 It's one o'clock on Tuesday February the 22nd 2022 and you are watching Science at Soast streaming live on ThinkTech from downtown Honolulu. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and my guest today is Eleni Ravanis. She is a graduate student within the Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. Science at Soast showcases many of the research projects that both are graduate students and our postdocs are performing. Soast is the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology at UH Manoa. So welcome Eleni. Really pleased to have you on the show. First of all, can you just tell the audience a little bit what do you do? What you're a student, correct? Yes. So thanks for having me. I'm Eleni Ravanis. As you said, I'm a graduate student, a second year PhD student in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. I work with my supervisor Dr. Sarah Fagens and I'm interested in all things Mars. That's great and hopefully the fire engine won't break into your house now. Eleni, although you're only a second year graduate student at UH Manoa, you've had a really interesting early research career. Our topic today is missions to Mars and I believe before you came to Hawaii, you were actually working on a different Mars mission. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. So I was looking enough to spend two years working for the European Space Agency for the Mars Express mission. That's an orbital spacecraft mission that's in orbit around Mars now. It was Europe's first mission to Mars and it's been there since 2003. So it's still going strong and I work specifically for one of the instruments on board that mission. Okay, and I think our first slide is going to show just a little bit about what Mars Express was doing. So walk us through. We've got many different images in this panel, including the spacecraft in front of Mars, I believe. Yeah, so that's an artist concept image of Mars Express itself in front of Mars on the left there and then in the top right corner we have the instrument that I actually worked for. And this instrument is really interesting because when Mars Express first flew, it wasn't actually designed as a science instrument. So it's called the Visual Monitoring Camera and it was actually designed to monitor a lander that went with the spacecraft, which unfortunately failed. But the camera remained on the spacecraft and then in 2007, some of the engineers at ESA decided, well, hey, why don't we turn this back on and see what we can do with that. So the camera started being used as an outreach instrument so the public could get involved and kind of the Mars Express team took images when it didn't interfere with the normal science operations. But then some scientists in Spain at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao in northern Spain found that they could actually do really good science with those images and we can get into a bit more of what that science was later. But long story short, this instrument is now considered a full science instrument on Mars Express and you can see some of the example images from the VMC as it's called in the bottom half of that slide. Yeah, exciting images briefly going left to right at the bottom. What is it that we're looking at? Yeah, so I picked some of my favorite images from this slide. So on the left we have a cloud over Olympus Mons, then we have Valles Marineris which is a huge canyon system on Mars which actually would dwarf the Grand Canyon system on Earth. Then we have one of the polar caps in the middle and then we have the polar cap with dust storm over the top and then on the right it's covered by the Think Tech Hawaii logo so it's hard to tell but just another image of Mars and the great thing about this camera is how much of Mars it can actually capture in the frame. So it's got a wide field of view which makes it really good for imaging kind of large-scale atmospheric phenomenon on Mars. Okay and these are real images taken with, I'll call it your camera because you work on the camera. That's right, yeah. As opposed to the artist's rendition and when you said that it had a wide field of view I think the second image, if we could have the second slide, this is another view of Mars, it's tilted on its side I understand so that the north poles to the left and south poles to the right but this is the kind of view that the camera would actually obtain. Exactly, yeah so and it also depends when you take the, when in the orbit of Mars Express you take the images so we typically took the images at the point where the spacecraft Mars Express was furthest away and it's orbit from Mars and that means you get a really good view of as you see here kind of half the planet. So that means that you can image really big things that you might miss if you're focused just on one part of the planet like this huge cloud over Arcea Mons volcano that you see here. Okay and we've got three dark spots near the top center of the image and you mentioned Arcea Mons which is a volcano on Mars, that's the one with the the white clouds screaming away to the bottom of the image. Yes that's right and all three dots are all three things you can see here are huge volcanoes on Mars and it's it might look like this is something coming from the volcano but it's not it's not anything like an eruption Mars isn't volcanically active today it's a water ice cloud that happens to extend from from this particular volcano. Okay and at the simplest level the camera is a color camera right it takes color images. It does yeah. Okay you can sort of interpret some of the data from that camera system in terms of its color characteristics but this cloud which you showed in the previous slide is that common or was this a new discovery made by your Kenman? So this was something that was really interesting with the VMC it was something that was noticed in in 2018 by some of the by the VMC science team and then they actually went well we actually went back there was a study led by Jorge Hernandez Bernal who was my colleague at the University of the Basque Country and he went back and looked through archive images of VMC and also other instruments on spacecraft around Mars to look for this cloud and it's a phenomena that reoccurs in a particular season each season on Mars and what was really exciting when when I was working at ESA was you know we actually predicted that this cloud would come back so we could specifically plan observations to try and catch that cloud and so then in 2020 it reappeared again and we could make observations and find a little bit more about how this really long cloud develops. So you think it's a weather cloud is it just when the temperature is right or the atmosphere is a little bit damp or something like I always thought that Mars had a very thin atmosphere that was basically quite dry. Yeah so we're still working on exactly why this cloud forms but using data from some of the other instruments such as omega is a spectroscopy instrument on Mars Express we can get some more detail about that what the what the cloud is actually made of because although the VMC does take photographs in colour can't really use that colour information to find what the cloud is made of but because it because we have the omega data we know that the cloud is made of water ice so it seems that in certain periods of the sea certain seasons on Mars warm warm air warm it's not very warm on Mars air kind of rises condenses cools and forms kind of this this head and then winds actually blow the cloud westwards and it can extend up to 1800 kilometers so it's a really big phenomena that you can actually see with telescopes on earth which is quite exciting. Okay and slide three I think shows a number of traces these coloured lines I guess Arceumons volcano is at the bottom right lurking under think te kawai again those coloured lines what are they? So they're observations that were made of different kind of drawing different time periods on Mars and it's just how the cloud kind of developed so from looking back at all these different archive images we were able to to kind of trace how the cloud develops from kind of the early morning to dissipating before the mid afternoon but before the afternoon so that's why some of the other other orbiters didn't spot it because they tend to actually observe in the afternoon and so these lines kind of just show how the cloud starts around the volcano and then extends all the way to the kind of top left of the image. And the scale bar the whole width of scale bars is a thousand kilometers so that's about 600 miles much more than the distance say between Hilo and Kauai just to give viewers some idea of the the size of this particular set of clouds and you know you've actually published you were an author on a research paper that described this congratulations it must be great as a student to have a professional paper already published. The fourth slide will show a little more of the details and you mentioned that most other spacecraft have missed the cloud and this diagram I find particularly interesting explain to us what it is we're looking at here. Yeah so we're looking at how the cloud kind of develops across the day and all these different colors kind of correspond to different different time periods on Mars so by taking that data kind of all together we can see a trend and the cloud kind of expands in it in a linear fashion and something else that we can look at is is how well something that we're trying to look at we try to look at in this paper and continue to look at is whether there's inter-annual variability between between how this this cloud develops over different years because for example with the the red dots that you see in the bottom they were kind of early anomalies in the season of the cloud developing and they kind of coincided with the waning of a huge dust storm on Mars and generally as Mars scientists were very interested in knowing more about Mars dust storms it's important for kind of understanding how they might impact future missions and current missions on the surface so this cloud was seems to have been affected by that dust storm and so it's interesting to kind of try and tease out a little bit more how that was affected and whether this cloud can be used as a bit of a proxy for climate phenomena okay and the diagram again down the bottom Mars I'll see them on local solar time so that's right after sunrise yes so it starts early in the morning early in the morning and the different colors where we've got top left Mars season the red might be summer and the green might be winter or something like that exactly yeah okay great this must have been really exciting you know sort of a a new discovery and you were working with the european space agency how did you feel at the time it was really exciting and what was great about working for Mars Express was because it's kind of it's an established mission I was able to get quite a bit of kind of I had quite a lot of responsibility quite early so I actually ended up being responsible for planning BMC observations on a monthly basis so it was really exciting when this kind of the season for the cloud came along again because I was responsible for kind of trying to get those observations that we could use in the paper so that was really exciting yeah and and by planning does that mean when the camera was turned on or what direction it was pointing in yeah so the the way that the planning works for for Mars Express at least is you you kind of plan about a month at a time in advance and so you plan kind of all the observations that are going to happen in a month and we have you know software that helps us do that and you find out how things will fit in in the timeline compared to all the other instruments the right angle what you're going to look at things like that so let me just remind the viewers that you are watching Science at Soast I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Marc and my guest this week is Eleni Ravanis she is a graduate student within the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology so Eleni this must have been quite a thrill for someone of your age why then did you decide to come to Hawaii become a graduate student it seemed you had a great career building in Europe yeah so I did my job at East as part of the European Space Agency graduate trainee scheme which is a really good scheme for for people who have a master's degree but I always knew I wanted to go back to kind of more strictly research and then this PhD opportunity came up in Hawaii and it was really appealing because it had involvement with another Mars mission which is Mars 2020 um so I'm actually a student collaborator on the mass cam z camera instrument on the Mars 2020 mission and I was really excited about the possibility of doing a PhD and doing that science research but maintaining involvement with an active Mars mission great well slide five actually shows Mars 2020 which I believe is called Perseverance this is an interesting image what are we looking at here Eleni yeah so we're actually looking at a selfie taken by the rover and yeah you can see the rover itself Perseverance rover and in the background you can actually see the ingenuity helicopter which also accompanied the rover so this is this is made up of kind of stitched together several images um really showing the rover on Mars uh I'm intrigued how can a rover take a selfie I've seen the Chinese rover um put a camera on the ground and then back up and photograph itself but I don't think Perseverance can do that can it no so actually it's a camera kind of on the arm and you know some very clever engineering and stitching them images in together in the right way so the what you see here is the selfie okay and a really interesting you in the background you can see the tire tracks or whatever the wheels have been uh leaving on the Martian surface now you say that you are part of uh an instrument team called mass cam z I think the next slide will actually show where your camera is and I refer to it as your camera um coincidentally I know the principal investigator for that camera is a former UH graduate Jim bell if I remember correctly yeah yeah so um this is an artist's rendition and it's pointing to various things on the rover can you explain a few of these things yeah so this is the science instrument so on the rover as you can see mass cam z is just one of those so mass cam z we kind of refer to it as a camera but it's actually a camera system and you can see it kind of has two eyes up on the top of the of the of the of the rover um pointed to by those arrows there and um some of the other instruments that we have is is rim facts that's a ground penetrating radar so we can see below the subsurface we have pixel which is really it's it's and it's really important for kind of seeing the rocks at a really small scale we have meeder which is a weather station so we have a lot of different instruments on the rover that allow us to see lots of different things about Mars but mass cam z as I said it's it's a camera system it's a multi-spectral camera that means that we can take uh images in kind of the visible light what we see with our own eyes we can also it also has filter wheels so that we we kind of filter the light coming through so that we can kind of pick out particular things in the rocks that help us understand what they're made of and therefore kind of the the geologic history that we're looking at in Jezero crater which is which is the home of the Perseverance rover okay how big is the rover you know is it like a a toy car or uh two stories building I have no idea of the scale it's not quite as big as a two-story building but it is big it's kind of like you know decent car size um so it's it's it's a big piece of machinery and it's been on Mars for how long well actually we just celebrated our one-year anniversary of landing so Perseverance landed on February 18th 2021 last year um so yeah we just celebrated our first first year anniversary on Mars congratulations thanks and you know what what does it do um our viewers may not be aware you know like it's got wheels so does it drive around or or what what's the uh part of the mission that you're involved in yeah so the Perseverance rover definitely drives around um so we've been exploring the kind of the crater floor at the moment we picked the Jezero crater as as the home for the Perseverance rover um because it has a really interesting mix of geology the thing that we're going to go look at next and it's a big reason that we landed in this crater is it has a delta um and so a delta um it occurs when you kind of have flowing water that then comes into a standing body of water um and so um we can infer that there was a lake in that in the crater um and then the thing that we're going to use the slide that you just showed in the next couple of weeks um we're going to go have a look at we're going to drive back past our landing site and we're going to go have a look at some more of the rocks so actually for the past year we've been exploring the rocks on of the crater floor um which um as you if any of our viewers are interested might have seen in press conferences uh primarily igneous in origin um so igneous is volcanic oh yes yes volcanic so so maybe like some of the rocks in Hawaii and we've had discussions on the team you know comparing um some of the rocks on Mars to to the ones we see in Hawaii which is always exciting let's let's go back to that last slide slide seven and you can talk us through um this is amazing it's not quite like my backyard but one incredible view um is this a single image or what is it we're looking at? Yeah so we're looking at an image taken by the Mascamzee camera and in the background we can see um Santa Cruz which is one of the hills in in Jezero equator and and what we tend to do with Mascamzee is I mean I talk about a Mascamzee image but we would take you know various kind of images and stitch them together to to make mosaics is a common thing that we do with Mascamzee um so we get this really interesting sweeping view and in the foreground we have some rocks called um it's pronounced Chesh but it's spelled Charles it's a Navajo word meaning frog um and these are some of the rocks that we're going to go explore next they're kind of dark big bouldery kind of blocky rocks and they look a little different to some of the rocks that we've encountered we've been encountering so far we first encountered them in the very early kind of days of the mission um and then we went down south with the Perseverance rover and now we're driving back up north so we're going to pass those rocks again so this is a mosaic of individual images stitched together in a computer yes I think so okay it's not I'm trying to remember off the top of my I'm trying to remember off the top of my head if that's a single image or if it's the images stitched together but we typically we kind of take both yeah it would be remarkable if that was an individual image um I don't know how many you snap each day but it'd be a lot it's a lot it's a lot of other images and um we were looking across the Martian landscape towards that hill um how far can you see on Mars yeah it was that um 10 feet away was it a couple miles or do you know anything about the details it looks really close yeah it looks it looks close but it's quite far away I don't know off the top of my head how far away this is but I mean we can see when we're in the crater well often sometimes we can see the crater rim in the distance and and that's um you know many kilometers away so we can we can see like kilometers at a time sometimes we don't tend to kind of investigate that those quite that long distance we tend to investigate the things closer um but we do get some really amazing views like you see here yeah and I know the opportunity rover drove over like 43 kilometers or something like that uh earlier in the 2010s but how far do you think perseverance might be traveling is there any prediction how long it might live for what its range might be well we have the nominal mission which is which is two years but um we we which is one Martian year two earth years one Martian year um but but the it's envisaged that that will be extended so the thing that we're going to do next is drive over to the to the delta and then who knows really we might be going for for many kilometers to come I I certainly hope so um and we can drive really fast with this new rover which is quite exciting we cover quite a lot of ground in a short space of time great so you know as we start to wrap up Eleni I mean is this where you see your career uh advancing and why study in Hawaii if the spacecrafts on Mars here um what what are your career plans and has Hawaii helped you advance those plans oh yeah 100% um I mean the great thing about being in Hawaii is it there's so many locations which can be considered like a we call it a planetary analog so the rocks that we're looking at here we can we can look at them and compare them to what we see on a planet like Mars um and it's really exciting being involved with the Mars 2020 mission not just because of this mission but also because it's the first in kind of a series of Mars sample return missions so the the perseverance rover is currently caching samples which will eventually be returned to Earth and so it's really exciting to be involved in something that people are going to be looking out for you know decades probably to come okay and I believe caching means that it's taking a sample and just storing it on the spacecraft yes and then eventually those samples will kind of be put down somewhere so that another another spacecraft can come along and pick them up okay so eventually will you be hoping to sort of be in charge of mission operations or you're going to build your own camera because you had two great experiments with Mars cameras already well that would be that would be wonderful but um yeah I'd really like to keep um being involved in science research and mission operations I really like having that mix um so so we'll see but I would really like to keep being involved with all these exciting Mars missions that are coming up yeah yeah the the rovers in particular are fascinating and of course there are the orbiter spacecraft that both the US and the Chinese have so Mars is definitely on in the future but people going to Mars any thoughts on that well actually the european space agency just released I still need to give it a proper read through but kind of a look ahead to to when we might send even you know european astronauts to Mars and they were looking at sometime around 2040 so it might happen kind of sooner than people think that will be really exciting there's a lot that geologists could do a lot um you know just quickly by kind of like with with the little hammer and and looking at the rocks so that will be really exciting but um we'll see there's lots of robotic spacecraft coming up yeah I know Elon Musk is trying to get people there uh by SpaceX for example it would seem that someone with your training uh an interest in Martian geology um would be central for perhaps you know landing site safety or where to drive once you actually get on the surface so hopefully your your career will take off and uh you know that you'll remember what you've done in Hawaii the camera PI Jim Bell you know we often talk about how Hawaii has helped him so good luck to you anyway let me just remind let me just remind the the viewers you've been watching Science at Soast I'm been your host Pete McGinnis Mark and this week our guest has been Eleni Ravanis and she has been telling us about missions to Mars and in particular the two missions that she has personally been involved in so Eleni thank you again for appearing on the show good luck in your career and we might even call you back in a couple of years time to tell us some more Mars results so thank you all and um everybody we'll see you again next week where we'll have a different graduate student from Soast describing her research projects so thank you and see you next week goodbye thank you