 Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us today. This is the second press conference of EGU 23, which is the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. I'm Gillian D'Souza. I'm EGU's media and communications officer and I would like to welcome our wonderful speakers today. I will quickly go into introducing them in a couple of minutes, but I wanted to share that this year we've got about 17,000 abstracts submitted to EGU's meeting and our press conferences are here to highlight some of the best and most unique studies with you. So each press conference will have time for speakers to make their presentations followed by a question and answer period at the end. If you're joining us virtually, then save your questions to the end and we will come to you in the last 10 to 15 minutes of the press conference. So I'm going to now go ahead and introduce speakers to make for faster transitions. This press conference is titled Emirates Mars Mission. First results from Deimos Mars' mysterious moon. Our speakers today are Hessa Al Matrushi from she's the Emirates Mars Mission Science Deputy Project Manager, Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Center Dubai UAE. Then we have Justin Deegan, who's research scientist, laboratory for atmospheric and space physics, University of Colorado Boulder, US. And then we have Christopher, who's associate professor, department of astronomy and planetary science, Northern Arizona University, US. And we are now ready to hear from all three of them. But before that, we have a super cool stunning video for you to kick things off. So when we have the slides loaded, feel free to just jump in and take over. Thank you. Okay. The mic is working. Yes. Okay. So welcome everyone. We're here to present the first results that we got from the Deimos campaign from the Emirates Mars Mission. I would like first to start and introduce the Emirates Mars Mission Science. So we started the science phase in 2021, and the mission was designed to study the Martian atmosphere for a full Martian year. So we're able to get a comprehensive image of the Martian atmosphere and its layer to study it through all the seasons and to understand what's happening from day to night for a full Martian year. For that, we do have three scientific objectives. We're looking into the weather systems in the lower atmosphere. We're looking into the upper atmosphere. It's the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And we're even studying the link in between them. This is why the mission was designed. And for that, we do have three scientific instruments. The first one is called the Emirates Mars infrared spectrometer. So this is where we're looking at Mars from the Thurman infrared band. And we're taking information about the lower atmosphere. The second one is the Emirates Exploration Imager EXI. This is where we're taking beautiful, visible images of Mars. And we do have bands on the ultraviolet as well. And then the third one is the Emirates Mars ultraviolet spectrometer. This is the instrument that we're using to look at Mars from the extreme ultraviolet and the far ultraviolet, studying the upper atmosphere of Mars. Using these instruments and the science objectives that we had, the mission was designed to give us novel science, a new science that is needed from the community to get the first. And the first thing that we aim to is to get the first global seasonal and urinal coverage of the full Martian year for the Martian atmosphere. So you can see from the plots that we have in here, that we do have a full coverage, seasonal coverage. We do look at Mars globally from the different instrumentations and bands. And while we do have such beautiful coverage and comprehensive one, we're able to get discoveries as well from the viewpoint that we had. So we were able to get our first global views of the aurora, where we discovered the sinuous discreet aurora, as well as the patchy proton aurora. And we were able to look at things that we haven't expected, like we're looking at complex structures in the upper atmosphere, things that we haven't seen before. So what I'm trying to say is the mission is unique in the way that it looks at Mars, and it's revealing events and phenomena that we haven't seen before. Summarizing the science that we have done in numbers. So we have 20, more than 20 scientific papers published in peer review and under review right now. We have more than 115 participations and conferences since Mars orbits insertions. So we're always talking about the results that we're doing from this mission. We have more than two terabyte worth of data publicly available for researchers and scientists to use. And we have seen a lot of engagement as well from the public using the data. And there is more than 4.5 terabyte of data that had been downloaded and we've seen a lot of engagement in social media people using the data, which we're very proud of. With all the science, this was enabled by a very unique orbit in comparison to other Mars missions. The orbit that we have from Hope has a very wide elliptical shape. It's 20,000 kilometers by 43,000 kilometers. And what you can see in there is an opportunity to absorb data very close by an opportunity that wasn't available to spacecraft before because they were very much close to Mars. So we've seen this opportunity and we knew that this is something that we want to do, but we were focusing on the primary science objectives until we came into the end of the primary science mission, which is to think of this year, where we saw a fit time to absorb the Martian moon, Deimos. So let me give you some information about the Deimos campaign. So we started this campaign late January this year. We had our closest approach to Deimos at around 100 kilometers on March 10, 2023. So about a month and a half before. We took observations for Deimos from our three scientific instruments. And for us to get this result, we've made minor maneuvers, three of them, to the orbit. The orbit didn't change in terms of shapes, but these minor maneuvers enabled us to have a closer look at Deimos, and it enabled future opportunities to look at Deimos after this encounter. We're promising more data to come on Deimos as well. And the good thing that we're very excited about that our science has been consistent, although like we're making Deimos observations with made small maneuvers, this is not impacting our science observations. So we will still sample the Martian atmosphere as we used to do in the primary science mission. So why we're observing the Deimos as a moon? What's exciting about it? So Deimos is one of the two Martian moon. It's the smaller one and it's the further away from it. It's because of these two things, it had been less observed so we don't have a lot of information about it. Not a lot of measurements have been done before. And there is the debate and science questions open about the origins of both Deimos and Phobos, like where they captured asteroids, or are they coming from Mars impact debris? So these open questions, there is an opportunity to get them answered using the observations that were given. This is the science motivation behind this campaign. And now I would like to give the floor to Justin, which will give us insight on what we've been able to achieve throughout the Deimos campaign. All right. Thank you, Hessa. So as Hessa said, I will start walking through the observations that we've collected with EMM and then I'll turn it over to Christopher. So, first of all, it's worth walking through how we observe Deimos. So this is a flyby. This is some of the closest flybys since the 70s when the Viking orbiters first observed Deimos. We're able to do many more of these than previous missions for the reasons that Hessa described. And what we have up on the screen here is a short animation of images taken by the EXI instrument. So this is using one of its visible filters. And you can see the geometry of the flyby in the panel on the right. This is to scale. And so hopefully it will. There we go. So you can see the spacecraft comes in. And this is the approach at closest approach. We were just about 100 kilometers away from the object. And you can see Mars there in the background. And then we move away again. And so you can see that in order to observe Deimos continuously, we had to rotate the spacecraft. All three instruments are on an observation deck. And we're able to simultaneously observe throughout this time period. And we'll let that run through one more time. And we'll talk more about these data or Christopher will talk more about this data in several minutes. So as I said, the orbit allows us to obtain systematic information. We're able to do these flybys repeatedly, which is a new opportunity. What we're going to be presenting here was acquired on March 10 during the closest flyby. And we'll be doing a number of these before and after. And as has to mention, we'll be doing more of them in the future later this year. So these data sets are unique, but they are building on previous observations made by other spacecraft and from telescopic observations. We're hoping to learn and what we will talk about in a moment in terms of preliminary results are trying to distinguish between what the possible origin scenarios for these objects are. And so understanding what we know about Phobos and Deimos and comparing and contrasting helps us understand, you know, how to interpret these objects either as captured asteroids as being coalesced material from a Mars impact being debris from a moon that broke up at some point in the past. You know, these are all things that people speculated about. So you can see some highlights here we have images from in the infrared from emers in the visible from EXI and in the far ultraviolet from emus. So I'm going to talk next about some of the emus observations and more detail and then Christopher will walk us through the years and the EXI observations. So emus is the most sensitive ultraviolet spectrometer that has ever orbited Mars. That's important for these observations because Deimos is very dark, just a couple of percent reflectivity. And the sun is not very bright in the far ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet. So that sensitivity means that emus is very well suited for this kind of novel observation. Now, in terms of scientific utility of these observations. There's actually a lot you can learn about a small body like this in the extreme and far ultraviolet, because those wavelengths depend on the composition of the body, whether it has organics, or if it's made of more basaltic rocky material, and also how much space weathering body has experienced over the course of the solar systems history. So in on this image, trying to explain a little bit about how emus makes a picture, unlike the EXI camera, emus is a spectrometer, and it requires the spacecraft to scan it across an object in order to make a 2D image. And so I'm going to run a little animation here that shows you the data on the detector of the instrument on the left. And the field of view is shown on the right as that magenta stripe. So we call this the air glow slit. And so you can see how as the field of view scanned across to Deimos, the signal comes and goes in the image on the left. And what you're seeing here is a spectral spatial image. And so the spectral dimension we gain information about the composition and the reflectivity of the object. And this just shows there's a real wealth of information. There's a full spectrum behind every pixel of the images that we acquire. There's some other things to note. We can see stars in the background. Some of these are very faint stars that you would not be able to see with your naked eye. And then Mars actually goes by in the background as well. So to talk a little bit about the science that we can pull out of these images. This is a two color composite. And what we've done here is that the red channel contains an image when we add up all of the light that was collected by emus within its band pass from 100, 260 nanometers. The blue is a specific wavelength that is scattered sunlight from hydrogen. And this actually fills the solar system. And so what we're seeing in this image is the fact that the hydrogen sort of backlit lights this image of Deimos. And so you can see the dark edge the night side of Deimos in its silhouette against the glowing sky and hydrogen. And the rest of the image where you see whitish or reddish that's just sunlight reflected directly off of the object itself. Okay, and then finally, this is the measured Deimos spectrum. This is an average reflectance spectrum for the object. You can see that the general structure is consistent with reflected sunlight. The sun has a lot of emission features that are well understood in this range. So this all looks pretty well as expected. When we divide that out we're able to see what the reflectance of the surface is. And that's the image on the bottom panel. You can see that this is a relatively flat spectrum. There aren't a lot of features after we do that division. And so, this is actually pretty important results. Because if Deimos were a D type asteroid, which is one of the hypotheses, we would expect to see some signatures of organics or carbon rich minerals. And those are not apparent in the spectrum. They're, they're, they're very new. And so this is suggestive that Deimos is not in fact a D type asteroid, and may align some support to the Martian material source offices. So with that, I will turn it over to Christopher and tell us more about years and EXI. Thanks, Justin. So some of the things that we did with the other two instruments are very complimentary to the, the music instrument. And so we have two additional instruments. I'm going to talk about the infrared spectrometer first. And then we'll talk about the camera and we'll save the pretty pictures for last. So Emirs is a Fourier transform infrared point spectrometer. And so just kind of like Emuse has to build up an image with time. So does Emirs. And so each little spot that you see there is about a two second integration. And what you'll notice is that, you know, some spots are bigger, some spots are smaller, that corresponds to when the spacecraft was moving by Deimos faster. So when you have kind of these smaller spots, it's closer to the body when you have bigger spots, it's further away. So both for Emirs, we broke up our scans into sort of three separate observation time periods we had the kind of incoming the closest approach and then the outgoing, and that allowed us to really tune the observation strategy to get the best covers that we can could. One of the interesting things that I even think we weren't necessarily expecting to be able to do. But because of that geometry that Justin showed where you are kind of coming in from the pole and then looking you know, you would basically rotate the spacecraft, we're actually able to get almost complete coverage of the body. And that we can, you know, you can see it here basically there's only a thin, thin area where we weren't able to see. And so that's that's pretty unique, actually as well. And these are the highest resolution infrared data that we have of Deimos, a similar data set was taken by the Mars goal surveyor test instrument thermal emission spectrometer instrument, which is the fifth generation, this is the fifth generation version of that their heritage instruments to one another. And that was done for Phobos. So we have a really great data set to already compare Deimos to which has has never been done before. So, what can we learn from emears, there's a couple of interesting things that we can take away. So the first thing that you can do with emears in the infrared is you can measure how much energy is emitted from the surface. So that means you can tell the surface temperature from that surface temperature, we can actually get a sense of the physical properties of the surface we can say oh is it made of course green things like you might see on other asteroids in our solar moon, the new or Ryu goo, which are made of these nice blocking materials, or is it super fine grain material like we maybe see on the moon right the moon's regular is this super fine grained powder. And so, what we see with Deimos is that it falls more on the line of a very fine grain particulate material, you know, in order of sort of micron size regular covering the entire service that's also really consistent with Phobos. So it's kind of more like the moon's surface than some of these other asteroids that we've seen before. The other thing that's kind of interesting is that when you look at the poles of Deimos when you have these kind of areas that are shadowed, they are very low temperature they are about 100 Kelvin. They're very low within the range that you can actually trap the volatiles at least on kind of a short timescale so we don't think there's probably permanently shadowed regions like you see on the moon, or anything like that on Deimos but we do think there are times and there are seasons because of the way that Deimos works that you might be able to kind of temporarily traps and volatiles on this surface. So, in addition to that thermophysical data or that temperature data, we're able to take spectral data so Amir's has about 150 different wavelengths that it can measure. And from those measurements we're able to do a comparison to both previous spacecraft data, but also laboratory data. And then we can say, you know, we have a sample of Tagish Lake, for example, which is what you're seeing here on the left and that's a good example for a D type asteroid. And so we can measure those samples in the lab. This is from a paper that I was a part of in 2018 where we did measure Tagish Lake in the lab and compared it to those test results for Phobos. Now if we take the same, you know, analogy and we compare those data to what we see from Amir's from Deimos, we can see that there's some pretty interesting similarities, but also some important differences. And so the similarities between tests and Phobos indicate that these two things are, you know, probably made of similar materials although they're a little bit different. And then the second thing that we can pretty definitively say is their spectra or their spectral properties don't look like a D type asteroid. And so they're more consistent with basaltic material, which would be a volcanic rock, which is what Mars is made of. And so those two things, when you couple Amir's compositional information with the lack of organics and carbon bearing minerals that you see from Amir's, those again lend to the interpretation that these are in fact not D type asteroids, but in more likely scenario we think derived from Mars, probably from some giant impact. The interesting part about that and it raises questions about and helps us start to understand questions like why does our solar system and some of the rocky bodies in our solar system have, you know, why do they have different moons, why does Earth have a giant moon, maybe Mars has these kind of two tiny moons, Venus has no moon, Mercury has no moon. So it tells us a little bit about sort of the diversity of really planetary processes that may be going on in our solar system. And so there's some definitely interesting things about that going on here. So EXI is our high resolution imager that we have on board the Amir's Mars mission. It's a filter wheel based imager. So unlike your camera, it has to take a picture and then it moves a little filter wheel to a different band pass and then it takes, you know, it's blue picture and it's red picture. And so there's a time delay between these different images that get acquired, no matter what we do, like your camera that, you know, takes red, green and blue all at the same time. So from EXI we're able to capture this fine scale morphology or surface appearance at better than 10 meters per pixel over, you know, basically the entire far side of demos. And so what we see from this is that the surface is pretty smooth. You can see some fresh craters in this image and you can see some really pretty degraded craters in this image, which is maybe a little surprising for such a small body. And what we kind of can interpret with that as well as that kind of very fine grained surface that we are seeing from Amir's data is probably, you know, exactly what we expect to see in these high resolution images. So just to kind of wrap up, here's an image taken that has both demos and Mars in it, pretty spectacular, you know, set of images here. And then so the summary here that we'll end on is that, you know, emm has modified its orbit, very minorly to enable these really close flyblies and we expect to see these happen pretty regularly in the future on the cadence of a couple of couple of times, or once every couple of weeks, there we go. And the question then is like, how often do we observe that? Well, we'll do it when we get below kind of a unique science threshold, right? So we won't necessarily take every time to do this, but we'll be strategic about that so we can make sure we're observing demos in different lighting conditions or geometries that can help further refine some of these questions that we have. So EMIRS has produced these FEVEV spectral images, they're super fantastic as Justin talked about and to help us constrain those organics on the surface. EMIRS has this highest thermal infrared, highest resolution thermal infrared data taken that help us constrain its composition and physical properties of the surface. And then EXI has these really nice high resolution images that provide a kind of synoptic view of the body, so all at once that will continue to leverage as we go forward. And so the kind of preliminary analysis that we have right now suggests that these are, or that both our leading demos and FOBOS are not captured asteroids, but in fact maybe pieces of Mars that have coalesced after a large impact. And then we'll just leave it with this image up here, so here's a color composite taken by the red, green and blue channels of EXI and yeah, that's a pretty fantastic image I think. Thank you all three of you for that very interesting presentation and that's the perfect segue Chris into our next part of the press conference which is the question and answer round. So if anyone has questions, if you're in the room, please raise your hand I'll pass the mic over to you, you can introduce yourself and then let us know who you have your question for. If you're joining us online you have two options you can raise your hand on the zoom function and then we'll come to you for your question you can also type your question in the chat and we will take it that way. So if anyone wants to go, we have one already. Hello. Have you seen anything that can tell a little bit about the age of the most, and also the effects that the space wearing and being so long out there in the space can happen the spectrum. That is composition. Yeah, so there are certain, you know, expected effects of space weathering I think we're just getting to the point where we can, you know, we've said the things that we're confident about today. But there's a lot more analysis to do. And actually, at least for the ultra violet. One of the limiting factors is what we know about how various materials behave under the effects of space weathering. So, one of the things that may happen is that we realize their laboratory experiments that need to be done. In order to better, you know, understand what kinds of materials could explain the spectrum that we've uncovered wouldn't be the first time people looked at an object at Mars and saw things in the ultra violet that weren't expected and we had to go do lab work to figure out what we were looking at. Yeah, so as far as the age goes, I think the kind of smoothness of the surface and the relatively crater free thing, the relatively crater free appearance of the surface kind of give some indication that, you know, I think the surface is, is probably pretty old, because you're seeing kind of this destruction of craters and you can see like there's actually one on the screen right here that's sort of on the left side, I guess, of that crater that on the left side of demos that looks pretty, you know, degraded. And so I think we're seeing, you know, either one, the body is not very competent. So it's not retaining its craters. And they're kind of breaking down quickly or, you know, I think that personally I think that's what's happening at this point but it's hard to say kind of explicitly but the surface is pretty smooth like I think I would expect more craters, you know, if it was a super old body. But that could also be an influence of how close it is to Mars as well right so maybe the impactors are getting pulled to Mars as opposed to hitting this thing. I don't know. It's the short version. Okay, we have another question coming in. Yes, thanks a lot. Rich, please see three lands journalists writing for physics world. Any measurements of demos. Brett with and compared to the sister moon to So, a lot of those actually had kind of come into existence already from from previous measurements for from previous observations and so what we're doing here really is kind of refining those measurements and especially taking into account the far side And so I will get the numbers wrong but it's like the size or a little less it's like 12 kilometers across versus Phobos which is quite a bit bigger. I don't actually remember how big Phobos is off the top of my head. But yeah, it's about two times smaller and so some of the things that we're, you know, looking forward to and just like with the rest of EMM data is that we publish these data, you know, freely right so anybody can go get these data. And one of the things that we're anticipating the community is going to do is update the shape model for demos, which will be, you know, a very large asset for future missions coming up like MMX by JAXA. So we think there's a lot of synergies between this kind of work that we're doing now that will will help prepare for some of these upcoming missions. We don't have any more questions. There don't seem to be any questions from our virtual journalists so if there are no more questions in the room then we are quite ready to wrap up today's press briefing. So, okay, doesn't look like more questions. Oh, you do. Okay, sure. So what was there anything that's like unexpected or surprising. So first I'll say what I think. So some of the things that I think were sort of surprising to me were were basically that the spectrum of phobos and demos are are not the same. I was expecting them to be more similar, to be honest, measured by similar instruments, you know, all things kind of held constant. So the fact that they're not quite the same is really interesting. And so there's definitely a story in there. Maybe one is, you know, more Mavic than the other, which kind of jives a little bit with the brightness story so phobos is a lot brighter than demos or phobos I think it's two times brighter or something. And so there's that's kind of one surprise to me, I think, as far as the spectral interpretation goes, I think that's also a pretty big surprise, because that's something that, you know, again, we're sort of hoping narrow down these two competing frequencies for this moon or these moons, both of them really, you know, if we saw one that looked one way and one that looked completely different. I think that would be also unexpected but instead what we're seeing is there's some nice consistencies between these two I think, again, it does lend to that story that they're, I think they're probably more likely to be, you know, coalesced pieces of Mars from a giant impact, which again I sort of alluded to this before has implications for how you form the moons in our solar system, right and so there's big questions that I think are now, if you take these as pieces of Mars that formed, you know, maybe not unlike our moon form with a big impact and maybe this impact was a little bit smaller, but then you have to ask questions like well why doesn't Venus have a moon or moons and why did Earth get one big moon and why did Mars get two small moons and why does a Mercury have a moon so there's all kinds of questions that this really stirs I think, because yeah I would say for the ultraviolet, it's kind of hard to be surprised when you don't know what you're going to see, because no one had gotten a spectrum of these wavelengths before. But I will say I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the data. We knew that Deimos was going to be very dark. And previous missions had tried to look at Phobos at similar wavelengths and just failed to get any signal at all. And so we were just trying to do our best to get the highest quality data and really pleased with just how well we were able to do it. Yeah, I guess one last thing to add I think is just that this is a pretty complicated series of maneuvers that EMM has been able to undertake, you know, to the tune of three distinct maneuvers to get these flybys and then enable future close flybys as well. And I think one of the things that gives a lot of credit to our engineering team is that the outages or the amount of time that we had to turn the instruments off to stop our kind of nominal science was limited to like a couple of days. And so, you know, to do these sort of unique kind of non primary science goals of the mission and we really only had to miss a couple of days of observing Mars from sort of its classic weather satellite position so I think that was pretty impressive as well. We have one more question. Hi, I have two questions. One question is, when are we expecting to see those data publicly available? And the other question, how often are we for future basically observation of them? How often will we observe them? Okay. So when it comes to the data, the images will be publicly available but the raw data will take some time to be processed and be available in our science data center. We usually release new data every three months so that will take its time. Well, we don't have our normal data pipeline prepared for the most images as we do have for the Mars one. So that's why there would be today, but these images that we process for this press conference would be available. When it comes to the second question is how often would be able to take observations of them as I believe like a super tap into that. So that would be once every couple of weeks that we would have the opportunity but then it's up to the team to decide whether to take this opportunity and take observations or not. So, if it's an opportunity that is worth pursuing in terms of science that's something that will really go for. Thank you. I think we have no more questions coming in. All right. So thank you again for your time speakers and for all of you joining us today. This concludes our press conferences for today, but be sure to join us throughout the week we have another six exciting press cons lined up if you need press packs printed or digital they're both available just join me in the press and then we can chat. If you need to speak to speak to our speakers. No, if you need to interview our speakers through the week then you can check in with me or Terry cook. We are both going to be available here and okay I wish you a very good EG 23 week and the recording of today's press conference will be available later today so feel free to share that or access it as well. And thank you again. Bye.