talk about space. I wanted to take a moment to ask my partner had pattern, Joe Chakka what's up, Joe, Hey Joe didn't. We just finished the Ulster County housing project.
Speaker 3:We did Jonathan. Last week, we finalized the Ulster County housing action plan, and it was released to the, to the public pattern put months and months of very intense work into 144 page report. We looked at data and demographics and local need to show how intense the need is for a range of housing options across the entire County pattern also created individual housing snapshots for each municipality within the County.
Speaker 2:Wait, Joe, that sounds quite elaborate. How long did you work on this?
Speaker 3:Oh, let's see. We started that project almost a year ago and it was, it was very intense. We put many hours into this. We did a lot of interviews. We did a lot of analysis on data. We did mapping, we did an analysis of demographics and we came out with a very high level action plan that really consists of five. What I would call basic elements. What they're very intense. The first one establishing Ulster County housing task force. The second one was to establish partnerships and collaborate with developers for scattered site redevelopment. The third was increased. The supply of supported and transitional housing throughout the County. The fourth create a housing smart communities initiative, similar to the climate smart initiative. And the fifth would be establishing a housing fund for Ulster County. Each one of these has pages of information, best practices and recommendations on how to implement.
Speaker 2:And I think you also mentioned that there's a profile for each municipality within, so they could go to the full report to find that
Speaker 3:Absolutely online and Ulster county's website and the planning department, there is a snapshot and each one is 10 or 11 pages. And we did a deep dive on every municipality throughout the County on housing. And it really shows the profile of need. It shows how the demographics changed, and it's a tool that really lays the foundation for municipalities to create their own local strategic plan for housing.
Speaker 2:Well, Joe, that's just another great effort in housing and you know, I think thanks to your work, we've been able to show why housing isn't an afterthought to economic development. We actually have economic developers talking about the need for housing to be located nearby. I mean, we not, not us. We're not going to take credit for this, but lo and behold, Amazon actually has a pooled money set aside for assisting people with housing, because there's a recognition that there is a housing crisis in this country.
Speaker 3:Well, that's right. And I would encourage our listeners to go to the report and read the narrative describing how affordable housing and all market rate housing is interest intricately, linked to economic development and workforce development.
Speaker 2:Today, we're going to be talking with Rob Sullivan. Rob is the senior research associate and co-investigator for the ongoing mission to Mars, which landed a Rover on the planet on February 18th, known as perseverance. Rob is a professor at the Cornell center for astrophysics and planetary science. And we couldn't be more thrilled that he's figured out how to spend time with us. Now that's not so easy since Rob had to adjust his time to Mars time. And we're going to talk a bit about what that means now, one other point, why is this important to pattern for progress, a mission to Mars? I think that I can sum it up in just one, thought it sparks the imagination. And that's how I view space travel, which is, imagine the possibilities. And if we could just get that little spark ignited in all of our listeners and all the people throughout the Hudson Valley and in our region, then it's a good thing. And so what better way to do it than to talk about just an incredible feat if you liked this episode, um, please let us know by contacting us@patternforprogress.org slash podcast. Hi, Rob, and welcome to patterns and paradigms. How are you doing and how, how has COVID effected your life? Let's just get that out of the way.
Speaker 4:I've been fortunate with family. We've been able to stay healthy. Uh, we've been very rigorous about, uh, being careful wearing masks, trying to do all the right things. So, uh, compared to a lot of people, we have come out well, but we've been very, very careful.
Speaker 2:All right. So that's all good news. All right. Your position at Cornell little, did I know someone who thinks he knows everything about New York state? Um, so why don't you tell me about your position at Cornell and the, the unit or section of Cornell that you work for
Speaker 4:Sure. I work in the department of astronomy and their research arm in our sort of greater astronomy department here at Cornell. There's several of us who work on the perseverance Rover right now and are also involved with other space flight projects. It's just, uh, an emphasis that our department has had really for decades to be involved with active space flight program.
Speaker 2:Did the pandemic do anything to the scheduling of this mission in terms of, I don't know, it affected everything else in life. So
Speaker 4:The way we time a mission to Mars, Mars kind of calls the shots in that. Mars is always out there. And of course we're always here. It seems like we should be able to go anytime we want, but it turns out there are certain times of how the planets to lie, where you can be very efficient in getting to Mars. You can get the most scientific payload for the investment that you make in your rocket and then the fuel it requires. And so it's kind of up to orbital mechanics when you need to launch, which means COVID or not. We had to be ready to go during the original launch window, which was July of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. And so some very courageous and hardworking engineers, as well as the scientists who helped them on the side had to keep going and get the payload instruments, assembled, calibrated, get them bolted onto the Rover, get the Rover in shape, constructed thoroughly tested and shipped to Cape Canaveral for launch all on time. We could not delay that because of COVID. So, uh, NASA leadership was very supportive of these efforts and, uh, gave the team everything that we could think of to try and get the job done in the time we needed, because if we missed the launch window in July of 2020, we would have had to wait two more years, which is extremely expensive. And also there are certain things about the Rover that wouldn't be in as good shape two years from now as they would when they're actually designed to be ready for launch.
Speaker 2:All right. So let's, let's just for our listeners. So Mars is how far away.
Speaker 4:Well, it kind of varies when you get on a good day. Every couple of years, it gets as close as 35 million miles. Um, but Mars is a, Marvin is actually not quite as round as earth. So even when we have a close approach, it's called opposition. When Mars has pride in the sky and shines down all that long it's brilliantly red, the brightest thing, the sky, except for the moon, those oppositions, that distance varies. I don't know the number of my head, right. And I think 35 million is, is pretty close, close as it gets. But most of the time the planets aren't lined up that way. They're not lined up that way that now. And so I can look it up for you, but I think Mars is probably over a hundred million miles away, right from us right now.
Speaker 2:So it's sort of more of an elliptical orbit and therefore it, it could vary the distance. Okay. Yep.
Speaker 4:You started in your mind's eye. If you've got a couple of hula-hoops one smaller than the other, they're pretty round. You just drop them. Right on top of each other, the inner one would be earth. The next outer one would be Mars, but the Martian hula hoop is a little bit out of whack. It's not quite round it's elliptical. So where are you cross paths with a planet? Is w whether it's sort of on the narrow side of the ellipse or the fatter side,
Speaker 2:Say it's 35 million. Alright. Yeah. That's, it's not around the corner and you have been involved in this mission and it lands 35 million miles away. If I remember it correctly, everyone was cheering because it landed perfectly. Yeah. I mean, people have a hard time parallel parking. I mean, you said this thing 35 million miles and all right. So give me a sense of the team. Cause you mentioned to me, there's hundreds of people that work on this all over the place. So if you can give me a sense of where is everybody
Speaker 4:Well, the credit for the landing event, which most people are familiar with from the news, not so much what the scientists are doing now, but the landing event, which is well publicized really goes to the engineers. Um, and they are, I really admire the integrity of how the engineers do their job. They are so accountable for what they do in the way they do it. You know, if there are two groups of engineers working on two sub-assemblies for months and months and months just everything's been blueprinted and machine with exactness and sub-assemblies are, are ready to go each one, each side, and they're ready to be bolted together. And you know, this has been on a calendar for months. And when they go to do that, one of the bolt holes is off by a little bit. And so it, it doesn't go together. The engineers that do this are the kind of people that wouldn't start pointing fingers at the others. I know your interface is raw. How did, how would you put a hole there when the boats all spots? These engineers, the kinds of people that their first instinct is to look at their own work very rapidly. Oh my gosh, did I screw up? And if so, how did I let the team down? Because the only thing worse, I think, than, than making a mistake is having someone else pointed out for you. They want to all in one breath, figure out what went wrong and here's the recovery plan. They just have so much integrity and accountability. And I think that's the only way you could pull off what they did, which is to take a vehicle, the size of sort of a mini Cooper, like car blasted off the earth, have a cross millions of miles and landed with precision on the surface of another planet. You're going from thousands of miles an hour in seven and a half minutes to touchdown, you know, very, very slow speed at just the right altitude. It's just fabulous, fabulous achievement. And I give them all the credit as customers. The scientists are just customers. We're just so grateful for what they do and how they've done it. And I should say that we decided to have lots of practice tests, how to use the vehicle, because remember efficiency is very important. We can't waste a moment. Once we're on Mars, you have to use the vehicle as thoroughly, as carefully, as efficiently as we can. So there are all these tests that we do call operational readiness tests, where it's all done virtually now with COVID. So it's pretty weird, but all these tests where you get practice images that come back from a copy of the Rover, that's in a sort of gymnasium sized test bed, a JPL it's, you know, it's on gravel and there, you can see the walls and the camera pictures. And you know, sometimes there are people sitting at a desk in some corner of the room while you're carrying out this test, trying to pretend you're on Mars. And then February 18th happens. And if someone like me is sitting in their office, just like they were during all those weeks of tests and using the same software, but then the picture that comes back is not the same old picture of, you know, some gravel part of a floor in a lab with someone sitting in the background, operating the Rover. It's Mars, it's this alien planet, hun, you know, more than a hundred million miles away at that point. And it's shocking. It's just shocking. Everything's the same on the computer screen, except you're looking at Mars right there next to the Rover wheel. And in that moment you realize all the great work that's been done by so many hardworking people during a pandemic to make that possible. And that was like,
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, and, and I could, you know, I can feel your emotion about it. I get to just be a cheerleader on the side going isn't that remarkable. Someone asked me, why would I do this as a podcast here in the Hudson Valley? And I said, if I could ignite the interest of anybody, not, not even in space travel, but ignite imagination. Yeah. And then spark that to, well, how do we do something? I don't care what the, um, the field is for me, you know, it is about, okay, it's problem solving. It's Imagineering, it's all these words. And, you know, I, I just find that the precision and the number of people that went into this, I, I do feel your emotion about this, which is, it is just remarkable. Um, and I'm only sorry that it happened in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of political polarization and all the other issues, because I feel as if the country should have been watching that moment. And yeah,
Speaker 4:I think a lot of people were, and I'm, it's hard to rate. It's hard to guess how things might've been different if we had not been in a pandemic, but my personal sense of it is that we could really use some good news. Uh, the news cycle has been monotonously discouraging for certainly during the pandemic, even depending on your point of view, even before that. And here's something, an event that is totally non-partisan, it's international, it's an international team. It's not just our country or some part of the country. And a lot of people had to work very hard to accomplish something very difficult, kind of on behalf of civilization in our future. And oftentimes I think in the new cycle that we paid attention to civilization, doesn't look so good. Sometimes some of the things that we get caught doing, and this is an instance, I think that might have been perhaps more welcomed if there than if there hadn't been a pandemic to see a group of people who've worked very hard for a very difficult goal, actually achieve it on behalf of everyone, including students who can take a look at this and say, you know, one day could I do, how could I participate in something that will make a difference decades in the future? Um, someone like me, I'm just lucky enough to participate. Like I said, I'm a happy scientific customer, the engineers. I really want to throw the credit to them.
Speaker 2:Now, when you say happy to participate. So let me see. I found an article in the, if, if a cute voice from 2014, that was entitled six crazy things, Cornell university professors are working on. And there you are with co-investigator Alex Hayes has working on the mask camp, XE the rovers zoomable mass mounted camera system. All right. Help me figure out and help my listeners figure out what was it exactly that you were working on in 2014? This is, you know, seven years ago.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a kind of indication of how long it takes for these projects to first of all, get them ready to fly. That has to be very carefully prepared and then to fly them. So in any case, mass Kimsey is a, can we clear my throat for a moment? Picture the Rover as, uh, as your surrogate or your listeners surrogate on Mars. It's about two meters tall. That's about the height of, uh, a lot of people walking along the surface, it's got an arm, it's got to have eyes and mass Kimsey are the eyes, the it's a color camera. It's actually a little bit better than the human eye in some respects, because it's got filter wheels on each that see wavelengths, not just the ones we can see, but also the wavelengths that machines can see a little bit into the infrared that can help distinguish compositions a bit more than we can with just our sort of red to green, to blue, a spectrum that we can. And it zoomable so that we don't have to drive quite as far to see things close up around us, um, that helps us understand our terrain much better and more efficiently than if we had to drive everywhere to see things close up. The zoom lens has helped that. And I said lenses because there are two of them just like most humans who have two working eyes and can see stereo. So can mask cams, either two identical cameras mounted a about the same height as, as a tall adult would. And instead of walking across Mars, they're being carried by six wheels.
Speaker 2:So the images that I see, and I would say to anyone that needs to understand the cool factor, go look for the March 2nd edition of the New York times, the science section, where there's this two page spread of the surface of Mars. And this is no longer just like, you know, Oh wait, that's where, you know, Tom cruise, the bad guys came from and you know, in his movie, you know, um, but it is, it is. So the images that I'm looking at your camera is taking those images.
Speaker 4:There are other cameras on board too. I'd have to look carefully at the caption for the, uh, the Sunday, the New York times article, but there are other cameras to the mass cam, Z cameras are the, the main science cameras up on the mass, but we also have some navigation cameras that aren't as high as resolution, but they're good enough to take images far enough advanced that will help guide how we drive the Rover. It's got a wider field of view. So you can take in more of the terrain, even if it's lower resolution and make stereo maps that will help. What's called the Rover planets, kind of the engineers who are in charge of driving the Rover, no, the train where it's safe to go and where it's not safe to go. So they can project drives several tens of meters, perhaps even more if the train allows and we need to get where we're going fast, because we've got a lot to do during the prime mission, we've got to collect all these samples and they have to be wisely chosen, and they're going to be spread apart several kilometers along our traverse. So it's important that we have navigation cameras that help that they're also hazard avoidance cameras. And these are not mounted on the mask. They can't be pointed or aimed or swiveled around their body mounted bolted on down to the Rover Donald on the Rover down low. They look for things that might, uh, be good for the arm to look at. They're very close. They can be close range. And there are some hazard avoidance cameras on the rear, too. There's some obstructions on the rear of the deck, which can get in the way of the view of the mast, but the rear has it avoids cameras can see. So they're also all kinds of other cameras that are used during EDL that's entry, descent, and landing that's that seven and a half minutes where we transitioned from a spacecraft to a Rover. And some of the most spectacular images that have been spread on the web so far are from those cameras. Looking up as the parachute deploys, looking down as we sort of plummet toward Mars, almost an earthward, but that would have been wrong right toward Mars toward our landing site. And we have not had cameras that do those things before on previous rovers, we didn't, we didn't know. We just hoped that things would work. We had a little bit of telemetry telling us things were going well, unfortunately they were. But these cameras that I just mentioned about looking up or looking down during landing, it's a very risky part of, of the mission and getting the very best possible data to see what worked, what barely worked. It needs a little bit of tuning. The next time you tried this, what, you know, did something deploy late to something, deploy early, something deploy, not when we flipped the way it thought we would. That's what those cameras were for. And I've not heard the final analysis, the engineers probably going to scrutinize every pixel of every image that came back from those EDL cameras. But I've not heard anything that, that didn't go extremely well during EDL. So, uh, I can only pass along good news, the same good news that you and perhaps your, your listeners already know about the EDL worked superbly. Well, again, hats off to the engineers.
Speaker 2:All right. So the, the, the help me out. So the mission or the Rover is called perseverance, and then, then there's this helicopter called ingenuity. So what, what's that? And how does that work? Yeah,
Speaker 4:So, so the rovers got their names, uh, from, uh, a competition among school children at various ages. And I forget now the names and ages of who won, but one student, uh, pick perseverance, and there was an essay contest. And another student picked ingenuity. I happened to trip over the names a little bit. They're new to me because we didn't have those names until for years we've been working on this. It's just Mars, 2020 and the helicopter and the names were picked, you know, I think right around launch. So I'm still getting used to them. And frankly, they're an awful lot of syllables. Mars, 2020 are just, the rovers is easy for me that helicopter. I didn't know what that is, but that's how they got their names about the helicopter. Um, it's just a test demo. It's not part of the scientific payload, but the Martian atmosphere as your listeners might know is extremely thin. It's about one 80th, the density of the atmosphere on earth. So even if it had a lot of oxygen in it, we still, there still wouldn't be enough to breathe. So making a helicopter is pretty difficult. You've got to have those blades on earth, whirl around, you know, with the tremendous whopping copping flopping sound of a helicopter when it goes by that's just brute force, those helicopter blades beating the air downward, uh, lifting the helicopter into the air. In fact, the helicopter blade is actually in cross section like a wing, like an airplane's wing. So on Mars, how do you do that with an atmosphere? That's one 80th is dense. Well, the answer is you make those blades go very, very fast, much faster than helicopter blades on earth and to set expectations. This is not a, you know, a Huey that you can step into. This is a little tiny contraption. It looks like a drone really in terms of, okay. Okay. And it's powered with a small solar panel and, uh, which means it can't fly all day long. It goes up, it flies for a few minutes, comes down, it's got a couple of cameras on it. One of which is a gray scale. In other words, it's black and white. And it's designed really for taking pictures of the surface as the helicopter flies, where it compares one picture after another to try and find, to confirm where it is in the sky. Is it, is it sliding to the left or the right? Or is it going up or down is out of the things in the, in the gray scale picture, getting bigger or smaller, but the pictures that we're likely to get back from it, uh, are from, uh, a color camera that takes pictures, not quite straight down a little bit off to the side. And, uh, we'll be looking forward to seeing those pictures, but it's, uh, it's, it's, it's a test demo. And so one of the things that we're going to be doing when the helicopters flying is monitoring it very carefully, but not right next to it, because we don't want to get a hit. If the helicopter flight goes unexpectedly, we'll be monitoring it. Using mass Kimsey. The zoom function on the lenses means we can park a safe distance away and do a standoff, uh, video typing to do video of the helicopter, attempting to fly. So all that is not really been done on earth. Of course it only works on Mars if it works at all. So all these things have to come together and we'll see how the experiments go.
Speaker 2:Okay. So let me see if I've got it. Use the imagery of a drone is the helicopter pre-programmed. So that it's just going to do something at a specific time, or are we actually controlling the helicopter here on earth somehow through the magic of engineering? Yeah. Well, the, um,
Speaker 4:It's a little bit of both, but I think what you're you might be asking is, are we, joysticking the helicopter real time? Unfortunately we can't one way light time. Uh, let me see if I can look it up, right. It is about 12 minutes, 49 seconds, which means if your helicopter goes up and you wanted to control it, your command to steer at one way or another prevented from crashed. And we get there about 12 minutes, 49 seconds too late.
Speaker 2:So, okay.
Speaker 4:So the engineering helicopter is kind of like the Rover in that. One of the things we, we, we don't joystick the Rover while it's driving across the surface, either because of the same problem, we send it some commands like a shopping list. If you will, of instructions that it's supposed to carry out over its day and the Rover will do we ask it to do, but using commands that we send it ahead of time, the Rover is kind of smart in that it takes pictures once in a while, say when it's driving to make sure it's not driving over a cliff, there, there, there are certain fail safes on board. But for the most part, we have to make up our minds the day before and what the Rover's going to do on it's next day on Mars. And that's why it takes so much effort is because we have to stay ahead of the Rover. If we fail to get our decisions made and our plans made and all those turn into very carefully constructed, uh, Rover commands and get that, as they say, uplinked or sent to the Rover in time for when it wakes up, we blow it. We've missed a Mars day of activity. It goes into what's called a run-out sequence, which does some good things. And it looks at the sky measures a few things that it can do pretty safely without a lot of ground in the loop, as they say, but we were all considered a waste of a martial day if we ever let that happen. So that's how the Rover works. We have to get those instructions ready every single day, which means we've got to look at the very latest stuff from the, from Mars to make sure that the instructions fit those. He was there a dog bone in our work volume. Well, maybe we shouldn't drive. Maybe we should stop and take a look at that. Um, is it, is it an Outlander, for example, the helicopter is kind of the same way in that. We have to tell what to do say, okay, you're on your own at 10:00 AM. I'm just making this up. I'm not sure this is the true flight plan. I want you to turn yourself on and fly straight up two meters hover for 30 seconds and come back down again in the very same spot. And the helicopter is smart enough through its black and white camera to know when it's moved upward about two meters. And if it's starting to drift, it follows us instructions. So that's how we fly the helicopter. We have to command it to do end to end what it's going to do when its flight ahead of time. We can't change its mind while it's flying and steer it towards something that we happen to be seeing in real time.
Speaker 2:Um, okay. So one of the things that you and I, and I probably got this wrong, but it was, we had a sync up when I was looking for a time to speak with you. Yeah. The timing of when I could speak to mattered. Can you explain that? And
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. So the Martian day is a little bit longer than earth day, which means if we want to keep the Rover busy and make our deadlines, we have to keep up with it on it's time schedule, not our own. And that means if you want to follow the Marsh and rovers day, which is a little longer than ours. After a couple of weeks, you realize you're working in the middle of the night, it's kind of like, uh, going on jet lag about 39, 40 minutes every day. Your time zone is shifting by that amount. So it's kind of a big deal. It's more than an inconvenience, uh, in that people from fatigue, they shouldn't be running rovers. They shouldn't be sequencing rovers if they're tired. And so an effort is made by a lot of people on these missions to get onto Mars time permanently, at least for as long as we operate on Mars time. And that can be problematic. Uh, they're all kinds of body clock issues that, that don't sync up. And we've, we've been briefed about, uh, you know, be careful when you're driving. If you get off shift at seven in the morning, and you've been on shift that the solid before, and you're done at six in the morning or five, and you've been doing this for several, several days, you don't realize how tired you can get. So they're all kind of ways to sort of fight this back, but there, there are rules to, you're not supposed to be out of shift for more than four days at a time. The complication now with all that. And it's, it's not a perfect thing, no matter how many guidelines you follow for, for dealing with Mars time. In, for instance, when I just, uh, when you, you get off shift and you come out the bright sunlight, he doesn't want to go to bed, you go back to your hotel and, uh, you know, there's lit light leaking into the shades, all kinds of problems like that. But with Kohler, with the pandemic, we're all working from home. And we can't ask our families to go into Maurice time. They've got to attend school and they've got jobs too. So a lot of us are dealing with Mars time, not as in a pure fashion, as we might be recommended, just not realistic as for myself, I sleep when I can I take naps when I have to, uh, try and align things so that, you know, when I'm on shift, I'm on shift. And, uh, I'm not doing that at home. I'm, I'm one of the few people I'm allowed to go into my office, partly because I don't have the bandwidth at home to support flight operations, but partly too, because I'm not starting my family in the middle of the night. I mean, when I wake up at two in the morning to get on shift or something like that, yeah. My alarm goes off, but my wife gets back to sleep. Otherwise I'm out of there. I get into the office and that's where I do my work. And that's happening for the team, you know, throughout the team. They're just trying to handle Mars time as best I can. It's a little bit more difficult with, with the pandemic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is which personalizes, what is your experience as part of the team in a way that I don't think myself for any listener, whatever. Imagine, um, okay. I think when we were talking earlier, you were explaining to me that there's sort of like a shelf life for what is land the Rover. I mean, you have to get done, sir. What is, what am I trying to say there that
Speaker 4:Well, um, machines wear out, especially complicated machines. Um, the Mer rovers, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with those. These were launched to land on Mars in 2004, each one of them, there, there are two of them on opposite sides of the planet. Um, there were supposed to have a 90 day mission, but because of again, great engineering, they lasted a lot longer eventually. Uh, one of the wheels and a second wheel broke on one of these rovers. And so the mobility was we stopped and we couldn't drive to someplace where we could tilt the solar panels enough, you know, a slope and survive the next Marshall winter. There are solar powered. Um, so things break, um, uncomplicated vehicles. And it can be very ungraceful. If you lose a wheel, even if the other five are working, you can't drive anymore. At least not well, but you're dragging that wheel, which we did with the Rover spirit for awhile. Uh, your high gain antenna. That's your sort of your, your dish antenna, if you will, that allows lots of communication. If that doesn't work, it's, it's got an asthma myth and elevation control that allows pointing. If, if that doesn't work now, your communications are down to a small fraction of what they otherwise would be, which means that the data that you give back is a small fraction of what otherwise would be. Um, if that mast, I was talking about where mass Kimsey is mounted, if that stops being able to swivel or get stuck in some awkward position, that could be the end of the mission. All of these different things can go wrong on this Rover. We don't know how the mission will end, uh, which what will fail first. We do know that that day will come and that's why every single day we're on the surface. It's just, it's a great gift. It's a humbling gift that we have to make the very most stuff.
Speaker 2:Now, did I read somewhere that like in 20, 26 or so like five years from now begins this other set of rockets or something that is heading to Mars to retrieve something? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The perseverance mission, the Mars 2020 mission is really just the first step of a much grander enterprise. Recall the course back a long time ago. You and I are old enough to recall the Apollo missions. How was she to kid? You were just a kid. And the reason we went to actually collect moon is because it's very difficult to do all the scientific analysis on the surface of the moon. You've got to take your bulky instruments that might take up as much room as an entire lab area on earth, and somehow miniaturized them. So back in the sixties, well, we obviously can't do that. Let's bring the samples back and we'll have the samples forever and we can analyze them for decades. And we're going to get better lab instruments, you know, decades from now. We'll be glad we have these samples and it'll be this treasure for civilization for, for forever. Well, we can't do that on Mars because we can't fly astronauts there to just land and pick up samples like we did with Apollo. It's simply too far too challenging, but perhaps we could use robots to get these samples back. Well, it's, it's tricky because it's so much further than the moon 240,000 miles to the moon, 35 million miles to Mars on a good day. Most of the time, far, far worse. So the idea is that the Mars 2020 Rover perseverance will do lots of analysis along its traverse and choose carefully about 30 or so, perhaps fewer samples of the terrain that it is traversing across and put those into little samples, uh, containers about the size of a penlight and then take those samples to one place where they're probably safe enough intended to be safe enough for a follow-on mission to come down and land a little Rover. We'll crawl off that future mission, come over, scoop up all the samples that our rovers carefully prepared. Bring them back to that. Lander it'd be a small rocket on that, that Lander, that rocket will take the samples and launch them up to Marsh and orbit. Never done that before. And another orbiter will come along and find them in Marsha orbit and contain them and take them back to earth where they'll be delivered probably to the Utah desert and be picked up and we'll have those samples forever. What could possibly go wrong? Right.
Speaker 2:Well, I, you know, that's my next question, Rob, which is like, you know, so have there been any surprises good or bad or that you're that and anything obvious, like, like fine. I, I'm not really asking you to tell me what went wrong because goodness knows there could be a good zillion things that could go wrong, but what surprised you that went, right? You know, like maybe that you were like uncertain that you were going to be able to do X and it worked,
Speaker 4:Uh, well, lots and lots of things have gone right so far. Okay. Um, more than most people expected a complicated vehicle, that's had to endure the shock of being onboard a rocket as it launches the cruel environment of space for seven months. And then in seven and a half minutes being slowed down from several thousand miles an hour to land on the Martian surface, which is very inhospitable. It gets extremely cold at night, which is not good for electronics. And a lot of other things like moving parts, all kinds of things can go wrong. Um, so far the vehicle checkouts, first thing we do after we land, we raise the mask, we exercise the arm. Uh, we've done a little bit of driving our first driving over the last couple of days, everything has worked amazingly well. Uh, there are no anomalies that I know of, and I did not expect to be talking to anyone at this point in the mission and being able to say that now the engineers are closer to the mission, may know of some things, but they be telling the operations team, if there are anything we needed to worry about or postpone or delay while they checked something out because they are priority right now and the mission checking out the vehicle, making sure it's ready to go for the science mission that we have a plan. And they're going to turn over the keys to us and say, okay, everything's working or perhaps two weeks from now, we've discovered something isn't working quite right. And they'll say, well, everything's working, but except for this, you're going to have to do a work around on that. But so far everything has gone amazingly well, again, hats off to the engineers.
Speaker 2:Well, and to everyone involved in this, now something dawned on me, which I should know the answer to, but I didn't see it anywhere. So for the six or seven months that it took to get to Mars, we were there, you know, speaking of cameras, were there images being sent back during the flight of the universe? Well,
Speaker 4:Sort of in that like mass cam Z for instance, and a lot of the other instruments have very short checkout sequences, a liveliness checks to make sure they're doing well. We don't do that often because frankly, there's not much we can do. If we discover a problem, it's just good to be aware of it as soon as something might be going wrong, but those pictures are taken while the Rover is still inside. It's it's it's capsule, if you will, heat shield and there's container protect it. And so we can't see outside, we can't see Mars getting big in the windshield, so to speak, um, or watching earth recede in the distance as we fly away from it. These are images that, uh, no one, but the engineers and the scientists close to the instruments would be excited about getting back a black image that with the right temperatures and, and just, we expect is more like a sigh of relief than some sort of a grand aesthetic adventure in terms of an image on board of spacecraft, uh, approaching Mars.
Speaker 2:Um, any sense yet? I mean, one of the things, if my history is right about the whole Apollo, which is why, you know, people celebrate landing on the moon, but honestly it was technology invented along the way that was then shared and had app applications in life, on earth. Anything like that yet from this effort to go to Mars.
Speaker 4:That's a great question. And I'm not sure I have a good answer because the technology kind of goes both ways in that. Um, you invent new technology when you have to, when, when the mission that the, the thing you're trying to achieve, forces you to just can't do it off the shelf. Okay. We gotta go invent, but that also makes it riskier and more expensive. And so in space flight, there's something to be said for using off the shelf technology that you've already flown in space, if you can, if it's available and if it will do the job. So it, it's kind of a mix of you invent where you must, but be very sure of it, uh, before you fly it on anything that that's going to matter. And if you can use technology that's already been developed that can be verified to work under marshal conditions that can sometimes be quicker and therefore cheaper because of course the taxpayers paying for it to get you to Mars safely. So it's a bit of both. And I, I don't have a specific, a more specific answer to your question on that.
Speaker 2:Um, I want to say what's next for you, but I don't think that's the right question based on this interview. It's clear that, um, the next couple of months, or, you know, almost a year is going to be spent now having gotten there understanding, you know, you're part of the operations team. So that's the short term. I think if you want to call it that after years of trying to get to this point, but is there something else now that you say, all right, now we did that. Could we do this? Is there anything that ever occurred to you that, you know, or still happily doing something, which I just think is incredible?
Speaker 4:Well, the one thing about this mission is that it changes. So what you are doing on the surface of Mars two weeks ago is usually different from what you're doing on Mars two weeks into the future. For instance, uh, we, we landed in a crater, I believe about 45 kilometers across it's called Jazeera. But the important thing is that he was once full of water. We know that because there's a river Delta into it. Think of your viewers might think in their mind's eye. Oh yeah. Delta. I liked the Mississippi Delta exactly. When you've got water that drains across half a continent, like the Mississippi Missouri system, it picks up a lot of sediment. And when that water reaches the ocean, it slows down because it just, you know, flowing fast and it empties in the Gulf of Mexico. When the, when the water slows down, it can't carry as much of that sediment. So it just drops it. And that's what makes the Delta, the Delta grows outward as the river continues to carry sediment from the continent. So Delta does take a long time to build up. And there's one in Jezreel crater where we are right now. That's why we flew there. And so our mission is going to change from where we are in the landing spot, which is something that the landing system kind of chose is safe. In real time. During that seven and a half minutes, we have to survey what's the floor of the crater Madoff. It was, this is once all under water. It may have had a lot of sediment that's been stripped away. And then we're going to go over to the river Delta itself, or what's left of it. It's kind of beat up. It's got impact craters on it because it's been sitting out in the Marsh environment for a long time, but there's still a lot of the Delta left somewhere in those layers could be clues as to whether or not life arose on Mars, or was it beginning to develop? So what we're doing now, which we just, we're still really in our landings. We're not that far where I think we're within about 30 meters or so of where we landed. And we're trying to set up for the helicopter exercise. We need to get that done before we can sort of hit the road, so to speak and get on with the main science goals, the mission. So right now we're, we're checking out if in the long range mask MC images, where's a good, safe place for the helicopter to operate performance is flight tests, new support that, but the science team is already looking ahead is still okay after that, where do we go? What's the most efficient traverse to sample all the main units that we can and get those samples prepared in those penlight containers I was talking about. And so that by the time of the end of the prime mission, about two years from now, uh, we will have done most of what we set out to do because there's a whole other mission. After that, outside the crater, there are some areas. In fact, it was a runner-up landing site inside Jezreel crater, outside Cesaro crater. If the Rover survives long enough, there's a place where Hotsprings perhaps ancient variation. Hotsprings once effected the geology. It's a interesting hypothesis because we don't see deposits like that in many other places on Mars. That's why it almost beat out Jazearra the crater interior itself as a landing site candidate. So we'd like to combine two missions with one, explore the Delt, the river Delta, where there was standing water for a long time on the marshal surface. And then if we can survive long enough, get outside the crater and explore that other site, which is not exactly next door, but if we're careful and ambitious, maybe we can reach it in time to do some great sites there too. So it changes the mission changes depending on what phase of it you're in. If I'm totally immersed in this, it's not going to feel like doing the same old thing every day. That's for sure.
Speaker 2:All right. Um, Rob, let me ask you, um, it was a couple of days after the landing. I think NASA released the video, which said, which anyone could go look at, is there a website that if my listeners say, Oh man, this is as cool as I think it is, but, um, you know, is there some place they can go for? Are there new images being posted or other ways for people to follow along?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right now that's being established and I've been so immersed in flight operations that I have not been paying enough attention to how those websites are evolving. I know that it's a high priority for the mass Campsie principal investigator Jim bell, who used to actually be a Cornell professor. Um, I used to play softball with him really great person. He is a high priority for him to get those images out to the public. Anyone the whole world, uh, can just pick up the data and make mosaics there. There's a whole community out there that scoops up these images faster than we can and makes all kinds of wonderful products and post them all over the web. So they're likely to be several sites right now. If you could do a search on perseverance images or surface of Mars, Mars, 2020, you'd likely to come up with lots of places. There'll be some official sites that are getting established that I, I don't know the status of right now, but they're likely to be all kinds of other products that people have used the data already for, to make wonderful mosaics, immersive, uh, products that are just wonderful.
Speaker 2:All right. Last question then. And then, cause I'm, I'm still taking this all in when you were a kid, is this at all what you had in mind as something you wanted to do?
Speaker 4:It's a great question. And, um, I suppose different persons would answer, you know, with their personal experience, but, uh, this answer might come out a little strange, but here it is. I remember watching the old star Trek reruns as a kid. I mean, they were in reruns then young enough, not that young, but young enough that they were reruns it, not original. And I remember sort of, self-consciously thinking, this is where we're going to end up one day. It's inevitable. I mean, all the different, different people on the bridge. There's a hoorah from Africa and there was a Russian helmsman. You know, the cold war are bitter enemies that he's brushing and he's on the bridge. He's steering the ship for goodness sake and, and, uh, Sulu from Asia. And there were women and men together and they, they worked so hard and well together to solve problems and explore the greater university just seems like that's where things are headed. It was inevitable. And, and yet I was aware that society wasn't in good shape compared to that ideal. And that we, you just, as a kid in school, you could read about how long it took women in this country to get the right to vote. It's embarrassing. It took decades and generations. Um, and, and the logic was right from the very beginning and yet it took generations for that to happen. And so there's this in my mind, this uneasy competition between how much we can change and improve and how slow and stubborn we are about it sometimes. But space exploration was this sign that maybe if we have a little fraction or resources to peel off and have a small number of people go explore some part of the solar system go to the moon. Maybe we are really emerging into something much better than just another species on our planet, maybe. And to be a part of that was a way to assure myself in some way that in fact it was true. We really are coming of age where we're much more than just another mammalian species where something better than that. We're not just a bundle of instincts that we've inherited from three and a half billion years of evolution and competitive ecosystems where we're better than that. We can consciously strive to do things that don't make us eat more food, or provide better shelter or beat up our enemies. We could do something greater than that. And if we are doing that, then no matter how bad we are in the new cycle and a given day, at least we can point to space exploration as a way of saying, you know, as a species we're on our way to do something a little bit better, and maybe it stops and starts, but it's happening. And I wanted to be a part of that somehow if I could, but honestly, I think I've been more lucky than good. Um, it takes luck. I think for someone like me to get to do what I've been doing for so long, I've been on Rover missions. Now, since, since before the murders landed in 2004, I was on Pathfinder in 1997. Um, I helped with the Galileo probe to Jupiter before that, um, you know, it can all be skill or talent. I, I work with people every day that I'm in awe of their, their talent, their capabilities, their maturity, their they're just who they are, their character. Uh, I've got a lot to live up to every day with the people online that I work with. I don't feel as good as them most of the time, I'm trying to live up to their standards. So I think it takes some luck too. And I've been very lucky. And I, when I was a kid growing up, I, I kind of knew that it would have to be very, very lucky indeed for me to be involved with the kind of thing that I am today.
Speaker 2:Rob Sullivan, thank you so much for spending a little bit of time explaining things that are just miraculous to me, but doing it in a way that hopefully our listeners understand it. I wish you the team, the engineers, the operational team continued
Speaker 4:Success. And thanks again. Thanks for inviting me on. I've been listening to some of your podcasts. It's a wonderful, wonderful set of podcasts. I'm really quite interested in your group and deserves a lot of credit. I'll thank you, right.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. Thank you for tuning in to patterns and paradigms the pattern podcast. For more information about this episode, visit our website pattern for progress.org forward slash podcast.