NASA's Amazing Perseverance

And of course I immediately wanted to record an episode about it, and then I learned as I started working on that episode that I had actually already done an episode about the Perseverance. I did it be for the launch of the Perseverance back in July of twenty So I thought I would rerun that episode to kind of give you guys the rundown on the rover and the technology aboard the rover, as well as some of the

parameters of the mission it will be pursuing. And then on Wednesday, I figure we will do a follow up and talk about some of the early stuff that we've had a chance to see and hear from Mars thanks to the Perseverance Rover, and an update on on what the mission status is and when we can expect some of those other activities to take place, the big one being the flight of Ingenuity that will be coming on Wednesday. But first let's listen to this episode recorded back in

July of about Perseverance. Now, at the end of July twenty NASA plans to launch new rover on a journey to Mars to continue the work of sojournal, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, all of which have really extended our knowledge of the Red planet. This new rover is called Perseverance,

and it really is something special. So today we're going to learn about the rover and its mission, and also a high risk, high reward experiment called Ingenuity that is not technically part of Perseverance, but is going along for the ride. However, before we do that, we've got a lot of other ground to cover, both here on Earth and on Mars, and I want to talk a little bit about why I chose this as a topic in

the first place. First is timing. Obviously, this episode should come out a couple of weeks before the scheduled launch, assuming everything goes well. And another reason is that these missions often reinforce things that I find really inspiring and even hopeful. Transporting a spacecraft to Mars, let alone landing something on that planet, and then using that something to

explore and conduct scientific experiments. That's a monumental achievement. It requires so much work, and it builds on more than a century of discoveries and theories. It's a team effort in which hundreds of people pool their talent and expertise to pull off what when you really look at it,

seems like it should be impossible. So while we have tons of problems we need to address here on Earth, from dealing with the pandemic to addressing real social inequalities and more, I look at how people have managed to build devices that explore another planet, and it strikes me that if we have the determination, we really can achieve incredible things, we just need to apply that determination. Anyway, here we go. As I record this, NASA has already

pushed back the launch a couple of times. So at the moment when I'm sitting at this microphone, the scheduled launch date is for July. Now, if that date should slip for whatever reason, NASA will have a relatively narrow window to launch or else face the reality that they will have to shelve this project for more than two years. So why is that. Well, let's imagine the Solar system.

Earth is the third planet out from the Sun, Mars is the fourth planet out Earthen Mars revolve around the Sun at different speeds, which means sometimes the two planets are moving closer together and sometimes they are moving further apart. In their respective orbits. Both planets have elliptical rather than circular orbits around the Sun, which also means there's a point in the orbit where each respective planet is closest

to the Sun. This is called the parahelion. And there's also a point in the orbit where each respective planet is furthest from the Sun. This is the aphelian oh and also, both of these orbits are slightly tilted with respect to one another, complicating things even more because they don't lie in the same orbital plane. These three dimensional

realities are a real pain in the neck. All of this means that when the planets do approach one another, they aren't in the same spots in their respective orbits as they were the last time they got close to one another. The closest they've been to each other in recorded history is about thirty three point nine million miles apart or fifty four point six million kilometers, and at that distance, it would take light about three minutes to travel from one planet to the other, and that's the

fastest often the universe. Remember, nothing goes faster than light. To even have that situation, you would need the Earth to be at its aphelian where it's furthest from the Sun, and Mars would have to be at its parahelion, where it is closest to the Sun, and both planets are on the same side of the Sun. And this does not happen frequently, at least not on human terms. That thirty three point nine million mile distance happened back in two thousand three, and according to math, that was the

closest the two planets have been for fifty thousand years. Now, generally speaking, you do get two spans of time when the two planets are relatively close to each other. But because we're not just looking at orbital position, but the shape of the orbits themselves, it's complicated, and those are a lot of parameters that you have to have line up.

This scenario where Earth passes between Mars and the Sun is called opposition, and we call it opposition because from our perspective here on Earth, Mars appears to be exactly opposite where the Sun is. As the Sun is setting at night, Mars is rising in the east, and when Mars sets in the west during the morning hours, the sun is rising in the east. During opposition, Mars appears as if it is a red star in the sky, nearly as bright as Venus is. If it happens when

Mars is closest to the Sun, we call it parahelick opposition. Moreover, the distance will begin to grow after that point as the planets begin to move apart from each other due to their different orbital velocities and elliptical orbits. So at the extreme end, when the two planets are the furthest they can possibly be from each other on either side of the Sun. So the Sun is in tween Earth and Mars, they are two hundred forty nine million miles apart,

or four hundred one million kilometers. At that distance, it would take light a whopping twenty two minutes to travel between Mars and Earth. Not that this really matters because you also have a big old Sun in the way, so you would actually have complications. This scenario is called a solar conjunction. Now here's the thing. Because of all the factors that I've described here, it takes a little more than two years to go from one opposition or

one conjunction to the next one. And actually it's about twenty six months. So Earthen Mars will get the closest they can possibly be in their respective orbits to one another, and then it takes another twenty six months for it to happen again. Halfway through those tway six months, you will get to the point where they are furthest from each other and you get the conjunction. Now, why did I spend so much time talking about that, Well, it's because NASA has to take all of this into account

when planning out emission to Mars. You want to minimize the distance that your spacecraft has to travel in order to get to its destination. Space travel is tough, man. I mean, it requires a lot of fuel, and fuel has mass, and mass means that you need more mph to get out into space. So you can't just add more fuel to a launch vehicle all willy nilly, because just adding that fuel changes things. Moreover, you want to minimize all the things that can go wrong while traveling

from point Earth to point Mars. One good way to do that is to reduce the amount of travel time, which means aiming for a time when the two planets are going to be closest. Moreover, you don't just launch when Earth and Mars are close, because it takes about a hundred fifty days or so for a space vehicle to get from Earth to Mars under ideal conditions, and these planets remain in motion that whole time. It's not

like they just stop. So if you aim your rocket to where Mars is now, Mars won't be there by the time the rocket arrives at that location in space. The best you can hope for is maybe a note written by Mars that says something like sorry, I missed you, and Mars is notoriously bad at writing notes, so instead you have to aim at where Mars will be rather than where Mars is. It's like leading a target. If you were skeet shooting right a clay pigeon is shot up into the air, you have to lead it a

little bit if you want to hit it well. This year, Mars and Earth will actually be closest, not in July during the scheduled launch, but in October, specifically on October. That's when the two planets will be thirty eight point six million miles apart or sixty two point one million kilometers. Again, not as close as they were back in two thousand three, because they are not gonna be at the ideal points in their respective orbits to be absolutely the closest they

can be. The last day NASA can launch a space vehicle and take advantage of all this would be August. If conditions prevent NASA from launching by that date, will probably be waiting around two years before we get another opportunity. This is also why if you look at the history of missions to Mars, you'll see they hit pretty much

every two years or so. This is also why when we talk about potential human missions to Mars, we typically talk about a long mission that would see astronauts stay on Mars for a couple of years, because it would be too challenging to land on Mars, you know, goof around for a week or so, and then try and launch back to Earth because the distance would be mounting between the two planets. We would need a mission where we could spend an appreciable amount of time on Mars,

perhaps creating new rocket fuel on Mars itself. That way, we don't have to carry a return trips worth of fuel on our way there. That would be kind of a deal breaker, because not only are you talking about an enormous amount of weight, which again adds to your concerns when you're launching the vehicle, it also represents a massive hazard. You know, rocket fuel is dangerous stuff. But we'll get more into that when we talk about one of the experiments that Perseverance is going to do on

its mission. Interestingly, whether the launch vehicle takes off on July or on August fifteenth, or any date in between, the estimated date when it will enter service, that is when it will land on Mars and establish communications from the surface of the red planet back here to Earth,

that data is the same. It's February twenty one. So if the launch does go ahead as planned, and I really hope it does, it's still going to be a while before NASA can conclude whether or not the mission was a success or even just the initial part of the mission is a success. Moreover All, this distance between Earth and Mars means that any rover mission to Mars

requires a lot of automation, a lot of autonomy. The distances here mean that at minimum, you're looking at around six minutes between when you can send a command to a rover on Mars and when you'll get a return signal. That's if Earthen Mars are as close as they can possibly be, and usually that's not even the case. We don't typically have that right. Most of the time. Earth

and Mars are pretty far away from each other. When the Curiosity rover arrived on Mars on August six, two twelve, the distance between the two plants meant it took nearly fourteen minutes to it signals from the rover. With that sort of delay, it's impossible to manually control things, So you have to create vehicles that can land and operate on their own. One way to do that is to design parachutes that deploy once the spacecraft or ejected rover

reaches a certain altitude above Mars. But the Martian atmosphere is really thin. That's going to be important later in this episode two In fact, the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars is similar to what you would find at thirty five kilometers of altitude here on Earth, so that's a lot thirty five thousand meters above the Earth. That air pressure is similar to the standard surface level air pressure on Mars. To put it another way, we

measure atmospheric pressure and units called milla bars. Here on Earth, the pressure at sea level is one thousand, thirteen millibars. Mars is atmospheric pressure varies during the Martian year, but it averages out to be between six to seven millibars. That's it, So one thirteen here on Earth, six to seven, not thousand, just six to seven on Mars. Now, since parachutes work by forcing air into a canopy and then effectively turning that canopy into a wing, you need atmosphere

for it to work. A parachute would be useless on Earth's Moon, for example, because there's not enough atmosphere to turn the parachute into a wing. Mars has an atmosphere. It's then, but it's there. However, it is so thin that parachutes can typically only provide a little bit of

the breaking and support during the landing. Process. So NASA has used a few different techniques to get rovers on the surface and not have them just break apart upon landing, including housing rovers in landing craft equipped with air bags. The air bags could help cushion the impact on the landing. On Mars, the Curiosity roll or had a super awesome approach. The rover was inside a descent vehicle, which in turn

was inside a larger uh structure. It was called the Mars Science Laboratory or MSL, and the MSL had thrusters on it that could make fine tune adjustments during the

descent phase in order to maintain the right orientation. That also had a heat shield to absorb heat during you know, entering the Martian atmosphere, and once it reached a certain altitude, it deployed a parachute which helped slow its descent, and then a little bit lower in altitude, the MSL ejected a descent stage, so this was kind of a platform with thrusters on it, and the rover was mounted inside the platform and this would fire its thrusters, slowing its

descent further until it hovered above the Martian surface. Then it lowered the Curiosity rover on a tether, turning the descent v iCal into what they called a sky crane. The idea was that the rover would touch down on Mars, it would sever the tether to the descent stage, and then the rover would be ready to go to work. And here's the thing. This whole process from entering Mars's atmosphere all the way to the point where the rover touched down would take about seven minutes. But you remember

the delay. It was fourteen minutes of a communication delay, So the whole process took about half the time it takes communications to go from Mars to Earth at this point in the two planets orbits. So the whole process had to happen without human intervention. And not only that, a success would mean that the rover would actually be down on Mars for seven minutes before we even knew if it had worked. And it turns out it did work,

which truly is phenomenal. And I even did a special podcast with Tom Merritt of Daily Tech News show Fame back when this happen in two thousand twelve. I remember getting really emotional about this because when you consider the innovation and inventiveness required to make something like this actually work.

It's really incredible. The Perseverance rover will follow in curiosities um tire tracks and and that it's going to use a similar strategy for e d L that stands for Intrigue Descent and Landing, So it's also going to use the skycrane maneuver in order to land. And this time the descent vehicle will have a couple of new tricks

up its proverbial sleeve. For example, it will have a set of tools called Terrain Relative Navigation or TRN, which will scan the Martian terrain and allow the vehicle to change its descent path in order to avoid any terrain that looks particularly hazardous and that improves the chances of a successful touchdown. And it's also going to have a microphone, so we'll get to hear what it sounds like to land on Mars. Plus if the rover wants to bust out some David Bowie karaoke on the way down, that

microphone will come in awful handy. When we come back, i'll talk more about the tools aboard the Perseverance, what they are meant to do, and a bit about how they work. But first let's take a quick break Perseverance is about the same size as its predecessor, Curiosity, which means it's the size of a small car. It weighs a bit more than Curiosity as well, has a mass of one thous so here on Earth it weighs two thousand, two hundred sixty pounds if we don't include the rover's arm.

The rover measures about ten ft long by nine ft wide and it's seven ft tall. That's a three ms by two point seven ms by two point two meters, so it's a pretty big rover. Before we get into the super per techie stuff and the goals of perseverance, let's look at some other related things. For example, the launch vehicle perseverance will depend upon the launch of an Atlas five one launch vehicle from the United Launch Alliance.

This is a two stage rocket essentially, and it stands fifty eight meters or one ft tall when the payload is attached to the top. Fully fueled. With the payload in place, the full launch vehicle ways five d one thousand kilograms or one point one seven million pounds. The five for one designation tells us a lot about the launch vehicle, as it turns out, so that five and five four one refers to the diameter of the fairing that holds the payload in place with the launch vehicle.

So in this case, the spacecraft that will hold the perseverance and this fairing is five meters in diameter. That's what that five means. So what's the four and five or one mean? Well, that tells us how many solid fuel rocket boosters are part of this launch vehicle. So there are four solid fuel rocket boosters, and the one tells us how many rocket engines are in the second stage. This is called the centaur, and there are single engine centaurs and dual engine centaurs, so this one is a

single engine centaur. The first stages rocket engine is called the r D one eight and this one was made in Russia. The engine burns a fuel made of kerosene and liquid oxygen. The second stage centaur uses fuel made of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which must be kept at very low temperatures to remain liquid, and for that

reason they are called cryogenic propellants. So at launch, the boosters and rocket engine for the first stage will carry the vehicle up to a certain altitude and that's where the first stage will separate from the rest of the

val the first stage will fall back to Earth. The second stage ignites and propels the spacecraft out to its trajectory to bring it on an intercept course with Mars, and then it separates from the launch vehicle and then Perseverance aboard its spacecraft will be on its way on its very long trip out to Mars. So, assuming everything goes as planned, Perseverance will touch down on Mars in

February twenty one thanks to the skycrane maneuver. If things don't go as planned, uh, I mean I don't know, I mean if it if it doesn't launch by August fifteen, there's a real question of whether or not the project can be put on hold for two years. And if something goes wrong, well, I guess you know, the mission scrapped and stuff can go wrong, because space, as it turns out, is super hard. I mean, like that thing

is trying to kill you. But let's say it all goes to plan and the rover makes it to Mars. What is it going to do when it's there. Well, NASA says the mission will last at least one year on Mars. That is one Martian year. That's equal to six hundred eighty seven Earth days, so nearly two full Earth years. If the mission is a success, we may well see the experiments stretch on much longer than that.

The Opportunity mission was only intended to last for ninety days, but it was able to continue for nearly fifteen years. But what is Perseverance going to do when it's up there all that time. The overall program Perseverance as part of is called the Mars Exploration Program or m e P, and one of the primary goals of m e P is to look for signs of life, most likely signs that life once existed on Mars thousands and thousands and

millions of years ago. But boy, it really would be cool if we found evidence of microbial life on Mars today. NASA has laid out four science objectives that Perseverance will pursue in an effort to further of this goal. The four objectives are looking for habitability, that is, seeking out areas that could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, seeking bio signatures, so looking for evidence that microbial life actually did exist in these habitable environments, such as in

signs and the rocks themselves cashing samples. This is all about collecting and analyzing rock and soil samples and preparing for humans which will take on the super cool challenge of producing oxygen on Mars. Now we'll dive into these more in a moment, but in addition to the four primary objectives, Perseverance will also study the seasons on Mars and how weather patterns change, including stuff like dust storms.

It will be building on our understanding of Mars, which will be critical if we ever do actually want to send astronauts there or columnists. So a lot of what Perseverance will be doing sets the st age for future missions with actual humans on Mars. NASA is going about this in a very methodical way. And I say that because I'm sure at least some of you remember the private organization called Mars One that had the stated goal

of establishing a permanent colony on Mars. The Mars One plan was to create habitats on the planet, or technically under the surface of the planet, because Mars doesn't have the same protective measures as Earth does when it comes to deflecting harmful radiation and particles from stuff like you know, the Sun, and the Mars one plan didn't have anything in it about coming back to Earth. This was a one way trip. The organization was founded in two thousand eleven.

It attempted to raise money from investors and through an application process in which people would vie to be considered as astronauts for this mission, but it ultimately didn't go anywhere, and that, by the way, is a big strike against space exploration. Typically in space exploration, you gotta go somewhere, right. So the owners ended up liquidating the organization in early two thousand nineteen. Some people think the whole thing was

nothing more than a scam. Now. I don't know if the founders intentionally set out to mislead people or not, but I was certainly skeptical of the efforts, as it seemed to be taking a lot of assumptions as concrete facts, and that's dangerous. Now, that's not the case with NASA's approach. It's always dangerous. Space is always dangerous, But they're not

taking assumptions as fact. Their approach is to build a foundation of knowledge upon which future missions will continue to build, with the hopeful goal of one day having astronauts themselves set foot on Mars. But NASA is not quite as cavalier as the Mars one plan. So let's start with the analysis of Mars and the search for life. Then we'll move on to the components that have more to do with laying the groundwork for human exploration in the

distant future. And then we have the issue of ingenuity to talk about, but that's for a kicker at the end. One of the things Perseverance has that Curiosity doesn't have is a drill. So Perseverance will be able to drill into soil and rocks on Mars to collect samples for analysis. The drill is on the rover's big arm, but a

smaller arm actually plays a part in this too. It can supply sample tools to the drill, so as the drill is working, the soil and rock that it ends up removing can be collected in one of these tubes. Then the little arm can take that tube full of material and store it back on the rover. At the end of this the rover will store certain rocks and soil samples, very specific ones, ones that the team back

on Earth have identified as being petit recularly interesting. It'll store a collection of these in a cash that's intended for later retrieval and the idea that these would someday be returned to Earth. I'll talk about that at the end of this episode. Now, this mission itself lacks the ability to come back. There's nothing about the Perseverance mission that allows them to return to Earth, so this will have to wait for a future mission. The plan is

to collect at least twenty samples. However, the rover does have enough equipment to collect as many as forty three. Now, along with the forty three sample tubes, the rover will also carry five special tubes called witness tubes. The purpose for these is to make sure that the stuff Perseverance

is finding is actually coming from Mars. See. One of the risks of this kind of exploration is that our equipment might unwittingly introduce stuff from Earth into Mars, and if that stuff happens to be organic in nature, like it happens to be the same as an organic marker, it could mean that any evidence we find that suggests life was once on Mars could actually be a total red herring, because it could turn out that the organic material actually came from Earth in the first place and

was unwittingly released on Mars. It's kind of like one of those movies where you've got a crooked cop who drops a bag of incriminating material right in front of a suspect and says, well, why do we have here? Looks like we've got some evidence, except, of course, the rover wouldn't be doing this on purpose. It's not a scuzzy,

you know, bad cop type. The witness tubes can capture contaminants and allow researchers on Earth to discern whether the stuff that was collected on Mars actually is totally Martian in origin, or if it has some contaminants that were accidentally brought by Perseverance. So they can do that if those tubes ever find their way back to Earth, so

this is also part of that long term deal. The rover will hermetically seal all the sample tubes and store it temporarily in the rover itself, but eventually the team will determine a location where the rover will store all of these tubes called the Sample cash Depot, and this is where they will stay until a future mission can pick them up and bring them back home to Earth. There are seven major scientific instruments aboard the Perseverance so

let's go through those. First up is the Masked cam Z, a camera mounted on a vertical pole, thus the term mast, and this is near the center of the rover. The camera has a panoramic camera as well as a stereoscopic imaging camera, so it can take really wide shots of the horizon, or it can use its stereoscopic lenses to

capture three dimensional images on Mars's surface. Now, not only will this camera be used to take lovely photos and to help the team on Earth determine where to send the rover, it also can help engine years back on Earth learn more about the mineralogy of Mars' surface. Next, we have the Supercam, which by day is a mild mannered photographer for the Daily Planet. Wait, sorry, no, I I meant that it's a camera intended to analyze the

chemical composition of stuff on Mars at a distance. Then you've got pixel p I x L that actually stands for Planetary Instrument for X ray litho chemistry. And if you're wondering what litho chemistry is, you're not alone, because I don't think I have ever seen that word ever before I started researching this episode. In fact, as I was researching the term. The only time I was seeing any instance of litho chemistry as a word was in

reference to pixel itself, and this annoys me. I mean, NASA, if you're going to use cute acronyms for your tools, you can't just get around the inconvenience of not having the correct letters by making up a word. But let's suss it out. So litho means stone. Now it all makes sense, right. Litho chemistry means the chemical makeup of stones on Mars in this case, And this device uses X rays in order to really study the stones around the rover. X rays have a shorter wavelength and carry

way more energy than the visible light spectrum does. The pixel has a spectrometer, which is a device that measures the spectral components of something. And now this isn't about specters like ghosts or something. This is more about a spectrum, you know, like the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation or the

spectrum of visible light. So they measure a continuous variable of some sort, and the pixel measures the electromagnetic radiation that's reflected off of various materials on Mars, which then tells us more about what those materials are made of. Then you've got these scanning habitable environments with Raymond luminescence for organics and chemicals. And this is a really cute acronym. The acronym is share Lock. This is another spectrometer, but

rather than X rays, this one uses an ultraviolet laser. Now, like X rays, ultra violet waves are shorter in wavelength and higher in energy than the visible spectrum, but they don't penetrate as far as X rays do. The spectrometer will also measure the composition of materials on Mars and search for the presence of organic compounds. It also has a high resolution camera for microscopic imaging, so that's pretty neat. Then there's the radar imager for Mars's Subsurface Experiment or

rim FACTS. This one uses a radar system that can penetrate the ground and give what NASA calls a quote centimeter scale resolution of the geologic structure of the subsurface end quote super nifty. Then there's one more scientific experiment aboard, the perseverance that we need to talk about, as well as ingenuity, something I haven't really covered yet, but keep teasing, but we'll get back to that after we take another

short break. The last of the major experiments aboard the Perseverance is the Mars Oxygen Institute Resource Utilization Experiment or MOXIE. What a great acronym. Now, this experiment will attempt to generate oxygen from the carbon dioxide that's in Mars's atmosphere. See here, on Earth, CEO two makes up about point zero four of our atmosphere, and that's it, and honestly,

that's enough. C O two is a greenhouse gas. In fact, out of all the greenhouse gases that humans release in our atmosphere, CEO two makes up any one point three p and of them. So a little c O two can go a long way when it comes to the greenhouse effect. But Mars's atmosphere is a totally different story. There, c O two is a major player. It makes up nine of Mars' atmosphere. Oxygen, by contrast, makes up a tiny point one three of Mars's atmosphere. Here on Earth,

it's twenty one of our atmosphere. Now, it's incredibly obvious that we humans need oxygen, and it stands to reason that would be way better if we could produce the oxygen we need on Mars while you know we're actually on Mars. As opposed to bringing everything with us, everything we decide we need to bring, we have to launch off the Earth, and launching stuff is expensive and it's risky, so it would be better if we could create all

the stuff we need while we're already on Mars. On top of that, besides breathing, we need oxygen as a component for rocket fuel, so using the resources of Mars to create few tool would be a huge deal. Again, we wouldn't have to send our return trips worth of fuel out on the launch. That would be enormous. Now, Moxie isn't going to terraform Mars. It's a small scale experiment, more like a proof of concept. It will take c O two from Mars' atmosphere and convert it into oxygen

and carbon monoxide through an electrochemical process. So Moxie pulls in air from the environment. It will pass that air through a filter and then pressurize the c O two so that it's approximately one atmosphere in pressure. That is one Earth atmosphere in pressure, which is much greater pressure

than what you would find in Mars' own atmosphere. The CEO two then goes to a solid oxide electrolyzer or s o x E. The electrochemical process does the separating at a temperature of eight hundred degrees celsius, so things get pretty toasty. There are asked preheating components. There's also an exhaust cooling component. All of this is really important for moxy to operate, but also it's important to cool the exhaust in order to protect the other experiments that

are aboard the Perseverance. The exhaust also has to pass through a filter before it can be vented back out to the Martian atmosphere. Now why is that, Well, it gets back to those contaminants I mentioned earlier. We have a responsibility to limit the sort of contaminants we could introduce to another planet, and there's actually an official policy

about this. It's called the Planetary Protection Requirements. Now, assuming moxi's experiments are successful, we might see NASA and other organizations create larger implementations of this same technology to make a significant amount of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, and that will be a big step in the direction to send people to Mars, as it will give those people an important component for making the rocket fuel needed to

return back here to Earth. And now finally it's time to talk about Ingenuity, a high risk, high reward experiment. It's high risk because no one really knows yet if it's actually gonna work. It's high reward because if it does well, we'll have an incredible experience that we can

build upon. So what the heck is Ingenuity? It's a helicopter. Yeah, Perseverance is bringing along with it a helicopter to Mars, so you can get to the chopper and get to Mars at the same time, thus fulfilling two different Arnold Schwarzenegger film plots simultaneously. It's never been done before. Now let's get more specific. When I say helicopter, I don't mean the sort of flying vehicle that carries people around here on Earth. This is more like a drone. It's

a very small aircraft. It's autonomous, which yeah, I would have to be. There's no way you can fly this thing via remote control back here on Earth. It would crash and then you'll be waiting fifteen minutes or whatever in order to find out about it. The Ingenuity has a mass of one point eight kilograms, so here on Earth it weighs four pounds, and it makes sense that it needs to be lightweight because the Martian atmosphere is

so thin. Now, remember, heavier than air. Aircraft need to generate lift, and you can think of lift as a force that presses up on the underside of a wing or, in the case of a helicopter, the underside of its rotors, which really a rotor is just a wing that moves in a circle. This force has to be strong enough to counteract the weight of the object in order to get off the ground. If the gravity of Mars were the same as that of Earth, this would be super

hard to do because the atmosphere is so thin. You would struggle to generate enough lift to counteract the weight of the flight vehicle. But gravity on Mars is also not as strong as it is here on Earth. It's actually a about one third of Earth's gravity a little more than that. So yeah, you've got a thin atmosphere, but you also have less gravity and therefore less weight to worry about. So your mass stays the same because gravity does not affect how much mass something has, but

your weight is different. So while the helicopter gadget weighs around four pounds here on Earth. On Mars, it's going to be closer to a pound and a half. Now, I would still have one point eight kilograms of mass because mass doesn't change, but that mass would weigh the same as an object that has just point six eight kilograms of mass here on Earth. So if somehow you were able to take an earth point six eight kilograms and put it against this thing while it's on Mars,

the scales would balance out. Now, considering the rotors on this thing, I'm actually really impressed they were able to get the weight that low because each rotor, and there are two of them, measures four feet or one point two met years and lengths. Now, just remember that these rotors are mounted in the center. So the helicopter also has solar panels. Those are going to be used to

charge the onboard battery. It has a wireless communication system that allows engineers on Earth to relay commands to the helicopter via the rover. So in this case, the engineers could give pretty general commands, such as how long the helicopter would operate or how high it was to fly. But then the helicopter has to do all the actual flying on its own. There will be no steering this

thing due to that communication lag. The helicopter has inertial sensors, so it can tell what it's orientation is, whether it's upright or not. It's also got a laser altimeter, so this is essentially a laser range finder, so it shoots a laser at the ground. It essentially measures the amount of time it takes for the laser to go out from the laser range finder, hit the ground and come back up and hit a sensor, and on that it can determine how high up it is. It's also got

two cameras on board. One of them can take color images and the other one can only take black and white images. And it's got some heating components inside of it, which is important because it needs to stay in operational temperature even during the Martian night. Uh. The average temperature on Mars is about minus sixty degrees celsius, though in the daytime during the Martian summer, if you happen to be near the equator, you might reach a high of

up to twenty degrees celsius. That's twenty degrees positive. So there is a really wide variation in temperatures on the planet. That's something else that we would have to prepare for if we were to ever actually, you know, go there. Now, NASA has made it clear that this aircraft is considered a quote completely independent of the Mars twenty twenty Science Mission end quote, which is why the ingenuity doesn't really show up when you look at the breakdown of experiments

that are aboard the Perseverance. It's also described as a quote demonstration of technology end quote. That means ingenuity isn't going to be relied upon to deliver any you know, scientific data about Mars. It's really meant to give us an idea if the powered flying device is a viable approach on Mars. It's also meant to prove that the manta ization of technologies necessary to allow for this will

actually work. And if it does work, then that means we could see all sorts of flying drones deployed to Mars in the future to do stuff like map out areas or survey regions that are too treacherous for rovers to manage, or perform other scientific experiments. Now, my hope is that all of these experiments teach us a lot more about our neighbor planet, and that with this information we can plot out further missions, and I think it would be truly remarkable if I were to see people

land on Mars within my lifetime. And as always, there are opportunities for the things we learned in the technology we developed to make all this possible to benefit us in other ways. One of the coolest things about space exploration that's not really about the exploration itself, is that all the technology that was once created as a necessity in order to achieve mission goals has kind of found

its way into our daily lives and other implementations. We often see unanticipated benefits as byproducts, and so I think it's always a good thing for us to push back our boundaries of ignorance. You never know what sort of things you're gonna uncover along the way. As for future missions, there are a couple more that I can mention briefly. One is a part of a mission that is called the Exo Mars program. This one has actually led by the European Space Agency and the ras Cosmost State Corporation.

The plan is to launch a rover which would not be that much different from Curiosity and Perseverance in twenty twenty two, again two years apart. This one will be called the Rosalind Franklin, named after the British chemist. NASA is contributing some of the UH components that are going to be used in some of the scientific instruments as part of this rover. The rover's mission is very similar to that of Perseverance, primarily looking for evidence that life

could have existed on Mars in the ancient past. Another mission is the aforementioned plan to retrieve the samples that Perseverance is going to collect assuming its mission is successful. This one is a more long term plan because of the complexities of getting too and back from Mars. So going from Earth to Mars and back again. Really we've only managed one way trip so far, this would be

a lot harder. The current proposed timeline would have a launch of the initial vehicle, the Sample Return Lander, in July twenty twenty six, which would actually touch down on Martian soil in August twenty twenty eight. Now that's an unusually long tra AVL time, and honestly I don't know

all the reasons for that. But the lander will have its own mini rover provided by the European Space Agency, and this rover will go and fetch the stored samples that Perseverance had gathered in one It will bring those samples to a rocket that is carried aboard the Sample Return Lander, and the rocket will blast off, the first time in history that we will have launched a rocket from another planet, and it will then send the payload

to rendezvous with another spacecraft in orbit around Mars. That spacecraft is called the Earth Return Orbiter, and it will actually launch from Earth separately from the lander. It would launch in September, a couple of months after the lander has launched, but it will arrive in orbit around Mars by October, several months before the lander touches down. The

Sample Return container from the rocket will separate. It will dock with the Return Orbiter, and then the orbiter would prepare for the trip back home once Earth and Mars were lined up again, and the estimated return date would be sometime in twenty thirty one. So if everything goes well, it's going to take more than a decade to get those Martian rocks and soil back here on Earth for analysis. Man, this stuff is hard, but super interesting. Guys. I hope

you enjoyed that episode about Perseverance. I really hope you enjoyed it, because we're gonna be doing another one on Wednesday.

I am really going to be looking at sort of the history of leading up to the Perseverance mission and talking about the the complexity of that lead in because it involves not just technology, it involves a lot of other human factors to like politics and budget and these are things that NASA has to deal with regularly and it can drastically change the ability of the agency to

pursue specific missions. And so we will cover that as well, because it's important again to get the full context of what's going on, and we'll also talk about some of the interesting stuff we've had a chance to experience thanks to Perseverance already. So tune in then. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, drop me a line let me know. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you

again release soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.