 Bingo, we're back. One o'clock rock here on a given Monday. Exciting Monday. It's like waking up all over again with all these fabulous shows and people coming around. And right now we have Sarah Fagans. She's a researcher at the HIGP, the White Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. In SOES, the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology. A world-class institution doing world-class things. You're a world-class researcher. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Thank you. It's good to be back. So, the big news is you had a trip to the Big Island and you took a bunch of researchers with you, students, I guess, or graduate students from all over the country. What did you do there? Well, this is a workshop that myself and colleagues at UH, Scott Rowland, Pete McGinnis-Mark, Bruce Houghton, we run this workshop every two to three years. And the idea is to take out graduate students from all over the country who are researching problems in planetary science, planetary volcanology especially, and who spend most of their time looking at images on computers and don't really get out into the field very much. So these workshops are designed to impart an education to these students, to take them out, show them what volcanic features look like in the field, in the flesh, as it were. Make it real for them. Yeah, make it real for them and show them how these features that they look at in their images relate to features on the ground, boots on ground. And so this is relevant for people conducting research on Mars, on Venus, the moon, Mercury, on Jupiter's moon, Io. The world, the universe is your onion, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. And one of the key things about these workshops is you can have so many misconceptions from looking at an image about how a physical process works live. And Hawaii is such a great place for analog features to planetary features. We see a lot of features on Hawaii that look like things that we see on Mars, on the moon, on Venus, etc. And we take these students and we put them on the ground and nature's often far more complex than they think it is. But they can start to get a feel for how processes work, how features are formed, how things look on the earth. And that's a little kind of analysis. Yes, yeah, yeah. Volcanology is geology, isn't it? Yes, it's a branch of geology, kind of a specific branch of geology. And we're so lucky here in Hawaii to have these processes ongoing, people can see how things work. What about the sensors now? You say sensors and in fact the show is making common sensors from Mars. We're going to talk about Mars in a minute. But what about the sensors? What kind of sensors are you looking at when you go to Big Island with a tour like this? We have a set of images of different types for the features we see on the earth. And these are satellite images, maybe land-sat images. The images taken in the thermal part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which gives us different information about the features we're seeing on the ground. We have radar images, which tell us about surface roughness. So, for example, our airflow, which is one of these very clunky, rough features, looks very bright in radar images. Hoi hoi flows, which are these smooth surfaces. I like those better. Yeah, they're much easier to walk on. They look dark in radar images. So, we have radar data that can tell you a lot about the surface. We have LiDAR, topography data. So, we'll have these different data sets for the features we're going to see in the field. Students look at the data sets, try and understand what they're seeing, but it's only when they get boots on ground. And then we have a set of images for, say, Mars. They might be visible images or topography or, yeah. So, different types of images taken with different sensors that tell us different things about the surfaces of the planets that we're looking at. So, you show them the sensors. You show them where the sensors are, how you deploy and operate the sensors, and then you show them what's on the other end, what comes out. We show them the images. They usually have a pretty good background in the type of instruments and sensors that are being used because they focus on a particular subject area for their research. So, when we're out in the field on the ground, we're basically ground-truthing the images that we're seeing and the inferences that we can begin to make from looking at images. We're out there ground-truthing and understanding really what's going on. Okay. So, these sensors, I mean, you're interested in this because you're interested in Mars. Give us a praise, C, on Mars. So, 2020, what's going to happen? What are you doing for it? Yes, there's an upcoming mission to Mars called the Mars 2020 mission. It will launch in July, August of 2020. Take a little while to get to Mars, and then early 2021, it lands. And this is another role... It's only four years away. I know. It's coming out quick, isn't it? No pressure. It seemed like a long way away when we wrote the proposal, but things are moving along. It's going to be another rover mission similar to the MSL Curiosity mission that's currently at the surface. Let me just take a moment and say, that camera... I'm going to tell that camera, what is a rover mission? It's a mission with a robot. Yes, it is. If the spaceship drops a robot on the ground there, on the surface of the planet, and then the thing goes around and it takes measurements and has lots of sensors. Did I get that right? Yes, you did. You did. And this particular rover is about the size of a car. It's got a bunch of wheels. You can see on the graphic on the TV screen here at the moment. It's cute. It does look cute, doesn't it? Like an R2-D2, but maybe with bigger feet. And it's packed with... It's got seven instruments on. This graphic is showing one of the laser instruments that analyze rocks, but just below that big eye with the laser coming out are two little eyes, which is the camera system. It's a stereo camera system. It's called Mastcam-Z. That's the instrument on which I'm a co-investigator. And that system will be taking photographs in stereo of the surface to basically analyze the features that we see there, help with navigation, and tell us a lot more about the surface of Mars. That is so interesting. It looks like it's out of a movie. It could be in a movie. Maybe you can make a movie before or after the trip. When the trip goes in 2020, by the way, how long does it take for the rover here to get there? It will arrive in early 2021, and then we go through a terrifying phase of entry, descent, and landing, where the rover has to make it safely to the surface. So it's like acting... It's in an orbit over the planet, over Mars? No, no. It reaches Mars, and then the landing module is deployed, and it parachutes down onto the surface. It's like a spaceship landing module, and then rover. Yeah. The landing module parachutes down. It has to slow down in order to reach the ground safely. It deploys a parachute, slows itself down a little bit, and then there's a maneuver. There's a component called the sky crane where the landing module comes down. It has thrusters to slow its descent. Then it lowers the rover down on tethers, and it's slowing itself down all the way down, and when it feels the rover hit the ground, it cuts the tethers, and then thrusts itself away. Oh, really? So it flies away? Well, it's a controlled crash landing, really. It doesn't want to crash on top of the rover, obviously. So it uses its thrusters to jettish itself away, and it lands somewhere else, and then the rover hits the surface. Yes. That's no longer needed. It's no good anymore. Well, there's gravity on Mars, so it's not going to be too light. So it's not to crash. No, and this is a big rover this time, so they had to use new technologies to figure out how to land the Curiosity rover that's currently there and this rover, the 2020 rover, which is basically an improvement, but the same basic configuration. I have another aside I'd like to make. I'm going to address the camera for a minute. Sarah is actually doing this stuff at the front end. She's the co-principal investigator of some of the equipment on this thing, and I mean, it's really exciting to talk to you. You are involved in something that all of humanity is interested in, and it's fabulous. You're making scientific history in the name of humanity, and I'm talking to you. I'm very excited to be involved in this. I had a little bit of previous mission experience back in the late 90s on the Galileo mission, but I had never been... The Galileo mission went to Jupiter, but I had never been involved in a rover mission like this. My role is that of a scientist. I'm not designing the instrument, but I will be using the instrument and interpreting the instrument's observations when we get to Mars. But in the run-up to that point, there's lots of different activities we're involved in from the whole team is involved in, you know, instrument design, planning for operations when we actually are on the surface. We have a number of working groups that are looking at different elements of the instrument itself, and we also have an education outreach component and a working group that's focusing on landing site studies at this point. Oh, we want to talk about all of that here in the next 20 minutes. OK, so how big is the team? There are something like 30 co-investigators on the instrument team, the MastCamsi instrument team. Now, there are seven instruments total, so, you know, multiply that 30 by seven. And then there are a whole host of graduate students and collaborators that are affiliated with many of the co-investigators. The co-investigators are like CDS Science personnel. And then there are all of the engineers and project staff at the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is where this mission is run out of. So it escalates into hundreds and hundreds of people very quickly. This is how you make a spaceship. This is how you outfit all the rover equipment. Yeah, yeah, we're just the little camera instrument, but, you know, there's so many other components of this rover vehicle that have to come together in harmony to make this thing work. To put it in perspective, you know, I read recently that Apple, for its cell phone, for the camera on its cell phone, there are 600 people working on the camera. That's what it is with modern high technology equipment. You have to have the people and you have to divide the work, divide the science, the technology. Everybody has a role. And then somehow you coordinate all that research in order to make the device, you know? So your principal device is the camera, the MastCamsi camera. Yeah, yeah, and it's actually... There it is, so there it is, wow. Yeah, there we are. There's the diagram of the lens assembly there. And a big improvement from the current curiosity mission that's on Mars is that this camera has a zoom capability. So there are actually two cameras. So you're looking in stereo like your eyes do so that you can get three-dimensional representations of the surface that you're looking at. How far apart are the cameras? The cameras are about nine, 10 centimeters apart, I think. Just like human eyes. Yeah, they're not too far apart. And they can zoom up so that you can see details when you're zoomed in and close to a target as small as maybe 0.600s of an inch, something like that is the pixel side. Yeah, when you're zoomed in and both eyes, both cameras can zoom in. At the same, precisely the same. They're exactly the same. And then each camera has a variety of different filters. So you can look at different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared, ultraviolet and all that. Yeah, that's right. You can look from basically short wavelength that are visible all the way to the near infrared. And so each camera has seven narrow pass filters and I think four broad pass filters. And we do that because different rocks and different minerals on the surface have different responses at different wavelengths. So they look, different rocks and minerals look bright at different wavelengths in a different pattern. And so what you can do by looking at the response in the different wavelengths through the different filters is interpret the compositions of the minerals and rocks that we're looking at. And this would be in coordination with other sensors that are also looking at the same materials and you get a combination of data on it. You can figure out anything you want. That's right. There are two other instruments. One's called Sherlock and one's called Supercan. Supercan. Sherlock. Yes, good acronym. And they use a variety of spectrometers and laser instruments to basically examine the rocks with lasers and at different wavelengths which will provide complimentary information to the camera system. And those two instruments are specifically designed to look for biosignatures that is evidence of the potential microbial life. And so the camera, you said the camera can look at things very small and close, but what about looking things far away? Do you tell the scopic as well? It can look up onto the horizon. It's gonna be a very useful instrument to aid in navigation of the rover as it drives around on the surface of Mars. Is it real-time? Can you see it real-time? No. Here at Command Central? No, it's not real-time. But the downlink capabilities are very good and we can get the images back basically on a daily basis. And it's 3D capabilities with mapping the terrain in three dimensions. That along with the navigational cameras which is a separate subsystem, that allows the programmers to upload a series of commands which will let the rover navigate pretty much autonomously. So we don't need necessarily that real-time interaction. She's semi-autonomous then. Yeah, I mean it's- You have instructions. We give it instructions, but also it's smart enough to avoid obstacles that might present themselves if we haven't actually noticed them. You know, Sarah, this is Sarah Faggins. She's a researcher at HIGP. We're gonna take a short break, Sarah. And when we come back, we're gonna talk about whether this would have been helpful for Matt Damon on Mars. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Lakeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. I hope you'll join me each Friday afternoon as we explore the amazing world of science. We bring on interesting guests, scientists from all walks of life, from all walks of science, to talk about the work they do, why they do it, and moreover why it's interesting to you. What the science really means to your life, its impacts on you, how it's shaping the world around you, and why you should care about it. I do hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. for Lakeable Science. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart-Turner, and I'm fortunate to be able to host Sustainable Hawaii at thinktechhawaii.com. I hope you'll join in with us every Tuesday from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to see the interesting people we have to share with you their information. Aloha. Okay, we're back with Sarah Fegans. She's a researcher at HIGP in Soest that you, H. Minoa. Very exciting discussion about making common sensors from ours and cameras among them. So, I don't remember the movie with Matt Damon, DeMarshan, all that well, but did he have this kind of technology with him? It sounds to me like what you're doing now is way advanced to what we could have done even a few years ago than what they used for the movie. Yes, he had a variety of technologies that I think at one point he drives off the go and cannibalize an old rover that happened to be on the surface in order to communicate back to Earth. I don't remember it very well either. So, that was actually a pretty sound basis in scientific fact. It wasn't too science fiction, actually. He did use some reasonable, the movie did use some reasonable scientific developments. And actually, I really enjoyed the movie. It was kind of fun. There were some aspects of his habitat that were perhaps a little far-fetched. But there are projects on Earth currently ongoing looking into how to make habitats for astronauts to live in on the surface of Mars in the future. Well, you're a volcanologist. Is that your training? Yeah. In England, way back when? Yeah. I mean, not that long ago. That's a while ago now. And you came out here because you felt that this is where the action is and the topography is especially on the Big Island, too. Apply your knowledge of volcanology, which is really an Earth-based kind of science to other planets. What is the connection between volcanology and Mars? Well, we look at the surface of Mars and it's an incredible volcanic terrain for the most part. Everything on Mars started off as volcanic, even though it may have been modified now or over time. We have these huge volcanoes scattered around the planet. We have vast... Which were established the way volcanoes always are with eruptions. Yes. Early on, the eruptions may have been more explosive. Later in Mars' history, it looks like they were more effusive. That is lava flows produced them. We have vast volcanic plains on the surface of Mars. So Mars is an obvious target of study for somebody who's interested in planets and volcanoes. And a volcanologist will be able to understand these processes on Mars because of her training in volcanology here on Earth. Yeah, and Hawaii is a great analog site for planetary volcanoes because the compositions of the lava's erupting are approximately similar. The types of features we see on Earth are very similar. Coming up on the screen here, we have a recent map of the Big Island volcano, Kilauea, and its latest lava flows. This is a new breakout that started about two months ago. And what you're seeing... This is current, this is happening. Yeah, this is current. As of last week, this map was produced. And the light red is lava flows that have happened since about two months ago. And the bright red, the dark red is new flows that have happened as of last week within the space of a couple of days. So you can see the ocean is down to the lower right. And the gray is the flow field that's been built up, or part of the flow field that's been built up since 1983 at Kilauea volcano. So we were lucky enough to get out and see active lava last week during our workshop. You saw this live. Yes, we did. And now this is a map that was created with some of those sensors you were talking about? No, this is a map created by the United States Geological Survey. They've been mapping this flow field for decades now. And they have the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, which is a branch of the USGS, has a key role in monitoring the activity and making sure people are safe, et cetera. So they go out every week, a few times a week, and map the new areas of lava by either on foot or by flying around in a helicopter and mapping the margins of the flow. So they provide this on their website as a public service. And we were lucky enough to, within a couple of weeks before our workshop, the lava flows came down close enough for us to be able to walk to. And you can walk to it from the park side, which is the west side, or from the calipana side, which is the right side of this map. And it's kind of a, you can see the flows right in the middle of the flow field there. So it's kind of a long walk to get to. It's about four and a half miles along the emergency route road there. So you walk from the green part into the center of the grave. And then you get close to the pink and red part. Yes, that's right. And when we went out last week, the tip, the red tip was probably a half mile in from where the road passes beneath it. And this emergency route actually was put in by FEMA over the last year or two. You recall when the lava flows were flowing down to the town of Pahoa, there was a lot of concern that residents of Puna would be cut off and wouldn't have a way out around the east side of the flow field. So that's why they built it. So they put the road in there, which you can't drive on, but you can walk on. Well, speaking of walking, I mean, how close can you get to that pink and red area in the map? I mean, I always felt that if you walk too close, you know, you'd see your shoes sizzle and you feel very hot in the bottom of your feet. Well, right at the end of that flow field, it's a very sedate kind of flow emplacement called Pahoehoe lava, which advances very slowly. You don't want to stand next to it particularly because the hairs on your arms will singe, but you can get within 10 feet or so, not particularly comfortably, it's very hot. Just be careful about where you're standing. You need to know what you're standing on and you need to keep an eye out at all times as to where breakouts from the flow are occurring. And for anybody who does want to go out and visit these flows, some things you need to know are it's a long hike. When you get off the road, it's very rough terrain. You need to wear long pants. You need to, it's good to have leather gloves or gardening gloves, because if you fall over when you're off the road, there's no trail or anything. You can cut yourself very easily. That's the a-ha lava. This is actually Pahoehoe lava, but when it fractures, it's very glassy and very sharp. So if you fall, you can cut yourself pretty badly. So you mentioned a-ha, o-o, and lava Pahoehoe. Pahoehoe, a-ha. Well, lava Pahoehoe is the place. Yes, it is, yeah. On the North Coast and the Hummelcourt Coast, yeah. So Pahoehoe is a very relatively smooth surface lava, but actually when it cools and fractures, it becomes very sharp. A-ha, I mean, you can walk over it pretty easily, well, relatively easily. That's the crumbly kind. A-ha is the really rough, lucky kind. Oh, it's a smooth kind. No, a-ha. Okay. All right. I have to spend more time on the big island, you know, hiking, actually. And so, you know, you talk about sites, you know, and the sites, locations are important, and I know that you're involved in the sighting, the selection of the site for the Mars rover trip, yeah? Yeah. What's that like? What are the considerations there? Well, the whole planetary community is invited to participate in selecting the next site. And any site that gets proposed has to meet a set of engineering constraints and a set of geological constraints that are defined by the mission objectives. So the engineering constraints involve things like, where is it safe to land a rover? It can't be anywhere that's too steep. It can't be anywhere that's too dust-covered because the rover might sink into the dust, and dusty areas are no good for taking measurements of rocks anyway. It can't be in an area where it's gonna land on a big rock and get stranded. It has to be in a certain latitude band, and it has to be at a certain elevation, quite a low elevation on the planet to give the parachute enough time to slow the lander down. The atmosphere is about the same as Earth? No, atmosphere is very thin on Mars. Okay. So, to use SI units, the atmosphere on Mars is 600 Pascals, whereas on Earth it's about 10,000. So it's very thin on Mars. So the parachute is not all that effective? No, I mean, it works some, but where the mission is because this, that's why they have the thrusters on the lander to slow itself down even more. So those are basically the engineering constraints, where you can go and where you can land safely. And then the geological objectives or the mission objectives for the science include things like, we wanna go to a location that has potential for preserving or the production and preservation and exposure of microbial life. Where can we go that we're most likely to discover life on Mars? Is there really a possibility of microbial life on Mars? Yes, there most certainly is. I mean, we know now that there are many areas on Mars that had liquid water, which is a key environmental need. We need water for microbial existence. Yeah, any form of life really needs water. We need somewhere that's relatively warm so that water usually has to be liquid. So we know from all of the spacecraft that have been at Mars over the last few decades, we've characterized a lot of these places very well from orbital imagery, from sensors on board the orbiting spacecraft. And we can tell what kind of environments are there in broad term. So it needs to be somewhere where we can have produced, preserved, and exposed microbial life. We're also interested. And that usually confines us to order terrains on Mars because if life arose, it was probably early. We also, the mission objectives also want to demonstrate technologies that can be used later on for future human exploration. So that has some bearing on where we go as well. And so one of the key places that we're looking at are impact craters that had hosted lakes at some point in the past. And often you'll see channels running into these lakes and those channels can bring materials and deposit them in deltas in the lake. It's those materials that you're interested in. Yes, yeah. Life could have formed in the lake or life could have been transported and deposited in the lake. And when you form deltas in standing bodies of water, you can bury and fossilize life forms very quickly. If you're not necessarily looking for life forms that are alive today, you're looking also for historic life forms that we can find evidence that was life before. Yeah, I mean it's much less likely that there is life form existing today just because it's arid and cold now. The Mars, in all likelihood, had much higher atmospheric pressure and a much warmer environment in the past. There's no possibility of a Martian then. We won't see little men running around. I just want to be clear about that. Now you're going to be at the JPL laboratory that control what do you call it, mission control there when this happens? That's right. When the lander lands, all of the co-investigators and collaborators on each of the instrument teams, so this is many hundreds of people, will all go to JPL and spend the first 90 Martian days Wow. In operations basically. This is not during the flight, but it's upon arrival. Upon arrival when we're first navigating around. It takes about a year or two to get there. It'll take something like six or seven months to get there, I believe. Okay. So not too long, but once it lands, we all go to JPL and learn how to work together as a team. After the first 90 days, we've returned to our home institutions, but we still are involved remotely because you can do everything over the internet nowadays. Yeah, speaking of which, I'd like to make a special request, okay? Sarah, you know, we have Skype here. We do a lot of shows all around the world on Skype. And when you're out there on mission control, maybe just maybe we can have one show with you. Sure. Where you talk to us from Mission Control in JPL in Pasadena, California. I see no reason not to. Tell us what's going on. Okay, I'm going to remember this. That's Sarah Fagans. She's a researcher at HICP, involved in one of the most interesting research events and experiences you could possibly imagine. Going to Mars and learning all you have to learn about equipment and sensors and what's to look for, where to go. God, these great questions. You're at the center of it. I want to be with you. Research at Minoa. Making common sensors for Mars. Sarah Fagans, thank you so much. Sure, you're welcome.