The Sound of Mars

it's carrying. Today, I thought I would talk more about the journey to launching that rover and what it's been doing up on Mars since it touched down a couple of weeks ago. Now, when it comes to space missions, a lot of factors come into play. There's the tech, obviously, I mean without the tech, we wouldn't be able to get to space or do anything useful once we're out there. But there's also money and politics, two factors that can

actually make or break space missions. In fact, the whole purpose of the space race, when you really boil it down, was because of political pressures between the United States and the Soviet Union. We had a lot of benefits that came out of it that had nothing to do with politics, But the money would never have been there had it not been for that political pressure. Personally, I wish it were otherwise. I would love it if just the pursuit of knowledge was enough for us, But we live in

the real world. NASA, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is a US federal government agency, and as such, it is particularly subject to the whims of politics and budget committees, and that means it can be really tough to make long term plans, as changes in the government can really shake things up from one group of leaders to the next. This is no small matter. The person in charge of

leading NASA gets that job through political appointment. The President of the United States appoints the nominee, who then must receive approval from the US Senate. This administrator is both the head of NASA as well as the top advisor

when it comes to matters involving space. Every four years in the United States we have presidential elections, and when those elections lead to a change in which political party is holding the executive branch that is the president, well, that typically means we also will see a change in

leadership at NASA. Since the agency's founding in the late nineteen fifties, there have been thirteen official administrators and another eleven acting administrators, meaning they were filling in the position while a new administration was in the process of choosing a successor. Oh and uh. Of those acting administrators, Alan love Lace, actually served as that role twice. So leadership at NASA has changed twenty four times since the agency

was founded in October night. If we were to average that out, it would mean that the head of the agency changes every you know, two point six years or so. Now, if you've listened to tech stuff for a while, or if you've listened to a show I used to do with aerial casting called Business on the Brink, you've heard stories about companies that were plagued with issues that either caused or contributed to a sort of revolving door situation

at the executive leadership level. And when you've got top leadership changing frequently, it can be difficult to maintain momentum or a long term strategy. And when it comes to space, you you have to plan long term because the amount of time it takes to conceive, develop, produce, and execute a mission can span several years or even more than a decade. Long term plans are hard y'all. Many of NASA's long term plans have focused on Mars, and I would say we're still firmly in the phase of learning

about Mars itself. We know a lot about the planet already, but there are many questions that we still have. So let's do a quick rundown on stuff we already know about Mars. And first let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. It's the fourth planet out from the Sun, which makes Earth and Jupiter. It's next door neighbors. It's smaller than Earth. The diameter of Mars is a bit more than half of Earth's diameter. The Earth has about

ten times the mass of Mars. This also means that the gravity on Mars is less than what you would experience here on Earth. On Mars, you would weigh about thirty eight percent of what you weigh here on Earth. Of course, your mass would remain the same. Mass doesn't change, but your weight would change. And we call it the red planet because it's red, So that okay, that that that makes sense. And it's also a planet, so that also I mean that it tracts. And we know why

it's red too. It's red because of the regulars on Mars, that's what we call the rocks and the loose soil on the surface, it happens to be rich with iron, and as we know, rust is the product of oxidation. So it's time for some chemistry, all right. So the simple formula is that you get iron or f E on the elemental table and you get an oxidizer. Here on Earth, the most common combination tends to be iron

water and oxygen. Water is more like a catalyst. In this case, iron exposed just oxygen does oxidize, but the process is fairly slow. Water speeds us up a lot, and if the water has a lot of electrolytes, which is not just what plants crave, then the process happens even faster. That's why iron exposed to salt water will rust pretty darn quickly. Now does that mean the iron on Mars rusted in a similar way, perhaps due to

torrential rainstorms. Well maybe that's one hypothesis, but there are other possibilities, such as solar radiation breaking down molecules like carbon dioxide into oxidants that rusted the iron over the course of millions of years, or there might be several reasons combined that led to the oxidation process, but Mars is reddish color was one of the reasons scientists suspected that water is or was on the surface of the planet before we were able to actually verify. Oxidizing reactions

can be either endothermic or exothermic. That means that, depending upon the actual reactants, you might need to add heat to cause the oxidation process to start, or the process itself might really ease heat. So with iron oxidation, you're talking about an exothermic reaction, meaning it does generate heat.

If you expose a very tiny speck of pure iron to an environment that has oxygen and maybe some water vapor like you know our atmosphere does, well, that spec will oxidize very quickly and release more heat than can disperse through that tiny tiny piece of iron. We're talking like itty bitty little flecks of iron. So you end up getting a super hot fleck of iron because the heat can't disperse quickly enough, and that ends up being a spark. Anyway, that's kind of getting off track. More

to the point. The fact that Mars has rust on. It tells us that iron and some sort of oxidizer have to be or at least had to be present, and it brought up the possibility that the planet has or had water on it. This would be one of the facts that we were trying to establish for a long time with various observations and Mars missions, and we did eventually mind ice on Mars. Mars is also very cold.

The average temperature on Mars is minus eighty one degrees fahrenheit or nearly minus sixty three celsius, and the atmosphere on Mars is primarily carbon dioxide. We would not be able to breathe there. It's a very thin atmosphere too, so not not a whole lot of it, and most of its carbon dioxide. Mars has two moons, Damos and Phobos, both discovered by astronomer A Esop Hall in eighty seven.

Hall had almost given up looking for moons around Mars, but his wife Angelina encouraged him to keep looking, and according to the story, he found both of them within that week. So I think we all owe Angelina credit for this as well. It's no surprise that the two moons were difficult to spot. They are two of the smallest moons in our Solar system. Phobos is the larger of the two by a little bit, and it also orbits Mars at a really low altitude of six thousand

kilometers or just three thousand, seven hundred miles. Now, for comparison, our own moon around Earth is three hundred eighty four thousand kilometers or two hundred thirty eight thousand, nine hundred miles away. So Phobos is super close to Mars, and that's one of the reasons why it's very hard to spot. There's not a whole lot of distance between Phobos and the planet it orbits, and it's very tiny, so picking

it out in the nineteenth century was really hard to do. Dams, while smaller, is also a bit further out in its orbit, and this also means that the two moons have vastly different cycles. Phobos orbits Mars three times per day and Dams takes about thirty hours to do a full circuit

around Mars. Phobus is fate is also sealed. Every year it gets a little bit closer to Mars because its orbit is decaying and in line and by in time I mean like fifty million years or so it will either collide with Mars or it might break apart into eighty eight pieces, and then Mars will get a ring. Come on, we all know Mars deserves a ring. Beyonce would agree with me. Both Phobos and Damos always present the same face to Mars, which makes them kind of

like our moon. You know, if you look up at the moon, you're always looking at the same face of the moon. And by the way, this is a good time to remind people that the phrase dark side of the moon doesn't mean that one side of the moon, either Earth's moon or Mars's moon, is always dark. There is a light side and a dark side of these moons, but the sides change because of the cycles, just as Earth always has a side that is, you know, lit up, and another side that's dark. But it's not like it

stays that way all the time. That's why we have night and day. Now, all that being said, it's possible that future trips tomorrow Mars might use these moons as

a forward base. For one thing, If you established the base on the side of the moons that always face Mars, you've got the rest of the Moon behind you blocking radiation from space and the Sun in particular for most of the time, which is a good thing because, as we all know, space is always trying to kill you, and cosmic radiation is one of the many weapons of choice, along with stuff like you know, the lack of a breathable atmosphere and the effects of vacuums on humans and

long term effects of exposure to micro gravity. I've done full episodes about how space is trying to kill you. I guess it's a good time to transition to some of the missions that various countries have launched to get more info on Mars. There's a lot more that we know about Mars. For example, it doesn't have tectonic plates the way Earth does. Uh. It has the largest volcano is in the Solar System, but none of them are active. They've all gone extinct millennia ago. It doesn't have a

magnetic field the way the Earth does. That has lots of consequences from Mars, one of which is that the solar wind from the Sun is gradually siphoning off Mars' atmosphere over you know, millions of years. So there are other things we know, but let's let's talk about some of the missions we've sent to Mars to learn more about it. The first successful Mars mission was Mariner four, which did a fly by of the planet in nineteen

sixty five. There have been other attempts that predated Mariner four, but NASA's Mariner four was the first to actually make it. All the others had mission failures. A few years later, Mariner six and Mariner seven followed suit, and then the former uss ARE launched its own successful orbiter spacecraft in

nineteen seventy one. The first space have to land on Mars, you know, without actually crashing into it, was the Mars Pathfinder with the Sojourner rover, which launched in nineteen and landed in n Sojourner remained in operation for less than ninety earth days. There wouldn't be another successful landing on Mars until two thousand three. That's when NASA had its Mars Exploration Rover mission and launched a pair of rovers to the Red planet. One was called Spirit, the other Opportunity.

They launched a few weeks apart in the summer of two thousand three and landed on Mars in January two thousand four, in very different locations on the planet. Both of these Rovers made contact by using a parachute and then retro rockets and then massive air bags, so the

landing was a bumpy one. Mars atmosphere is thin, but it does exist, so parachutes are viable presuming that what where it is you're trying to land on Mars isn't too heavy, and they don't slow you down as much as they would on Earth because there's just not as much atmosphere to catch and slow you down. These rovers

also stayed in service a very long time. Spirit gave up the Ghost pun intended in but Opportunity remained active until the main purpose of these rovers was to look for signs of past water activity on the surface of Mars. While Spirit would get stuck in two thousand nine and finish out its mission as a stationary platform kind of like a lander, Opportunity kept working until it was clear

that it was beyond reach and had expired. The NASA Social team shared the message my battery is low and it's getting dark, and frankly, a lot of people on the Internet got very sad that this robot on Mars

was going offline. By that time, people had sort of a scry a kind of personality and life to this robot in no small thanks to the NASA Social team, and people got really caught up on how this robot was so far from home and all alone and I'm sorry, I can't read my notes because something's in my eye. The Spirit and Opportunity were each doing science long after their initial planned missions, which was great, but Mars missions

don't always go that way. The Phoenix Lander, which wasn't a rover but a stationary Mars science platform, launched on August four, two thousand seven. It landed on Mars on

May two thousand eight. It also used a parachute and thrusters during landing, achieving a soft landing in the process, and it landed near the polar region of the northern part of Mars, and scientists knew that it was going to have a pretty short useful life, or at least was likely to, because, as George R. R. Martin would say, winter is coming. The Phoenix Lander operated until NASA lost contact with it in November two eight, essentially six months

after it had landed. By that time, sun exposure on that part of Mars was very low, which meant the lander couldn't get enough energy for its solar panels in order to recharge its battery. But it did do a lot of science in those six months, examining the polar climate, the composition of the lower atmosphere on that part of Mars, and studying the history of water and ice on Mars. It might not have had a very long life like Spirit or Opportunity, but it did do a ton of work.

Then we move up to twenty eleven with the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, better known to the rest of us as the Curiosity Rover. This one was much bigger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It weighed in at more than a ton at least on Earth Martian gravity, being about a third of Earth's gravity, and as I mentioned in the pre Perseverance episode, Curiosity required an up

to that point unique approach with a sky crane. So think of it as a platform that uses rockets to maintain a position above a specific point on Mars, kind of hovering above it, and then it lowers the rover jeep sized rover down to the ground below with cables. Perseverance would use a very similar method, but again I covered that in the previous episode, so I'm not going to repeat it here, because all chances are you've heard it already. In ten, NASA launched the Insight Lander, which

touched down on Mars in November of that year. Insight is kind of like a Martian weather station. It monitors stuff like wind, pressure and speed, temperature and so on, but it's also measuring seismic activity on Mars, and it attempted to get a temperature reading of the planet's interior, but it turned out that the clumpy nature of Martian soil meant that the temperature probe wasn't able to get enough purchase to dig down in order to do the work.

Mars is hard, y'all. Now, when we come back, we'll talk more about the lead up to Perseverance itself, but first let's take a quick break. So as of this recording, there have been forty nine attempts to send missions to Mars, whether a fly by spacecraft, an orbiter, a lander, or a rover, and some of the missions, to be fair, had multiple components. So out of all those missions, about half were outright failures and some of the remaining were

really only partial successes. There's never a guarantee that any one mission is going to achieve its goals. So when we factor all this in that NASA's leadership changes pretty regularly, that if you miss a launch window to Mars you have to wait two and a half years to try again. It even when things line up you might have a fifty chance of success, you start to see how the odds are stacking up against you. And of course there's

also the matter of budget. Because NASA is a government agency, it has to appeal to Congress for its budget, and since twenty ten, Congress has granted NASA the equivalent of around half a percent of the total federal budget, or between eighteen and twenty one billion dollars depending on the year. Now, this isn't just a blank check. The administration at the White House gets a big say in where that money goes. When Barack Obama announced his administration's space policy, it really

shook things up quite a bit over at NASA. For one thing, it removed all funding for the Constellation program, which had as its mission objectives the funding of vehicles that could launch crews to low Earth orbit, the Moon and ultimately to Mars. But it had gone over budget. It was under funded despite being over budget. In other words, it was going to be way more expensive than what

anyone had anticipated, and there had been numerous delays. So after a thorough review of the program, UH, the White House decided to no longer funded. This, by the way, remains a controversial decision. There were some within NASA who adamantly disagreed with the decision. There were others who were saying that perhaps it was merited. UH. I probably need to do a full episode about the Constellation project at

some point and really dive into all sides of that story. Anyway, back in twenty sixteen, the European Space Agency had to go it alone with a mission that had intended to be a joint effort between the e s A and NASA, and the reason NASA was no longer part of this dance was because of changes to NASA's budget in general.

Around twenty twelve, the White House budget request US began to allocate less money to go towards unmanned missions to Mars and more money dedicated toward human exploration and commercial spaceflight. New goals included a mission that would ultimately send astronauts to an asteroid, something that still hasn't happened as of right now. Oh and also some funding went toward the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, something else that

hasn't happened yet. When the James Webb Telescope was first proposed, the target launch was let me check my notes, two thousand seven, but if all goes as planned, it will launch on Halloween of this year, so better late than never. As for that European mission, it was part of a program called Exo Mars. The effort involved launching both an orbiter, which measures trace gases in Mars' atmosphere, and a lander called the Shia Parelli E d M. The orbiter entered

into its planned orbit without issue. It is still orbiting Mars now. In fact, it even got a look at the Perseverance, but the lander crashed on Mars and did not survive. A second part of this program, originally scheduled for eighteen, has since been pushed to twenty twenty two, and in NASA's absence, the Russian space program rose Cosmos has stepped into partner with the E s A. The budget cuts did not bode well for projects like Perseverance.

NASA estimates that all told, the cost of the Perseverance mission will be somewhere in the neighborhood of two point

seven to two point nine billion dollars. The majority of that cost went into the development of the spacecraft and the rover that was two point two billion of the total, and the rest would cover the launch of the payload into space, which was around two fifty million dollars, and the cost of operating the mission for the projected length of service UH the projected mission is to last two years, but keep in mind that other missions to Mars have

had numerous extensions to their missions when conditions allowed it. Still, that cost is much lower than the development costs were, and the benefits of extending missions when feasible are unknown and thus incalculable, and they're usually pretty cool. So while we don't know how much it's going to cost in the long run, we also aren't really sure of what kind of amazing benefits we might see due to those missions.

NASA began working on the Perseverance mission back in when less than one million dollars of its budget went to the preliminary stages of defining mission objectives, which in turn informed engineers as to the types of tools and instruments that the rover would require to carry out its mission. For the following two years, the amount of NASA spent on Perseverance hovered around the one hundred million dollar mark,

But in twenty six is really kicked into gear. That's when the actual build phase for the project began, and from twenty sixteen until last year, NASA would spend an excess of three hundred million dollars per year on the project, with the peak coming in with more than five hundred million dollars of NASA's budget going toward Perseverance. Now what certainly an expensive endeavor. I don't want to give the impression that Perseverance stands out over all other NASA missions.

Other Solar System exploration missions like the two Viking spacecraft Cassini, and Perseverances, older but smaller sibling Curiosity, are all more expensive, especially when you adjust for inflation. If you don't adjust for inflation, then it doesn't look that way, but inflations of things, so we have to take that into account. And those aren't the only missions that NASA's done that

are more expensive than Perseverance. Perseverance currently ranks as number seven in NASA's planetary exploration programs in terms of cause, And if you look at long term projects with human space flight, Perseverance doesn't even really mirrit attention the Apollo program, which sent multiple missions with astronauts to the Moon that cost around two hundred billion dollars when you adjust for inflation.

Now that's not a big surprise, because keeping humans alive in space and bringing them back to Earth safely is really hard. In fact, it's it's hard enough that sadly we have not always been successful doing it. But still pursuing any expensive mission is a risk with changes in leadership, you never know when the new suits are going to tell you to stop working on a project and shift

funds around elsewhere. Perseverance managed to persevere through the changes, even as we saw goals shift away from further missions to the Moon under Obama and then back again under Trump. Now the reason I lead with all this is because after all these changes, the pandemic threatened to mothball the Perseverance launched for a couple of years. If NASA had not come up with contingencies to deal with the dangers of COVID, the mission would have to wait, and that

would have been a bummer. And then there's the danger that the NASA of the future wouldn't have the budget to follow through on the mission, and even with all the measures in place, the possibility of missing that window was very real. NASA had to push back the launch date a couple of times, and there was a real deadline that they had to hit. If Perseverance had not gotten off Earth by August, it would have had to sit around in the tool shed for a couple of years. Now.

I don't actually think it would be in a tool shed. I'm just imagining. Perseverance is kind of like, you know,

a writing lawnmower. It also marked a major shift in priorities. Typically, when approaching a launch date, Priority one has to do with making sure everything is in place for a successful launch, but with the pandemic, Priority one shifted to the health and safety of all those working together to make this happen, and it required drastic changes, with some people working from home like a lot of us have had to do, and others adopting additional safety measures in order to work

on location. Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager of NASA's Mars Exploration program, put it like this quote. We called the effort Mars twenty twenty safe at work. The objective was to keep the team as safe or safer than they would be if they were not working. Putting a spacecraft together that's going to Mars and not making a mistake. It's hard, no matter what. Trying to do it in the middle of the pandemic. It's a lot harder, end quote. But the team did do this, which made the rover's

name of Perseverance all the more appropriate. And in fact, Perseverance has a small plate on the left side of its chassis that commemorates the efforts, as well as honoring healthcare workers around the world. The plate shows the Earth, complete with a launched spacecraft sitting atop a sort of scepter, and wrapped around the handle is a single serpent. It's a vocative of the rod of Asclepius, associated with a Greek god of healing and medicine whose name I most

certainly mispronounced. Now, that's not the only plate that's mounted on the chassis of Perseverance. There's a plate made of titanium that has the name of the rover engraved upon it. There's a plate that shows the Sun, the Earth and Mars on it with the inscription ten million, nine hundred thirty two thousand, two hundred explorers on it. Attached to this plate are three silicon chips with ten point nine

million names stenciled on them in incredibly tiny printing. Surrounding the sun are dashed rays of light on this plaque. Those dashed is actually spell out a message in Morse code, and that message is eat at Joe's No, I'm sorry, wait wrong note, I'm sorry. It says explore as one that's that's far more inspirational, has pointed out to me on Twitter by Jim I will Spare, sharing his Twitter

handle just in Casey doesn't want it publicized. The Perseverance also has a plate that shows the evolution of rovers sent to Mars, starting with the Sojourner from and leading up to Perseverance and Ingenuity as well. It looks a lot like one of those stick figure family stickers that you see on the backs of cars occasionally, where it's like the parents, the kids, the pets, that kind of thing. It's very cute. Now when it comes to hidden messages,

NASA can get a little playful. The Curiosity rover has wheels that lead a dot and dash pattern in the regular as it PAS says over Mars, and yes, that's also morse code. That message just reads out jp L that stands for Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Perseverance has another

coded message included in the whole package. While landing, the rover took an image straight up at the open parachute that was slowing its descent, actually took video of it, and the parachute has bands of white and red on it, and before long some clever folks sussed out that these were patterns that represented a message written in binary. When translated, the message says dare mighty things, which is pretty cool.

And in addition, the outermost ring of colors on the parachute appears to be Earth coordinates for the jp L, so if a Martian comes across this discarded parachute, they'll know where to send the return As planned, the Perseverance touched down on Mars on February one. NASA captured a lot of data during Intrigue Descent and Landing or e

d L as they say. Sensors in the spacecraft's heat shield measured temperatures and pressure changes, which will help future engineers have a better understanding of the conditions they need to take into account for future missions to Mars, including those that might have human astronauts aboard. The atmospheric readings will also give insight into future flying vehicles, and of course, the Ingenuity helicopter will give us more information about this too.

The moment the spacecraft deployed the parachute, the Perseverance camera system began to document the descent process, and you can watch the descent, which included a camera mounted below the spacecraft so that you can see the landscape of Mars grow closer. You can watch as the jettisoned heat shield falls a long long way down until it moves out of frame so it's still falling when the camera angle has shifted enough where you can no longer see it.

NASA's video of the ascent really shows how incredible this whole process is, how technical it is, and you also get to hear NASA engineers react with joy at the announcement of each successful milestone during the landing process. It's a joyous experience and I do recommend checking it out. The video is on YouTube. It's about three and a half minutes long, and it's called Perseverance Rover's Descent and touchdown on Mars. The video also shows when the terrain

relative navigation system comes online. That's the system that allows the entry craft to identify a suitable landing spot for the rover. The thrusters on the entry vehicle then helped

maneuver the falling spacecraft toward that spot. Then the landing engines prime and the backshell on the entry vehicle jettison's and for a moment, the view of Mars and the video tilts in a way that might seem alarming, but in fact that tilt represents the vehicle's move to get out of the way of the falling backshell to avoid

any possible collision. Once at the right altitude, which is about twenty meters off the surface of Mars, the landing thrusters provide enough thrust to hover over the landing spot, and the skycrane begins to lower perseverance to the surface, extending the cables slowly and setting the rover onto the regular This part of the video shows dust scattering beneath the rover because of the thrusters, until the camera on the rover is low enough that it's actually in the

dust cloud. Then the view pretty much shifts to the skycrane above, which detaches and then flies off to avoid colliding with the rover, and you hear the jubilant tango Delta touched down, confirmed and there was much rejoicing. When we come back, i'll talk about some of the incredible stuff Perseverance has already sent us, keeping in mind that we haven't really gotten started yet. But first let's take

another quick break. Perseverance landed in Jzero Crater. Now, during the planning phase of Perseverance, teams spent five years selecting the best spot for the rover to land in order to carry out its mission, which largely focuses on looking for evidence that Mars might have at one point hosted life in its distant past. To that end, NASA scientists wanted a spot that would be a strong candidate for having that kind of evidence. The Jesero Crater was once

a lake billions of years ago. NASA identified that the rim of this crater has organic carbonates in the minerals. Now Here on Earth, carbonates served part of what makes up stuff like seashells, and those can last as fossils for billions of years. So while carbonates alone don't indicate that life was definitively present on Mars. They could represent one of the best chances we have of finding evidence

of past life. Perseverance will examine these areas closely, and it will also take samples of material, storing them in metal tubes that can be left behind so that a later mission can retrieve those tubes and bring them back to Earth. And let me tell you, the idea of bringing back Martian soil here to Earth is something I find really exciting. The carbonates will give us more insight into the long term history of Mars as well. Carbonates

form through interactions between water and carbon dioxide. By examining the carbonates that the crater, scientists will learn more about how Mars change from being a planet with water on it to kind of the desert landscape that it is today.

The RIM is where scientists have found evidence of the greatest concentration of carbonates in this particular crater, though it's unknown if the RIM is the so called bathtub ring left behind by the ancient lake or if it actually predates the lake itself, and it will take some time for us to learn more. When NASA was planning up this mission, the expectation was that it might be toward the end of the two year mission before Perseverance is

actually at the rim itself. Right now, Perseverance is kind of bulking up. It's charging its onboard batteries through the use of its solar panels, and not just its own batteries. Perseverance is also supplying juice to the helicopter ingenuities six off the shelf lithium ion batteries. The helicopter, which is attached to the underside of Perseverance has already phoned home. It will stay on Perseverance between thirty and sixty days,

charging up gradually. Also attached to Perseverance is the base station for the helicopter, which will serve as a communications node between the rover and the helicopter later on. Everything so far is performing as expected. Now the charging process is a slow one. The first big power up gets

Ingenuities batteries up to thirty capacity. Then after a few days, the Perseverance can do a second charging session, thus getting the batteries up to thirty and each week will be much the same, which is why it's going to be a little while before we know if helicopters can fly on Mars but assuming all goes well, sometime this spring or maybe early summer, we should reach the point where the helicopter will detach from perseverance and stand on its own,

and then it will have a window of about thirty martian days to conduct test flights. Assuming it gets off the ground and returns safely, it will be considered a monumental success. This is one of those high risk, high reward type experiments. We literally do not know if it's going to work. NASA plans to have up to five total test flights if it all works out, but that is a big if. For one thing, the helicopter has to survive long enough to try and fly in the

first place, and that's no small shakes. Temperatures at the Jesro Creator can dip down to about negative nineties celsius or minus one thirty fahrenheit. Some of that battery power won't be going to flying. Instead, it's going to be going to heating elements to keep everything warm enough so it doesn't freeze tight. Then there's the dust, which can cause damage or at the very least coat solar panels

and make them far less efficient at gathering energy. The atmosphere on Mars is very thin, so to generate enough lift to get off the ground is a challenge. The helicopter device weighs just four pounds. Here on Earth, it's about two kilograms. I mean it's always two kilograms because again that's mass, but you get the idea. The carbon fiber rotors, besides being very light, will rotate at an

incredible rate around two thousand, four hundred revolutions per minute. Now, a typical helicopter on Earth, like the vehicle that you would ride in, it rotates its rotors somewhere around four hundred fifty to five hundred rpm on average, So twenty four hundred is very fast. While we wait for Perseverance and Ingenuity to fill up their batteries. There are a few other things we can talk about so far. One is that Perseverance has taken some amazing panoramic shots of

the Creator already. If you've ever played with a panoramic photography app on your phone, you know that you typically line up the shot and then you slowly pan your phone so that the edges line up, and usually you have, you know, some sort of guide like little dots or

something else to make you go through the process. Smoothly, and what's really happening is your phone is taking a series of photographs one after the other, and then digitally stitches all of those together to create the panoramic view. The same thing is true with the cameras on the

mast of Perseverance. Perseverance gave itself a couple of days to settle in on Mars, taking that first panoramic shot on February twenty with its navigation cameras and then following that up with a better photo on the twenty one. It rotated the mast sort of like a periscope and did so three hundred sixty degrees and captured high definition photos with the masked cam Z, which is a dual

camera system that takes zoomable photographs. This second panoramic shot consists of one hundred forty two images that were all digitally stitched together, and among the various rocks and stones you can see is one the researchers have already nicknamed the harbor seal because well, it kind of looks like a harbor seal. It's a darker color than the ground around it, and scientists hypothesized that the shape is due to erosion. Some of which might have been relatively fast acting.

You know, something you can measure in the hundreds of thousands of years rather than the billions of years. In addition, the images picked up some pitted rocks that have peaked interest. The rocks could be volcanic, because as I said, Mars is home to the largest volcanoes in our Solar System, though they have been active for millions of years. Or it's possible that these rocks are made of carbonate minerals.

It will take time before Perseverance has the juice to wander over and get a closer look, or maybe even to gather samples. Future photographs will be sharper, according to the team, which is beyond cool. Much of the heavy

work will take place later this year. One other thing Perseverance has already done is it got a sound recording from Mars, and sadly, while you cannot hear any David Bowie or anything, you can hear the rover's own systems and the sound of wind blowing on another planet, which is phenomenal when you think about it, and it sounds

just like this. The work NASA does with Perseverance will give us a deeper understanding of Martian history, and what we learn will likely come in handy as we consider the possibility of sending astronauts to Mars in the future.

There are so many engineering challenges for us to work out for all of that to come together, from protecting the crew from harmful radiation to surviving the harsh temperatures of Mars, to figure out how to produce oxygen, water, and food millions of miles from home, and then there's the whole you know, getting folks back to Earth part.

The challenges are not necessarily insurmountable, but they are daunting, and learning more about the planet will help scientists make the best preparations for a successful mission in the future, and I'm really excited to learn more about what Perseverance

finds out. I always find space missions to be super cool and interesting, both because we're pushing back our ignorance bit by bit learning more about the universe we live in, and also in the long run, we often end up with tech achnologies that evolve from things that we used in space applications, and so we all get to use space tech in some form or another. Um It may not look like space tech, but that's where it came

from and I think that's pretty cool. If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, let me know. The best way to do so is to reach out on Twitter to handle is tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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.