 Good evening, my name is Haley Jones. I'm a senior lecturer in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. And I'd just like to tell you a little bit about how this talk has come about tonight. I'm teaching a course in Systems Engineering Design, and we have a space theme this year. And I was put on to Miriam Baltuk, who is the current director of the Camera Deep Space Communications Complex. And she told me that she had a couple of visitors coming from NASA and that perhaps they could talk to our class or even better perhaps we could give a public lecture. So that's how this has come about. I'd also like to thank the CSIRO for partnering us with with us this evening to bring this public lecture to you. So we have two speakers this evening. I'll introduce them as they speak. And if I could ask you to leave your questions until the end. So we'll have the first speaker, then I'll introduce the second speaker, and then we'll have questions at the end. So our first speaker is Badri Yunus, who is the Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Communications and Navigation at NASA. He's responsible for NASA's space communications and navigation infrastructure and services. Mr. Yunus oversees all NASA telecommunications and navigation projects and networks, including NASA's space network, near-Earth network and deep space network. He's also responsible for the development of enabling technologies critical to meeting the agency's vision for an integrated space communications and navigation architecture, aligned with NASA's future space exploration needs. Badri is going to talk to us about NASA's vision for space communication in the 21st century and a little bit of the history of the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. Good evening, everyone, and thank you, Professor Jones. Doctor. It's a good turnout. Were you all required to come here? Will you get credit for attending? Anyway, but it's good to be with you. We've been here for a few days, and it has been so far quite a trip both in Sydney and in here. Seen a lot of progress at the Canberra Ground Station with new added capabilities that we are adding over there with the addition of new 34 demove guide and tennis. As the brochure said, I'm here to talk about the vision for the 21st century, where are we going to be in terms of telecommunication capabilities and infrastructure? But I thought in this presentation also to touch on the relationship that we've had with the Australian government, who's all of you, and the history of our relationship from the beginning to where we are now and hopefully where we are going in the future. So my office is new. Although communication and communication, infrastructure and service have existed for quite some time since the beginning of NASA. There was no NASA without communication. You couldn't send spacecraft and communicate to sign language with them. You needed communication to establish contact. But the office is recent. In the past, communication used to be driven by specific programs. So much of the infrastructure grew this way, you know, dependent on specific program requirements. And at no time they thought about, you know, combining and trying to harmonize the communication services provided to all of the NASA customers until recently. And so in 2007 they hired me. They asked me to manage the transition of all of our assets, infrastructure and services into a unified, fully integrated kind of architecture and capabilities. And this gave me oversight and control of the existing infrastructures that, you know, associated with the follow-on network, the deep space network, which I imagine all of you are familiar with it. And I hope you all have, you know, have visited the Canberra ground station and seen some of the capabilities and some of the science also supports. The Neon Earth Network, this is a network of ground station distributed around the globe, primarily in the North and South Pole to provide support to Earth's exploration missions. Those are studying the environment and the climate. And also space network. Space network consists of a number of data-related satellites distributed around the globe in geostationary orbit provided support, near real-time support. Actually, it's real-time support to missions that require this kind of support, such as human mission. Over the past three years, we've completed the development of the architecture. We also initiated the programs and the procurement activities for the capabilities that will lead to the integrated network, and I will talk about that. So what's the integrated network supposed to do? You know, it's driven by a set of requirements. Definitely among them is to unify all of the network, you know, unify them to provide support to both robotic and human missions. And why that, you know, by harmonizing, by integrating, there is a level of efficiency you can get out of this integration, and you can save some money. And with the money that you save, you can invest into new capabilities. So the networks that we have, they are pretty old. Some of them are suffering even from obsolescence problems because they have supported NASA for quite some time. They have supported the user's proficiency higher than 99.99%. So it wasn't broken, nobody tried to fix them. So but the technology evolved pretty rapidly over the past few years, and the assets were yet to catch up with the state of technology. At the same time, the appetite for more bits and more data rates and more data and higher resolution has grown exponentially, but the capabilities were still far behind. And looking at the, you know, seeing the benefit of internet, we wanted to carry this aspect into space. We wanted to have all of the assets kind of networks. There is no more point to point connection. Everything has to be network based kind of services. And they gave me the challenge to pursue the highest data rate feasible. And feasible is a dangerous term because, you know, is it technical? Is it budgetary? Is it kind of operationally feasible? So this is something they left up to me to determine. Also, we wanted to make sure that we have data communication protocols that will allow, you know, international interoperability. And because we do not operate in space alone, the cost of overhauling the data from space, be that near Earth or deep space, is not that cheap, it's pretty, pretty expensive. So we wanted to make sure that we piggyback on each other and we provide some level of cross support among all of the agencies involved. And also the responsibility extends throughout the solar system to providing support for mission on Mars, on the moon and beyond. And we needed to do all of this while maintaining the level of support we are providing to the present set of customer. We need to meet existing customer needs. It's like, you know, driving an old Chevy and you have to convert it to a Lamborghini of the future while going at 90 miles per hour. But that was doable and we've developed the architecture to doing that. So what am I talking about? These are the assets and you can see the Canberra site highlighted in red over here. But it's a combination of a number of stations providing support either to the geostationary data relay satellites or satellites or a station located up north or the north pole or down in the south pole providing support to polar orbit missions. And we have a whole set of ground station. Much of the support we get here is we procure commercially because we are under a mandate to commercialize services if the commercial market or commercial sector can provide it. So a portion of our business depend on the availability of commercial providers. So all of these assets that have evolved over time independently using different technology, different standard, different interfaces. Now I'm being asked to pull them together, integrate them and harmonize the software, the hardware and push in the commonality that exists among all of them as high up as they can. So I established an 80% level of commonality among all of them, leaving 20% kind of range for the uniqueness of some of these services because deep space support is governed by certain laws of physics, same way for near Earth and for providing support from data relay satellite. For that, for these kind of uniqueness, 20% will not disturb the whole business case for unifying and integrating all of these assets. Definitely over the past so many years we have relied on microwave connectivity between the assets and the mission that we support. And by the year 2015 I'm introducing optical communication to NASA's telecommunication infrastructure. It's going to be, we are going to start with some support to our mission. It's a demonstration, technology demonstration to a mission that we are sending to orbit the moon. It will not be there for too long, but we want to see the viability of the link and to gain experience commanding and controlling a spacecraft using optical communication. Still, in terms of microwave connection we are moving ahead with going up in the spectrum. As our appetite for data rate goes up, so that the need for wider capacity, channel capacity to accommodate a high data rate. So we are pushing and we are mandated that all missions flying post 2016 to move to migrate to the KA band. That does not mean we are going to leave the X band and the lower frequency band because they still have their value and they will still be needed for the future. But for all of these missions that require high data rate and need to outcome, they need to be, they need to have much wider bandwidths. They need to move up. The KA band is much larger than the, as you go up in the frequency band you will have more frequencies available to you than the lower frequency. There is plenty of contention at the lower frequency range and that's where you see much of your mobile devices be that broadband or cellular telephony. They're all competing and there's big contention for that prime real estate, we call prime real estate in the spectrum. All of this creates a lot of noise, you know. So you have so many RF devices operating in certain frequency range, whether in band or around the outside those bands they are going to create a level of interference that might not be suitable for space operation. You know, when we send a mission to deep space, the signal level received on the ground is pretty small and later on you will hear from General Tatini and it will give you a certain perspective on how small that signal. And that's why, you know, it's like listening to someone talking from across the room, the further they are that, you know, the harder you are going to hear them. And so we use some bigger ears, some magnifications, some cones, you know, to try to be more directive toward them and hear them more. So the further you go, the bigger the ear you need and that's what we get out of the 70 meter antennas. As we started to go move away from Earth, our antennas started to grow and grow and grow. Definitely there is a boundary after which the cost of implementing these big ears, you know, becomes so prohibitive. And that's why we are moving to optical communications. Optical communication provides orders of magnitude, better performance, it can allow the missions themselves, you know, to have more flexibility because you are reducing the burden on them. You have a smaller payload that consume less power, occupy less volume and it weighs less. So you have more room to add more scientific instruments on board the spacecraft. So we are making the push toward a technology that can meet the needs in the near Earth as well as the deep space. And this is the kind of optical technology we are pursuing, it relies on detecting single photons because if you are to operate from deep space, you are operating in a photon-starved environment. You don't have much energy, every photon counts. So we are working on this kind of technology where you can receive single photons. Definitely the technology, you know, involves superconductivity and so on if you are to really detect this kind of low voltage, you need something that's extremely sensitive to this kind of voltage variation. And later on, by the year 2025, you know, we are definitely going to move ahead with optical communication, you know, still the microwave links will still be, you know, the horsepower needed to meet all of NASA's needs. But, you know, this is the time we are going to transition and we are going to ramp up in optical communication. At the beginning, we are going to come down to the ground. You know, we have the kind of technology that will allow us to penetrate the atmosphere and get adequate reception on the ground. But as we move further and further into deep space, you know, where every single DB start to count, we are going to move with these receivers instead of having them on the ground to move them up into geostation orbit, possibly orbit well beyond that at the L1, L2. So the future looks great from a communication perspective, you know, in terms of having the kind of receivers that will allow us to accommodate much higher data rate than today and will allow the mission to trade that high data rate with weight and power requirement on this spacecraft. All of this is going to be supported with a communication protocol that's suitable for austere environment where you are liable to have plenty of blockages and interruption of the signal. And because of the cost of this link, it's pretty expensive. Every blockage can end up costing you a lot. And because you don't have that many answers, you want to assure that the message that you are sending from Mars, from Saturn, from anywhere that will make it to its final destination. So we have been working on a new type of protocol that's suitable for this kind of application. The protocol is called disruptive or disruption tolerant networking. And we are working this protocol with a gentleman that you all probably have heard of. His name is Vince Cerf. If you are familiar with Cerf in the internet, he is the father of the internet. So this kind of protocol will provide, will provide us, will allow us order magnitude better performance than today. It will maximize the virtual capacity that we have by many times, depending on the environment. And all of this because sometime we are going to send these missions into deep space and going to Jupiter, for example, it takes five, six years to get there. So what is the mission requirement change? Before you get there, you need to allow for some reconfiguration to take place on board the spacecraft. So we are moving more and more towards software-defined radios. We are also going and getting into the cognitive radios. And actually we are going into the intelligent radios. Radios that can learn by themselves, can adapt, can reconfigure themselves, dependent on the characteristic of the environment where they are operated. So from a telecommunication perspective, the future looks great. We expect, we have the technology, we have the processing capability. With the Vertex 6 and Vertex 7, you have these kinds of super-duper processors. They consume a lot of energy, but they can manipulate the extreme amount of, or a high amount of data and bits. And all of this is available. And in the next year, I will be launching a payload. We are, we used to call it Connect, but it's most, it's primarily a testbed. It has a number of software-defined radios on board to include a GPS receiver and a few other capabilities that we are going to put on the space station. And I have a number of space agencies that we are working with that have already signed up to partner with us on fully exploiting this payload and to test new waveforms and to build a huge library of waveforms that are suitable to all kind of environment as well as to test a whole new set of communication protocols. As well as to advance the radio navigation and the position determination and trying to extract a lot of that to service science and the measurement that we make. And I'm going to speed it up because I know that, okay. So that takes me to the second part. And I know that General Tatini will expand on is the Deep Space Network. The Deep Space Network is the major component of our infrastructure. It evolves over time. And actually, it was among the oldest of our network. It started in the 50s. Remember, early was the launch of Sputniks when the Russian, the Soviets back then launched Sputnik. That started the space race. And that's when we started and you will see later as I go through the tally of all of the ground sites that we built and we collaborated with you, all with your government is that it was in response to that, you know, and aligned with that space race. So the DSN started in the late 50s and it grew to encompass three main ground station distributed worldwide, separated by 120 degrees and all together 360, that's full circle. So they provide around the clock coverage to all of the Deep Space Mission. And their support is not necessarily just, you know, the Deep Space Mission, but also anything from geostationary all the way up. They are located in Goldstone, California, Madrid, Spain, and you all know Canberra. Have you been to Canberra? So these are some of the missions that we are, you know, that probably some of you are familiar with and they are some of the recent one. But you can see the oldest one is was launched in 1977. Remember VJ Voyager? Some of us believe that it's already went beyond the solar system. Some others are arguing now still, still have few more years to go. But guess what, we are still supporting it. It's so far away that, you know, it's voice coming down here, we can only hear it a bit at a time. So when we try to focus our antennas and we use these big ears, 70 meter antennas, you know, it takes us a long time to distinguish and to recognize its voice and to start because it takes time to integrate the amount of energy received on the antenna. Therefore, you know, supporting this mission has been very challenging because it takes a long time on our asset. But, you know, and at one time they made me, they had me or they put me in a position to choose whether to terminate the mission or not because of the cost of supporting it. And, you know, so I asked myself the question, what if we make contact tomorrow? Can I bear the burden of terminating something that took 20 some years to get to where it is now? I will let it die on its own and I will keep on supporting this mission as long as I can and we will swallow the cost. It's not a problem. And the most recent mission is Kepler. Kepler is a fantastic mission. And by the way, it's probably the first mission that we support in KA band and that showed the transition and our evolution and the frequency spectrum from S to X now, the KA. But Kepler is, you know, is our eye into the universe trying to look at other planets to see whether there are other planets similar to Earth. And I guess Gerard Tatini will touch on some of that. Additionally, you'll have plenty of mission that you are familiar with some probably, such as the Mars exploration and the some, recently we had the messenger, you know, making contact with and being inserted into the orbit of Mercury. So, as I said, you know, Starved All was the explorer, explorer one and the two, you know, JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, that Gerard Tatini is presently the deputy center director and he will elaborate on some of that later. And they were ready, you know, as soon as the president, you know, challenged NASA and the scientific community to respond to, you know, or to engage in the space race, they were ready to launch Explorer One. And that's where they started the buildup of the asset needed to provide that control and command of the spacecraft. And they looked 120 degrees away from Goldstone. Goldstone was the first site where they started. And they saw something like in Australia, prime real estate, people who spoke English and nice folks doing, you know, extremely smart and you can work with and pretty good allies. And that was a natural choice for them to target Australia. And the relation has been growing ever since. So it started in Womera and you can see in here how some of these states were driven by specific programs and mission. You know, they were not built to support every mission, specific programs. And that's why programs were burdened, you know, with the cost of every infrastructure or telecommunication infrastructure needed to support their mission. So, you know, so you have so much redundancy. Each program will have to pay the cost of its own infrastructure. That was a costly operation. But back then it was a space race. Money didn't matter. Just spent as much money, but get us there first. And we succeeded and we succeeded tremendously. And so many of these stations, you see that evolution. We start with support and mission. We show some success. Then we move on, you know. Womera ceased operation in 1972. Then you had Buchia and Canarvon. Also the same thing started in the 60s. And they closed around... Buchia closed in 64. Provided support to Project Mercury while Canarvon closed in 1974. Kubi Creek also, same timeframe, 1966. And they were providing support to a variety of technology-driven application to include, you know, space observation and environmental measurements. Also the station did not stay too long. It closed in 1970. And we'll see why. Because we were building other capabilities elsewhere that were growing and allowed us to integrate much of these capabilities somewhere else. Honeysuckle also was one of these stations that came about around the same timeframe, 1967. Supported the Apollo mission. And, you know, that's where we received the first pictures. You know, as you all remember, later on was the parks antenna. They received the first pictures and they heard the first, you know, they were the first to hear the astronauts as they landed on the moon, you know. Oral Valley, you know, it's another station that provided support for near-Earth mission, in particular the human spaceflight. Before we had the data relay satellites that are distributed around the Earth, looking down at the missions, as they enter the atmosphere and whatever. We had to support them from the ground. From the ground, our visibility of the sky is pretty limited. So we needed so many of these stations distributed around the globe. The Oral Valley was, you know, one station out of 30 that provided that continuous coverage of the human spaceflight. It closed in 1985 when we had the first data relay satellite launched. Park antenna, it's not part of the NASA, you know, infrastructure, but nevertheless it supported our exploration and our programs, as well as our deep space missions. And Tidbinbilla, that's where we are now. The future looks for Tidbinbilla. We have made the commitment to invest more money to build additional capabilities over there. It's going to be homogeneous with the other networks. It's going to have at a minimum 534 beam wave guide and tenets. And the beauty about beam wave guide and tenets, they are so flexible and robust, because you have the, you know, much of the feed, you put them at the base of the antennas. And so you can add as many of them as you want, while the other kind of antennas, you have to put them on top of the dish and you're making you lose real estate and additionally they are not as flexible and robust. This is a camera as it looks today. This is where we started last year. We broke ground for the location of the new antennas. There will be an antenna completed in 14, another one in 16, another one in 18. There will be 534 beam wave guide antennas in addition to the 70 meter, the existing 70 meter antenna. We don't know what to do with it, but it's going to remain part of the capability until we find requirements that will drive this continuous operation. This is our website. So you are all invited to visit it. You'll have much of this information, as well as you get to see the technology that we are evolving. And I hope, you know, some of you will get into this line of work and pursue this kind of discipline from RF system engineering to technology development. If you do so, call me. Thank you. That was really interesting to hear about how you move forward with the technologies into a microwave and optical and changing the protocols as well. Okay, I'd like to introduce our second speaker for the evening, General Jean Tatini, who is the Deputy Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. He's responsible for the day-to-day management of JPL's resources and activities, including managing the laboratory's solar system acceleration, Mars, astronomy, physics, earth science, and interplanetary network programs, and all business operations. Jean is going to talk to us about NASA's vision for robotic space exploration. And I should bring up your talk, shouldn't we? Thank you very, very much. Good evening to you all. It's a real privilege for me to be here with you tonight. I'm a retired Air Force guy. I spent 36 years in United States Air Force, the last 20 some doing military space things. And then I transitioned over to the Jet Propulsion Lab in a follow-on career that has been absolutely marvelous. I tell you that only to say that I've had the privilege of being in your country many, many times, both with my Air Force hat on as well as with my JPL hat on. And it is a marvelous, marvelous place. And I try to get back as often as I possibly can. It's interesting, you know, you realize that my colleague, Badri, came from the headquarters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington, D.C. And like a typical headquarters guy, he pointed out at least four things that I'm going to talk about, but then took all my time. So we will... By the way, when we have an opportunity to talk with younger people at the high school age and talk about what they want to do when they go to university, I counsel two things. I say, you know, one, if at all possible, you should try to get an undergraduate degree in applied physics. And you should understand calculus. You do those two things, you can solve the mysteries of the universe. And then as I later on, as I've been into this, I do an indendum and I said, in addition to that, you absolutely have to take a systems engineering course at some point in your career. Let me press on with this if I may. I'm going to talk a little bit about the challenges of interplanetary deep space exploration, and then I'll give you a preview of what's happening within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration relative to the JPL portfolio of launches as we go forward. Paid political advertisement for JPL. It was founded as an operating division of the California Institute of Technology back in the mid-1930s when Professor von Karman brought some of his students into an arroyo in Pasadena, California to do rocket research, both solid and liquid propellant rocket research. That was right at the very, very beginnings of the Second World War. We morphed into an army research and development lab doing a lot of rocket research into the Cold War, again doing a lot of anti-aircraft missile rocketry kinds of things with surface-to-air missile sergeant, Nike, Ajax, those kinds of things. And then in October 1957, the then Soviet Union launched Sputnik. It certainly changed the way the entire world looked at space, especially the politicians and especially those in the military. January of 1958, Caltech at the time with its JPL operating division launched the first United States Earth Orbiting Artificial Satellite, Explorer I. That put the United States into space. Under the Eisenhower administration in 1958, they passed what we refer to as the National Space Act. It reassigned the Jet Propulsion Lab then from an army research and development lab to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. That's where we are today. That's what Caltech does. We are a federal lab. All of the desks, the chairs, the tables, the land, the buildings are owned by the federal government. All of us that have the privilege of working at JPL are university employees. We all work for Caltech. And as I tell people, there are only two people at the Jet Propulsion Lab that don't have a doctorate degree. You know, the deputy director, me, and the janitor. The difference is the janitor is working on his dissertation as we go forward. So I am not the scientist here with you this evening. Now on the next slide just tells you where the Jet Propulsion Lab is today. We are operating 19 spacecraft as we visit this evening and nine major instruments. As we go forward, I'll talk for a minute about the dawn mission. I'll talk about where we are in Mars. I'll talk about the Stardust NEX program. And I'll talk about the deep impact mission that we recently concluded. But as Bodry pointed out, we have a number of spacecraft both in orbit around our particular planet or in orbit around Mars, in orbit around Titan. And we also have those two Voyager spacecraft somewhere out there. There is a debate as to whether or not they are still under the influence of the star that we are under the influence of or whether or not they are in deep interstellar space. We're not sure of that. But I will talk about that. Now before we get to that, let's talk for a second about some of the challenges. Probably when you're talking about deep space exploration, distance and time are your two greatest enemies. And this just gives you some idea of how long it takes to transit 100 million miles from Earth to Mars. And if you were with Lewis and Clark, as they explored the Northwest Passage of the United States with their canoes and on foot, it would have taken you about 40,000 years. If you were with Columbus as he sailed, the Dunedin to Pintin to Santa Maria, it would have taken what, about 10,000 years. That Z240 is a little sports car that belongs to my boss. He claims that it'll go 55 miles an hour. I don't think so because it's about a 1968 vintage sports car. At 55 miles an hour, it would take him about 175 years to make the trek from this planet to the planet Mars. Even today, when we launch the Mars Science Lab on the 24th of November of this year with all of the energy and the specific impulse generated by a Delta IV heavy rocket launch vehicle, it will still take over nine months to get from here to Mars, realizing that the only way we can do that is once every 24 to 27 months as the planets line up and give us that kind of a launch opportunity. That is a real challenge to us today and it is a real challenge to those folks who have to pay for the launch vehicles that get us into space. And if there's any one of you out in the audience today that can come up with a big slingshot that doesn't cost a lot of money to get us up there, we'll buy one from you, okay? Now, the next part of this is navigation. And navigating in an interstellar space is something that very few people can do well and that's one of the core competencies of the Jet Propulsion Lab. When these men and women worked the Mars exploration rovers, both Curiosity and Opportunity, they traveled 450 million miles and put us at a point of entry into the Martian atmosphere plus and minus about 80 meters of where we should have been. Okay? And that like to use a golf course analogy. That's like teeing off at the Royal Course down in Melbourne and putting a golf ball on a green at St. Andrews close enough for a tap-in birdie, okay? Well, both the tee and the green are also moving at about 60,000 miles per hour. That's what the JPL navigators are capable of doing. And how do they do that? They do that with mathematics, okay? So tell that if you have youngsters at home, if you have grandkids at home like I do, tell that to those folks, okay? It is all the power of navigation. Now, Bob re-indicated to you that I was going to talk a second about communications. This is just the example that we use. Of course, we have Cassini in orbit around Saturn as we visit this evening. If you transmitted with a 40 watt transmitter over a billion miles from Saturn back to the Earth, okay? You would. I'm going to have to put my glasses on to look at this. By the time that 40 watts of transmission got to the Earth, it would be one billionth of a billionth watt, okay? You take that one billionth of a billionth, of a billionth watt then, and it would take 200 quadrillion, okay? Or 15 zeros after the 200 to provide enough wattage for a 30 watt refrigerator light bulb. And it is that kind of capability that the men and women of the deep space networks, not only here at Canberra and Tidbinbilla, but also in Spain and also in California can do. And as with their large antennas and with the technologies that they bring to bear there, remember that you cannot fly in interstellar space without bringing the information back. It would be a waste of everybody's time. So let me go through a couple of recently completed missions. There have been in our history only five comets that have been imaged by a fly-by spacecraft. Of that five, the Jet Propulsion Lab assets have imaged four of them. One of them is shown here on the slide. This is a comet Haley II. It is the fifth and most recent comet that has been imaged by a fly-by spacecraft, something we call epoxy one. This was done in November of last year. What we did is we recycled the deep space spacecraft, and I'll talk some more about that in a subsequent slide. And the navigators took it and said, we think there's enough fuel left where we can re-orbit this thing and get a fly-by of Haley II. It's the first time that a single spacecraft, the deep impact spacecraft, has imaged two different comets. So that's one mission to a comet. Another mission to a comet is something we call Stardust Next. And on Valentine's Day of this year, Stardust Next then flew by the comet Temple I. Temple I was a comet that was impacted by a projectile launched from the deep impact spacecraft on the 4th of July, 2005. And we then took the spacecraft, re-oriented it, flew it through both in a photographic mission as well as a spectroscopy mission to try to understand what the ejecta was like coming out of the crater that we caused. And then five years later, we went back to that and re-imaged it again with the Stardust spacecraft, and what you see up here in the slide on the next view graph is an image on what would be on your right of the deep impact spacecraft and on your left the Stardust Next spacecraft and the orientation that the space navigators had to make to geolocate the crater on the comet from both of those different camera angles and images. And what these folks found then is that there has been very little change over the five-year period of time to the crater impact. And although they do see a little bit, the two craters about 300 meters in depth help the scientists locate the areas hit by the impactor and they talk about a composite image. It is about 100, the image shown in the middle, there's a bright dot right up here gives you some indication as the subsurface of that particular comet. So that's the two, I said comet, the two asteroids that we looked at. Now let's turn our attention to the Cassini spacecraft. It orbits around Saturn. This particular image talks to the moon Titan. And I think we're up now. The Cassini mission has discovered in the neighborhood of about 52 moons in the Ceterian system, Titan being one of the more interesting because of the methane there for many, many years, for about the past 20 years or so, the scientific community was conjecturing the hypothesis was it did have liquid methane lakes on the surface of the moon Titan. And then in on the 22nd of January 2006 when we then took these images that confirmed that scientific hypothesis. And in fact on the planet Titan there is a climological cycle. It actually rains there. The difference just like it does here on our planet, the differences are it rains methane, methane lakes. And just to one of the other things that I want to point out, this is the radar image that has been unprocessed, if you will. And then what you look at on your right is a process colorized image that helps us visualize a lot better the scientific information that we're getting back from the Cassini spacecraft as we go forward. Now one word about Earth science and it's been interesting listening to your news the last several nights on your release of a study about relative to climate change. We're not going to get into that this evening. We are not going to talk about that. But what we will talk a little bit about is what space born instrumentation can bring to the debate and change a lot of conjecture to fact as we continue to develop the climological record in these areas over a long enough period of time where we can draw some very good highly competent scientific opinion. If you just start up on your left and you walk your way through the air's instrument measure global temperature you do an awful lot of ozone tracking with that particular spacecraft. Jason will give you global sea height. Grace is a gravity mapper of this planet. Grail, which I'll talk about in a moment is an upcoming gravity mapper of the lunar surface using the same technology. You go up here, quick stat will give you surface winds so you have ocean height, ocean temperature winds over the ocean. You can do an awful lot of scientific investigation with those kind of data points. Moving down the miser gives you aerosol tests will give you ozone MSL will give you stratospheric chemistry and then finally cloud set which is the latest one we have gives you moisture profiling in the clouds on a vertical slice. So that's just a taste of some of the Earth science missions that JPL and the NASA have flying today to try to answer these kinds of questions and better develop the modeling on some of these kind of questions that are being debated by your government today at least on the TV and in the media as it go forward. Now this is what we're doing this is what we have done let me switch gears here and talk for a second about what's going to happen within the next nine months from a JPL perspective alone and in the next nine months we're going to launch four, five separate missions and have a fairly major encounter with a spacecraft called Dawn and we'll just let me take you through those if I may. The first is something called Aquarius it is a sea salinity spacecraft developed in conjunction with the Argentinian Space Agency an organization called CONI we developed the instruments the folks down in Argentina developed the spacecraft itself it was assembled in South America and there is a picture of it being assembled crated, shipped via C-17 from Brazil it is now at Vandenberg Air Force Base undergoing a number of tests as we build the spacecraft up integrated on a Delta II and then it will launch on the 9th of next month and it will go into a polar orbit and it will give you a lot of information on ocean salinity which gives you information on density and then you draw conclusions from there probably one of the more interesting missions that we have coming up is something called Dawn Dawn will orbit two of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt it would be the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a main belt asteroid it will be the first spacecraft to ever orbit two different asteroids in the same mission and it will also visit a series which we define now as a dwarf planet what enables that is is ion electric propulsion and the spacecraft was launched in September of 2007 and then on the 16th of July of this year it will be captured by the gravity field of Vesta and go in orbit around Vesta for about a year leave Vesta go to series and go in orbit around series that is something that we are really looking forward to probably in an engineering perspective but not as much as a scientist are looking forward to some of the information we'll get back from there Juno, this is the cover of Aviation Week in March of this year a very very good image of the Juno spacecraft Juno is a solar powered spacecraft it will go further into our solar system with solar powered than any other spacecraft that we have ever flown that's another way of saying that there is a massive array of solar panels on this particular spacecraft it is down at it was built at Martin Marietta in I'm sorry it was built by Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado it is now down in Florida going through its final checkouts in preparation for launch next year this again will show you a picture of the vault all of the instrumentation because of the radiation fields around the planet Jupiter are captured in a vault this is the vault that is open now on a turntable and then one of the solar wings is sewn there on the right it will give you some idea of the size of this particular spacecraft as it goes to Juno it is about a six year transit to the planet because of the radiation environment that it will fly through we have a one year mission planned for Juno around the planet Jupiter as we go from there recall now we are going this is not going to happen in years this is going to happen in the next several months as we go through this one of the big issues as a deputy director what if I have an off nominal condition in one of these spacecraft how do we work our engineering community to make sure we can problem solve while at the same time continue to meet the launch windows that I'm going to continue to talk to you about for just a second this is grail grail is too small spacecraft that will fly information around the lunar surface and give you a lot of indication as to the gravity field on the moon which gives you an awful lot of indication in terms of what's going on in the subsurface areas there the principal investigator for this is a professor at MIT and the individual that's doing the education and public outreach the first female United States astronaut in space a woman by the name of Sally Wright so you will see a lot of that as we go forward now probably the sum total of the missions that we talk about here dollar wise is in the billion to a billion and a quarter dollars in terms of US taxpayer resources I'll now talk about the Mars Science Lab program this is about a 2.3 billion dollar program that is being executed organically to the Jet Propulsion Lab what we show here is a rover family on your right is Pathfinder the first one of the rovers that we actually landed on the surface and operated that's about the size of a bread box if you will this week in the middle is one of our two rovers spirit and opportunity that's about the size of a golf cart and then on the far left on your far left is our Mars Science Lab program in a naming contest it has been named Curiosity so as it launches and flies out to Mars you will hear it referred to by that name instead of the Mars Science Lab program this is the identity of the size this is Curiosity in our spacecraft assembly facility at the Jet Propulsion Lab it will launch on the 24th of November the 25th of November the day after Thanksgiving on a Delta IV as I mentioned from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and on a webcam well it's we're just getting ready to ship but you can get on a webcam at JPL and watch the activities in our spacecraft assembly facility this is a little bit about some of the mobility testing that we have this is in its fly out configuration on the top is the cruise stage the back shell and then the heat shield and the rover itself is kind of in an origami fold inside of there this is how it is going to sky crane down to the surface we'll release it we parachute it down the sky crane then activates and there are retro rockets of fire it is lowered from the sky crane once the sensor sends impact on the Martian surface some explosive bolts will fire the sky crane will fly off and voila we're doing science on the surface of Mars or what we hope will be many many years there's wet chemistry there a lot of biological kinds of things on the surface now you can't do any of this without the deep space network the reason we're here today is because of the DSN and Bodri again talked to you a lot about that the DSN has looked at it as an infrastructure program we fight every day for resources to get that now my final slide is kind of a mix of technology, art engineering and science this is the Crab Nebula it was first observed on earth in the year 1054 AD and it is basically the remains of a supernova if you will it is about 6000 light years away so when the Chinese first saw it in 1054 it actually happened about 5000 years before Christ okay I won't go into some detail because she's giving me the hook here but what is interesting about this particular image is that the light blue there is from the Chandrian X-ray telescope the Hubble Space Telescope optical image is in the green and dark blue and the Spitzer Telescope which is in the infrared provided the image in the red as we colorize this and put this together so with that I thank you very very much for your attention and I look forward to Bodri answering all the questions, thank you thank you Jean that was really interesting my students have actually been looking at colonizing Mars so I hope if there are any of them here they got something out of that are there any questions for either of our speakers I'll tell you what I have in my pocket a JPL coin and I'll give this coin to the first person that asks a question of Dr. Jones do I have a taker? there we go come on that would be a good coin anyway we converged on the 1550 it's safe from an impact to the eyes and whatever as opposed to the lore 1550 nano do you think NASA has a lot of eyes and blood? I couldn't hear all of that he said with NASA prioritizing a lot of its operations now is that going to put a risk to the quality? I want to let the headquarters talk about the policy part in general we do manage and operate we rely on commercial services but with NASA we are still in charge we rely for deep space we rely on the jet propulsion lab to provide the power in terms of engineering and management but at no time we relinquish control we are still being controlled these spacecraft and the assets that we have definitely they do not cost a dollar or two you are talking billions of dollars the safety of property and the protection of this investment is our responsibility to the taxpayers you might say a word to the privatized launch team it's a new endeavor we expect to get a competitive rate and definitely the commercial sector in the past when challenged was able to respond in a very efficient way so we are hoping that this will be the case and will reduce the cost of launch to NASA as well as to the commercial sector the power is going to come from RTGs it's going to be nuclear powered plutonium 238 and the facts of the matter are with the rovers themselves the spirit and opportunity we thought that the failure mode was going to be that the Martian dust was going to cover the solar panels and in fact end its life that way and we were absolutely wrong there because we didn't anticipate the little dust devils we expected as a broom and swept it clean the fact of the matter is though the instrument suite that we have on MSL has to be nuclear powered in order to do the kinds of science we'd like to do on the surface in addition we are looking at the five years of operation and for that you really need this kind of power generation the rovers are in their seventh year of operation what would I like to see next there's a couple of three things you know one we at JPL would love to see a large radar program that will do a lot of natural hazard kind of work for us we would also like to see a fully funded flagship outer planet mission to the moons of Titan and the Jovian system and third if I was king for a day we'd also like to have some kind of nuclear powered spacecraft that's the only way you're ever really going to get humans out of low earth orbit and into Mars and other places so you mentioned something about intelligent radios self-configuring radios can you give us a bit more what stage of development do they have well the cognitive radio is essentially a radio that can adapt to this environment we have it in the lab and should see the day of light or the light of day within the next two to three years the intelligent radio is a concept that will take that further to you know and I expected to be ready by the 2020 timeframe did I answer your question it's a radio that can work with this environment collect data and make its own decision by itself while the cognitive it's a radio that can adapt you have some adaptive processes that will allow it to adapt to the environment it's in between the software configured kind of dumb radio and extremely smart and the software defined radio is as good as the programmers and our ability to reconfigure it on the fly I did not hear this something goes wrong to the White House for an RTG power machine and we have done analysis after analysis after analysis in terms of the safety of that particular line and how it would stand both an on-pad accident all the way through an accident as it goes into the first stage for it so that's how you do it oh safety is definitely among our first priority that's why everything we do is very expensive because it goes through a number of redundant processes to ensure the safety so even if an explosion to take place on board the spacecraft that particular module is protected will not leak will not diffuse any of the energy that contains what if you've got the three tracking stations because we are not the only ones that operate and support deep space mission we rely we piggyback on the capabilities that provided by other space agencies if we cannot do it with the two remaining stations and for the most part we have been able to meet our own needs and the load that we have on the network with two with two stations just in case one of them shut down and unable to provide that support again if we have critical maneuvers and we require coverage at certain point in space that cannot be provided by the other two stations we talk to the Japanese space agency we talk to the Indian we talk to everyone and we build that into our schedule and that you want to make absolutely sure you have coverage of so what you try to do in that regard through our navigators and the guys who do the orbits is put that in a view of more than one station at any one time but you know there is so much redundancy out there also that a complete failure of a station both with its 70 meters and its 34 meter antennas is fairly remote it does happen stations have more than just one antenna and when you have critical maneuver they take the highest priority in terms of support so there are always assets to provide that coverage I think we just have one more question so can you say that louder if there has been an impact with the spacecraft from some sort of debris in space at all well I don't know for deep space mission to have I mean you most of this you worry about is in low earth orbit and up the geo but you do have micrometeor hits all the time we have as a matter of fact we brought back a piece of the Hubble Space Telescope and examined it and it was just peppered with micrometeor right hits we had the two communication satellites that we almost had a collision with that has opened up a lot of cooperation in this the private sector in terms of a lot of what they're doing there the Air Force Base Command has a lot of ephemeral cataloging information out of pride to avoid those kind of things it's getting crowded up there in certain parts of the geo belt and you do have to watch that to add to what the general is saying every time we fly the shuttle it comes down we can see the impact of these little even a speck of dust up on orbit with something going at 20,000 mile per hour can cause some damage and we have an active program to track every single speck of dust up there we track it down to the millimetre level and we try to avoid the areas where there's plenty of debris and we have an active program now to do more detection tracking of these we call them debris but for the most part they are near Earth's object that are floating in space and we try to also avoid the situation where collision may take place between two space assets that will create more of these debris but definitely we have plenty of eyes at looking up to ensure that as our spacecraft cross they haven't they avoid these debris that could be on their way I think we'll have to call it a day there so please do a minute thank you