 So, tonight, the first speaker is Professor Penny King, and she is going to talk about the exciting news heading to Mars. Mars has been all over the news recently for good reasons, which is always nice. And she's going to dive in to about what she does and also what's so exciting about it. So, Professor Penny King is at the Research School of Earth Sciences here at ANU, and I will hand it over to her. You just have to unmute. Thank you. Thanks, Brad, for the lovely introduction. As Brad mentioned, I'm at the Research School of Earth Sciences, so that's down near the centre of Canberra. But what I like to do is get away when it's not in shutdown and look at rocks. And I look at volcanic rocks from eruptions. I go to Salt Lakes and look at the rocks there. And then I have spent some time being part of the team that's looking at rocks on Mars. So this is part of the Curiosity Rover. Here's the instrument that I helped calibrate and sent to Mars. And we also go up into Arnhem Land and work with the traditional owners on rock art. So I do a range of different things. Today I'm going to talk to you, though, about Mars and exciting things that we have been learning about the red planet, our neighbour. So here's the Curiosity Rover in the Namid Sand Dune, and you can see that it hasn't got stuck. In fact, this rover's been going for eight years a few weeks ago, and so it's amazing. It's a very resilient little rover. On its trips, it's collected a whole lot of views of Mars. So I'm going to just show you some of them. Now, as I mentioned, I'm a geologist. I like rocks. I like sand dunes, too. More sand than rocks. There's a lot of sand and rocks on Mars for a geologist. Very thin atmosphere on Mars, and then this is an impact crater. So there's different processes that occur on Mars more frequently than they occur on Earth. It's also very cold, about minus 60 degrees centigrade average. The radiation is strong, not a good place to hang out really. It's actually quite inhospitable, but I just showed you that we had spent a fair amount of time with rovers on the surface of Mars, and here are the tracks of the Curiosity rover coming off that sand dune. And it seems you might wonder, why do we go to Mars when it looks so inhospitable and rocky and cold and has very little atmosphere? So why do we do that? Well, the first reason is that humans just love to explore. We've been doing it for thousands of years. And as Brad mentioned, the Australian Highlanders have been some of the first explorers. Here I'm showing some of the song lines or path trade routes that they used as documented in the 1930s. But they have been using those trade routes for tens of thousands of years. So exploring on Earth and in the oceans is something that we as humans have been drawn to do. But as most of you love astronomy, the sky has also held our fascination. Here are some examples from other parts of the world. Star charts from Egypt and also from China. And we continue to explore. And as you know, one of the places that we explore the planets nearby. This is the launch of the Curiosity rover in 2011. And here I am with my family watching for the countdown. That rocket went really fast. It was there one minute, seemed to hover in the sky. And then 20 minutes later, it was over Australia. So if you want fast transport, take a rocket. But it could be confused for some of the places that we have on Earth. So here's some photos of places I've been. And you can see that they have a sort of Mars like quality rocks, dry red, not very hospitable looking. But Mars is more like home than any of the other destinations nearby in our solar system. So here's a list of targets that NASA has been considering to visit, to look for, how the solar system has evolved and changed over time. And so you can see Mercury and Venus, Earth and Mars. Mars is the most similar to Earth. Here are some moons. They're very icy, not quite as similar to Earth. So because Mars is so similar to Earth, people have wondered, does it hold the answer to this question that we've thought about for millennia? Are we alone? This has been the topic of many books, movies. You've probably seen some of them. Here I am with ET in Hollywood. It's the real ET, one of the first famous extraterrestrials. Is ET what we're looking for? Or what kind of life should we be looking for? Well, there's one option, which is a live life. And then the other option you can guess, dead life or extinct life. So which kind do you think we should be looking for? It's actually both. So that is, we kind of doubt that we'll find a live life, but we'd be happy if we did. We're thinking that it's more likely that we'll find extinct life. So the kind of life that most scientists are looking for is very small. We're not talking about dinosaurs or ET. We're talking about microbes. And microbes are 100s the size of a normal piece of hair. So if you feel your hair and think about how small 100s that would be, that's the size of a microbe. Microbes are important because they were the first kinds of life on Earth and the simplest, and they're now really abundant. And so they're a good target for looking for life elsewhere. The first microbes on Earth were found in really old rocks. So rocks that are older than two and a half billion years old. And you can see Australia has quite a few of those kinds of rocks, particularly in Western Australia. Now Earth doesn't have as many of those really old rocks as Mars does. On Mars, here, these orange rocks are shown, and those are more than 3.7 billion years old. So scientists think that Mars would be a really good place to go and explore for early life because it has a lot of rocks that formed at the time that life was forming on Earth. So it's a bit hard to search for microbes, as you might imagine, because they're so small. And so scientists have decided that the easiest way to look for microbes is actually to look for the kinds of environments that microbes might like to live in. And so NASA has had a strategy for many decades now of following the water. And the Mars exploration program has relied on looking for water on Mars. Interestingly, Indigenous people in Australia have known for years that water is essential for life. Here's some Wajno rock art from the Barnett River in Western Australia. And the Wajno spirits shown beautifully here in this rock art were cloud and rain spirits. And they created the landscapes and continue to have influence over the landscape and the inhabitants. So we're looking for water, but I showed you a whole lot of pictures. And those pictures didn't really have any water in them. And so why are we going from Earth with lots of water to this dry planet that, as I explained before, is not very hospitable for life? It's dry, thin atmosphere, very, very cold. The sun's radiation and cosmic rays hit the surface of the planet and there's lots of dust and rocks and probably limited life, if any. Well, the reason that scientists go there is we believe that there used to be water on the surface of Mars in the past. And so if we look at the oldest areas of Mars and so those are the heavily created areas in orange that I showed you before. So yes, Mars is older than Earth in terms of it has more rocks that are old. It's not actually older than Earth. They both formed at the same time, but there's more old rocks. I'm just answering a question I see online. So if we look at those old, old rocks, we see things that look like streams. So on Earth, we have streams will connect up. Little streams will all lead into bigger rivers like this. And we see things that look like legs with streams coming out of them into big depressions that are thought to also have been legs. So Mars does have a little water today. It has it in ice at the poles. So this dark blue is ice. And then it has water bound up in the rocks in the light blue here. So that's in types of minerals called clays and sulfate minerals. So you have those in your garden. There are gullies on Mars and some of the craters. And this is Newton crater. And that's been monitored over the years. And hopefully you can see that going downhill. The surface is changing over time. There's been a lot of argument about these observations. Some people think it's water. Other people think it's just dust going downhill. Anyway, there's a multiple lines of evidence suggesting that there may have been water on Mars in the past. So that has been enough evidence to send a bunch of rovers to Mars. And so this one's been eight years on the surface security rover. And what it's been doing is trying to look for a place on the Mars mountain surface that would be a potential place for life in the past or present. And as soon as we got there, pretty much within the first few weeks, a stream was confirmed on the surface. This is confirmed by looking at rocks and seeing these little round pebbles. Can you see them up here in this top right corner? And you can only make little round pebbles like that by moving them in a fast moving fluid like water. So this be water like the water in a river on Earth. We then travelled around within the first few months and found rocks that had funny little spots in them that geologists think form through the process of water trickling through the rock. And so these rocks made the scientists on the team very excited because this was a place that we wanted to go and look at carefully. With all the tools on the rover to see if these rocks could have hosted life or even have traces of life in them. So that is in fact what we did. We went and drilled these rocks with the rover. So here's an example of a drill hole on Mars. This is the first drilling site. So we did a little test drill hole, not very deep because this was the first time the drill had been used on Mars and then did a deeper drill hole here. Can you notice something strange? The rocks red over here. But what's been drilled is grey. I'm just going to leave that with you for a while to think about. Okay, so when the geologists went here, we were looking for a few things. Was it a good environment? And the answer was yes. Because we found clays like you have in your clay garden if you live in Canberra or clay you might have used for modelling in class. Not very much salt, which is good for microbes and not very acidic, which is also good for microbes. A chemical energy gradient. Well, remember I mentioned this grey versus orange? That's actually a chemical weathering gradient. The grey rock has been oxidised or rusted to make it orange. And so there's a chemical energy gradient. Sometimes it's called a redox or oxidation gradient between the grey and the red. And microbes use that chemical energy to survive. Is there protection from radiation? Remember I said it's pretty horrible radiation. Well, not really, but it's probably the best we've ever seen on Mars. Had seen on Mars at that point because it was a drilled rock. And so we were burrowing down inside the rocks. Was there organic material? So microbes are made of organic material. So if we found organic material we might be able to say something about whether there were microbes there. So even though these rocks were drilled in 2012 this work wasn't done for six years because it had to be done so incredibly carefully. So molecules on Earth are in microbes and include a whole range of different potential molecules. Now on Mars there's radiation and the oxidation, the rusting. So we probably wouldn't expect these molecules. These are some traces showing molecules here that were found. And these are very simple molecules, not complicated like these ones and suggest that they probably aren't microbes on Mars. And if there were they've been extremely degraded. So our best guess at the moment is that we haven't actually found and measured life in these organic molecules. It's probably from meteorites. The exciting thing is we found an environment that could sustain life and where microbes could live. So what's next? Well on the 30th of July, so a few weeks ago the Perseverance rover shown here on the right which is kind of a twin of the Curiosity rover took off on a six month trip to Mars. So we're in a good time right now and we're quite close to the orbit of Mars so that's why this mission went now. Perseverance is going to another crater. It's called Jezero Crater. This is topography map. And it's going to investigate this area here shown in these very strange colours that are thought to represent what's called a delta. So a delta is where a river comes out into a lake and fills a lake. And as it does that material is deposited on the floor of the lake building up sticky clay. And that sticky clay ends up having microbes stick to it. And as you go into the lake you get more and more microbes. So here in this picture we see that this shape is like this so we'd expect the ridders coming down here and we have... Oh can you see my... I hope you can see my mouse. Anyway the river is coming down here and we can see these rocks out here and we'd expect them to be... have more microbes in them if there are microbes there out on these edges. So that's what the exploration plan is. The edges are full of clay, this special kind of clay called smectite and it's shown here in blue and that's where we expect to have lots of microbes. So the perseverance rover is going to go to this area and it's going to investigate these areas that are rich in smectite or clay. And it's going to do that with a whole lot of instruments, ridders and lasers and weather stations, cameras, a spectrometer that measures UV light, another one that measures x-rays. And it's going to have a bunch of microphones too. Now my favourite part of the rover is this cool little aircraft that's going to launch from the rover's body. It's called Ingenuity and it has a little rotor here so it's kind of like a helicopter because it's flying in the sky. And then here it has two camera eyes and it's going to be looking down and trying to help the perseverance rover figure out where it should go. The other part that I really, really like on this rover is that it's going to collect samples. So it has a really big head here. This is bigger than a lawnmower on the end of an arm that's about the length of a lawnmower. And it has drills on the ends of that arm that are going to drill into the rock. And the cool thing about those drills is that they're able to actually create cores of rock. So they're like cylinders of rock. So here on the left is an example. The bottom left of a core of rock. And then it's going to put it in this sleeve and store that rock inside the sleeve in this container. And this container is called a cache. And then eventually in a few years' time the aim is to go collect that cache and bring those samples back to Earth so we can look at them. Now the idea of looking at the rock cores is that the rock cores might have materials in them that have been protected from radiation. And radiation, as I mentioned, isn't very good for preserving molecules and it destroys them. And so we're hoping that by looking at cores we have a better chance of finding microbes in those clay or smectite-rich rocks. So there's two Australians on this mission. Abby Allwood is from Brisbane. She works at JPL and she's in charge of the x-ray spectrometer. And then on the right, David Flannery works in Brisbane Queensland University of Technology. And here he is last year measuring rocks. And the Western Australia, some of those really old rocks and using the drill that they were using on the rover. So there's some Australians involved in this mission which is really exciting. So if you'd like to learn more, you can go to mars.nasa.gov and find out more about these exciting missions and upcoming results. So thank you. There are lots of questions here and I think I'll just have to scroll back. So someone says, I understand exploring and curiosity. Why would we want to imagine life on the moon or Mars or another planet when we can't take care of this planet? I actually wonder that myself sometimes. I think that they're different goals. So caring for our planet is something that everybody should be doing. But that doesn't mean that we can't listen to music, that we can't do art, that we can't explore. It just means that it's one of the things that we do. And it turns out that exploring on other planets gives us some options of things to learn about and that may end up helping us take care of our planet. And also turns out a lot of the money that we spend on going to other planets is spent on people's salaries and people developing new things. And so sometimes those new things are helpful for us in our day-to-day lives as well. So I think we should be doing both. I don't think it's and or. I don't think that we have to have a choice between exploring planets and taking care of our Earth. I think we should always be taking care of our Earth and that we can choose to look at planets too. Venus is very hot for this kind of exploration. And so Venus, unlike Mars, is over 350 degrees on the surface and it's got very, very thick atmosphere in clouds. And so we think that it would be quite hard for life to survive on Venus and that it's more likely to be found on Mars. Mars might have underground volcanoes. That's true. Mars might have underground volcanoes. In fact, it might have something called lava tubes. So this is when lava comes out of a volcano and a crust forms on the surface of the lava as it's flowing along. And that crust then insulates the hot lava inside that can still keep flowing through that tube or that crust. And so then the volcano ends up being underground. People think that that might be a reasonable place to go looking for life because the crust of the volcanic rock would have shielded any life from the radiation. Okay, the sand dunes really look like snow vows on Earth. Are they similar to what we have on Earth? And yes and no. The gravity is different on Mars and the atmosphere is thinner and so the wind doesn't move material as much as it does on Earth because the atmosphere is thinner. So they, yes, they're similar but we do have to make corrections for the different properties of the surface and atmosphere of Mars. Can we live on Mars? Not right now. And the reason we can't live on Mars is because we don't have enough resources on the planet to live there. And so we would have to figure out some way to make water for a start and protect ourselves from the radiation as well and keep warm. All of those things are really quite hard to do without fuel but fuel is really heavy and so it's actually quite hard to take fuel to Mars that's enough to do those kinds of things. So when can I visit Mars? Well, I think we have to solve some of those things first and I think that bringing back samples from Mars will help us because it will tell us what's there and then what resources are there in a real way. So we've set these rovers and that's great but it's all remote. Can you imagine sending a camera to the bottom of the ocean? You could take photos, look around but it's just not as good as you going yourself, right? Well, it's the same with these rocks. You really want your rocks to come back to you so that you can look at them and multiple people can look at them, check them out and then everyone can decide what's there. When you send the remote camera or the rover to Mars you can't really have that fact-checking and multiple people looking at things because you only have one way of getting the information. It's like sending the camera, it's just one way of getting the information but if you bring back what you see on the ocean floor then everyone can look at it on the ship. Same with Mars, if we bring back the samples everyone can look at them and then we can come up with better ideas as to what's there so we can come up with better ideas about what kind of radiation protection might we need are those rocks and minerals toxic? All of those kinds of questions we can answer with samples that have been returned from Mars. Wow, there's so many questions here. What got me into looking at rocks? That's interesting. I just liked being outside and I've never heard about looking at rocks actually. I didn't know that people did that. A family friend said to me when they heard what I was going to study at university Penny, why are you doing that? I was going to do arts and they said you'll end up just filing papers in an office somewhere and I thought, oh no, that's the last thing I want to do I want to be outside. And so she said, oh, why don't you do geology or geography? And so I decided to do geology and I decided that rocks were actually pretty cool. Are there any other sites like the one that Perseverance is going to explore? Yes, there is. There are actually quite a few sites like that because there are a lot of craters on Mars and lots of evidence for that old water. So yes, there are other sites like that. What will happen if extinct life is found on another planet? So if extinct life is found on another planet there'll be people that say, yes, I believe that and there'll be people that say, no, I don't and there'll be people that the scientists saying we need to test that. And so I think it's going to be ambiguous if we find evidence for extinct life on another planet. I think that the scientists will say we need to test that again and that we need to then check out what's going on with multiple techniques. So I think that's the first thing that's going to happen but I think it'd be very, very interesting. Why is there no water on Mars? You know, I'm actually working on that right now and we don't have a very good idea. The main ideas are that it had an atmosphere early in its life that had water in it and it was that the planet couldn't hold on to that atmosphere very well because it's not very big and so gravity didn't hold that atmosphere to the planet and the hydrogen escaped. Now that said, there is water in the ice at the poles. So there's not no water because there's water in ice but there's no liquid water. So I might have said that wrong by accident earlier but yeah, there's no liquid water and it's liquid water that you need for life. Can we make a rover from an RC car and a GoPro? What is an RC car? I wish that someone could answer me because I don't know what an RC car is. Sorry, remote control car. Ah, okay. Probably could, yep. Now, the problem with your rover is it would work on Earth but it wouldn't work on Mars. Now, the reason it wouldn't work on Mars is that Mars is so cold that our normal electronics that we're used to don't work very well on Mars. So you have to use special electronics that can survive temperatures that go from minus 120 at night up to 25 or 30 degrees during the day and so if you had a remote control car and a GoPro that had parts in them that could stand up to the temperature cycling, yeah, you could. Am I interested in your rover at all? Is it being explored too? Yeah, I love your rover. Your rover is a moon off Jupiter and it's got an icy crust and then it has an ocean that isn't like our ocean with normal salt in it. It's an ocean with epsom salts in it. So you might have seen epsom salts for the bath. So there's epsom salts in the ocean of your rover and then there's bicarbonate soda. So that's what you use in the kitchen when you're cooking. So your rover is super cool. We're not quite sure why it's like what... how it's become the way it is but there are some plans for exploring your rover in a lot more detail. So you can go to the NASA website and learn about that. Okay, so how do these machines engineered to pick up rock cores get tested on Earth before they start their journey to Mars? So what they do is like this picture here. This is David Flannery and he has actually got the drill bits. This here under his piece of whatever that is, piece of paper is one of the drill bits, like the drill bit that they're going to use on the rover. And so he's drilling into some rocks that are kind of like the hardness of the rocks on Mars to check it out and test. Then what they do is they put those onto the rover and they test it on the rover itself. Sometimes they have a twin rover that they do testing on too but they have to do... I mentioned earlier they have this horrible like temperature fluctuation and then they have lots of radiation too. So they usually do some testing in a cold chamber. They do a testing in a shaking chamber, a vibration chamber and they make sure that the parts work before and afterwards and it takes more than 10 years for most of these missions to get ready and so they spend a long time testing. So I hope you enjoyed that and looking forward to seeing this stargazing even though it's virtual stargazing. Thank you. Thank you Penny, that was fantastic. Mars will feature a bit tonight in our virtual stargazing. Now it is a bit cloudy here in Canberra. We're fighting back rain and clouds and all sorts of things and it's been like that for a week. Great for the trees and plants, obviously not so great for us looking up but a sacrifice we're all willing to take. So I'll talk about a few things that you can see in the skies tonight if it's clear where you are or maybe later this weekend or into early next week. And so if you go outside now, right around 7.30 and if you look towards the east you'll see pretty high in the sky two bright objects and these two objects are Jupiter and Saturn. So sometimes you may see a really bright object and you don't know if it's a star or a planet and there's actually two simple tricks that determine if an object in the sky is a planet or a star. So firstly, planets don't twinkle. So you may, you know, twinkle twinkle little star. You may have seen stars twinkling and flickering lights slightly changing colors and all those sorts of things but planets don't do that. So why? Why don't planets twinkle? Well, it's quite interesting and that is it's a bit to do with our eyes actually our eyes in the Earth's atmosphere. So as points of light come into our Earth's atmosphere there's turbulence in our sky. So the same reason your aeroplane shake is the same reason stars twinkle. And so as that light comes down turbulence bounces around and we see that flickering we see that twinkling. But planets, planets have multiple points of light so they're closer to us. They're for brighter and therefore we see multiple points of light coming into the sky. So our eye kind of averages that twinkling together. We don't necessarily see it as this twinkling. We see it just as a solid point of light. Now if you look through a telescope you can actually see a bit of the planet moving and shaking. You know we don't see twinkling of the sun or the moon that's because it's super bright. So firstly if it's really bright and it's not twinkling probably a good chance it's a planet. Now the other trick is planets form what we call an imaginary line across the sky we call the ecliptic. So imagine our solar system is this giant disk this giant plate. And we're looking through the edge of the plate. And so if you look through the edge of the plate all the planets will line up on this arc going across the sky. And it's essentially the same path the moon and the sun for the most part follows across the sky. So if you kind of know where the sun rises and sets and where it relatively goes where it roughly goes across the sky anything that's bright and not twinkling appearing on that line will be a planet. So in fact tonight and it's been like this for a couple months and it'll be like this through the end of the year. So it's not like you have to worry about and rush out to see it just tonight you have plenty of time. Jupiter and Saturn are really close to each other in the sky and they form what looks like a pretty straight line going down and they follow all the way down to the horizon where the sun rises in the morning. So if you're going out right now or go up tomorrow night you'll see Jupiter and Saturn and Saturn is always spectacular to look through a telescope. So this is an image I took a bit while ago so knowing we weren't going to get anything this week but Saturn luckily doesn't change too much night to night which is always fantastic and you can clearly see the body of Saturn rather and the beautiful rings of Saturn and you can see the gaps you can literally see the gaps or what we call the division between the body of the planet and the main ring system of Saturn and you can really see this through a telescope the telescope that we use for our public nights and Mount Shrumlow if you have a pretty good pair of binoculars you can start to see that Saturn is not round or circular that it's kind of weirdly shaped and that's the rings so it's really amazing I think to see Saturn because it's like it appears Saturn is exactly as promised which is always a good thing that you want in your planet now the other thing Jupiter now if you have a pair of binoculars you can go do this so just for reference again Jupiter is the top object here Saturn's the bottom one so Jupiter is a bit brighter and it's going to be on top or further west depending on the time of night relative to Saturn and if you look at Jupiter you'll see Jupiter and if you have a telescope you can start to see these two main gas bands of Jupiter but even through a relatively fine pair of binoculars you'll see Jupiter and you'll see the four dots around it in fact Penny mentioned her questions about Europa and Europa is one of those four what we call Galilean moons the four biggest moons of Jupiter and through a pair of binoculars you can actually see them so if you look at Jupiter right now now imagine this is actually tilted you'll see one, two, three dots on the top and a fourth dot on the bottom and if you actually look at Jupiter every night say you want to take a look it's a clear night and next week will actually be very clear nice and cold and clear here in Canberra we'll see these moons change over the sky so in fact you'll see that these dots aren't in their same position night to night and that is actually because they're orbiting around Jupiter in fact this is one of the key pieces of evidence that Galileo used to show that the Earth was not the center of the solar system in the universe along with another thing that I'll mention in a second so great chance to see the moons of Jupiter in action just by using a pair of binoculars and looking at that bright object someone's asked what do we use to stargaze these images were taken through an eight inch telescope so when we talk about telescopes it's the size of the telescope mirror that matters how big the mirror is so telescopes are just giant light buckets so if your eye was eight inches wide you would see the same thing effectively as that we can see through this telescope so just by using a simple camera on the back of this we can see Saturn quite well and this is exactly what's taken if you have a telescope that's four inches you can also still see the rings of Saturn you can clearly make out the ring the moons of Jupiter and some of the details of Jupiter as well especially if we have a nice clear night which unfortunately isn't tonight now if you're a late person you like to stay up a little bit late at eleven o'clock you can actually start to see Mars so you know Penny talked a lot about Mars and you can start to see it as it comes over the eastern horizon just after eleven o'clock and so by the time eleven o'clock comes up you'll see Mars low in the east and Jupiter and Saturn will be nearly straight above you and Mars looks red in the sky you know Penny showed all those beautiful pictures of Mars we call it the red planet it looks red and it looks red in the sky just as on Mars Earth looks blue in the sky we see Mars as the red dot and if you have a telescope you can see Mars as a redder dot you can start to see some detail on Mars through a telescope about the size of eight inches so next month we'll probably take a closer look at Mars as it will be rising a little bit earlier and so Mars is visible all the way from about eleven p.m. all the way until sunrise so Jupiter, Saturn and Mars if you're an early riser will all still be up then someone has asked how many moons does Jupiter have Jupiter has 79 moons it used to have 62 and then 17 more were found in 2018 so it's at 79 moons but it doesn't have the most moons in fact Saturn has the most moons at 82 moons so Saturn has 82 Jupiter has 79 they're a bit overachievers when we compare to Earth which has only one luckily we're not Mercury and Venus which have zero even Mars has two even though they're tiny and so yeah it's interesting to see but with Jupiter you can only see really the four big moons of Jupiter those Galilean moons as we said on Saturn, Saturn's largest moon Titan you can see a bit of size to Titan on a clear night it is possible but really the rest of the moons of Saturn are quite tiny and really embedded in that ring system now there's obviously some other things to see in the nighttime sky that are always great that I love to look at so we have here the Southern Cross and the trick to the Southern Cross is two things some stars you may see they may look like the Southern Cross so how do you know what the Southern Cross is? well we use the trick called the pointers and that is these two bright stars what we call alpha and beta centauri point to the Southern Cross so if you see something that looks like the Southern Cross and you see two bright stars to the left of it or to the bottom depending on the time of day or time of night rather these this will be the Southern Cross and also the Southern Cross by its name is in the south so if you know where south is and you look towards the south the Southern Cross will be in the southern sky it won't be in any other direction so it's always a trick to finding the Southern Cross but above kind of in this triangle between alpha centauri what sometimes is called Rigel Centaurus at the top of the cross there's this triangle and if you look on a clear night so you kind of need a moonless night so the moon is quite young right now you'll see what looks like a star but that star is actually a faint fuzzy object and through a telescope you can see it's actually what we call globular cluster in this case a mega centauri and the mega centauri is a ball of stars grouped together where gravity is being held on to it it's being pulled together and it's being tightly bound and we think it's actually the remnant core of a galaxy so we think mega centauri used to be a galaxy that gravity ripped apart threw around and kind of spat out and this is just the leftover bits of it so it's a great chance to see tons of stars literally millions of stars in this little ball and again you can see this even through a telescope about the size of 8 inches someone's asked how did Saturn's rings form and how did they keep their shape so if you notice Saturn's rings form a ring where our solar system is a disk our Milky Way is a disk things in space like to spin around and as they spin around we call conservation of angular momentum so imagine I have all these things spinning and a couple of them collide well they're going to bounce off in the same direction and gravity is going to pull them together so now you have a few things like this a few more of them bounce so yet more spinning and as you get more gravity gravity pulls the rest of the things together so the universe that like the natural spinning shape is things in a disk which then eventually if you get enough of them turn into a ball it's this really elegant process using the principles of physics that show how the fabric of everything galaxy stars, planets, moons, rings all come together so I think it's a very beautiful thing that we get to see in our universe now if you're an early riser let's say you like to wake up the dog and take a walk with them or you know get some fresh air you can check out Orion the early morning sky and Venus if you're up in the early morning Venus is what we call the morning star bright in the eastern horizon and if you look through Venus through a pair of binoculars a telescope it also has phases just like the moon and before I end I just want to point out a really cool thing happening next weekend and you may have seen this a couple weeks ago and that is the moon, Jupiter and Saturn all lining up as a trio so on the 28th of August in the early evening you'll see the moon, Jupiter and Saturn all in a perfect line now because the moon moves differently through the sky than Jupiter and Saturn on the 29th again in the early evening the moon will kind of be in between Jupiter and Saturn with the 30th kind of the other part of the line at the end so next weekend go outside and you can see this anytime after sunset and see kind of a really cool space trio in line now it will happen again in September in fact it will happen a couple months until the end of the year when we don't see this anymore so lots of things to see in the sky this week and this weekend and go outside hopefully it's clear not too cloudy and you can see some awesome things now our next speaker I'm going to hand it over is Professor Kate Reynolds and Professor Kate Reynolds is in the Research School of Psychology and she works on groups and group dynamics so how do groups function, how do groups work the processes, the relations and so she's going to talk about something I think is really cool and that is space psychology and how we use psychology to prevent, as she's calling it space mutiny how do we get people to Mars a lot of people have asked in Penny's talk what about sending people to Mars well it's pretty tricky and Kate's going to talk about one of the really big tricks of sending humans to Mars and I think that is the human part and what she and her students and colleagues are working on to solve that so Kate, if you're ready I'll hand it over to you thanks for the introduction hello everyone it's great that you can join us for stargazing I'm just trying to share my screen which should be straightforward it doesn't seem to be seeing my screen okay well I'm going to talk you through this with limited visuals I think because it doesn't want to recognize let me just check something hmm okay well I'm going to look at my slides and you're going to get to look at me so I did want to start by just spending a little bit of time talking about the title here mutiny in space team risks and opportunities for space flight missions and mutiny is really an example where people don't obey someone in authority and decide to do things differently and it's a sign that there's disagreement or that teams aren't working so well together and I want to talk a little bit today about the role of psychology and the importance of I guess the opposite of mutiny which is team cohesion for space flight missions but I did want to just spend a little bit of time give you about 30 seconds or so to think about how you might be able to work out why psychology is important for space missions so I'm going to give you about 30 seconds starting now to think about how is psychology relevant to space flight missions okay so maybe you've had a chance to discuss about that question we know that some of the things that you might have thought about were loneliness that obviously that astronauts in space can feel lonely and they can feel like they are missing out on things back on earth and so loneliness is one of the things that they need to struggle with psychology is sort of also relevant in space missions because of sleep deprivation and stress that people can experience mental health problems in space and it's also true that in space our brains the way we process information the way we think doesn't work as well in space we're much slower in terms of our cognitive function and the way in which we think and respond and so that can take a lot of getting used to when we're we're talking to astronauts that are in space we also know that psychology is important when it comes to team functioning the way in which we might select astronauts to go on space missions the training that they will have on space missions and also how they function together as a team on space missions so all of those things mean that different areas of psychology sort of clinical psychology cognitive psychology social psychology and organizational psychology are all relevant to to what happens in space I'm just going to see if I can email my slides to Brad because he might be able to to help here so we know that psychology is relevant for all of those kind of reasons and as a result NASA has quite a lot of interest in psychology and the way in which teams function in space they've spent some time thinking about different types of missions and the impact that psychology might have we also know that there's been some events in the history with NASA that have led to more attention on psychological factors and one of those events happened in in 1973 and 74 on the Skylab mission which was the sort of space station prior to the International Space Station and what happened on that mission is that the three astronauts on board felt that they were being overworked they had too much to do people were being too demanding in terms of the schedule that they had and so they decided effectively to go on strike and turned off their equipment for a day and decided to have I'm sure many of us have felt like that when we've been at work or at school and here is a case where the astronauts took a very high risk action and turned off all communications with mission control and this really shows that there is an example of conflict between the teams the team that's in space and mission controls a team that is responsible in terms of mission success and it shows that things can go wrong in space and there could be some quite serious consequences after this time NASA spent a lot focus a lot more on some of the issues to do with team cohesion and team conflict and spent sort of more time thinking about what some of the team risks might be in terms of these space flight missions NASA has now identified a whole range of areas where it perceives there to be different kinds of risks and one of those is to do with cooperation coordination and communication and psychosocial adaption so all of those aspects of psychology that we have talked about already and NASA has done some work thinking about what kind of missions are likely to produce the most challenges for teams of astronauts in space but also the relationship between astronauts in space and mission control and how those groups are going to work together to have a successful mission NASA recognises that the longer that humans spend on space missions and the larger the groupings of people that might go to space the more likely it is that these issues of team cooperation coordination and communication are going to be a problem and so they're putting more effort and energy into understanding what are the cycles that teams go through when they're trying to act together well to perform a task and to think about what some of the threats might be to a team that might lead it to engage in more conflict they also want to spend some time working at how to measure team functioning so if you're on earth in mission control and you're working with the team and you're trying to work with that team so it's successful what are the things that you might be looking for that tell you that that the team's not working how might people on earth and perhaps fellow crew members in space know whether the team is functioning well or not and so we need better measurement to assess team functioning there's also this question of if the team's not going so well we need to know how to introduce different what's called counter measures or different ways in which it might be possible to help the astronauts in space to function better as a team and so these counter measures what kind of training could people do what kind of support could they get in space how might they be prepared before they even leave earth to be able to function effectively and when we've got more people going to space not only more missions there's a mission planned in 2024 to go to the moon to spend a longer period of time on the moon and then to hopefully move on to Mars there's not only those kind of missions there's also this idea of space tourism where you can imagine in the future people might go on a holiday with a whole lot of other people and travel around the moon and back to earth and team functioning may also be important in that setting so we have some slides here thanks Brad so we're just we almost had some slides so there's the example of there are the astronauts with mutiny in space who had issues on skylab four this is the example of NASA's thinking about the likelihood of something happening and the consequences of something happening and you can see that as missions get longer there you can see sort of yellow versus red so yellow means that there's medium risk red means that there's high risk and as we are travelling longer the risks to do with cooperation, coordination and communication increase and if you just go to the next slide you can see and you can go to NASA's web page and you can see all of the types of gaps in knowledge that NASA thinks exist in relation to team functioning and at ANU and with Grace Goodman Brad Tucker and Emma Tucker we're looking at some of these gaps and we've done some research already in particular looking at gaps 1, 2 and 3 so if we go to the next slide we can talk a little bit about how we study and how we prepare teams for space and we're really looking at trying to recruit not only the right individuals but also the right groups so even though we might have individuals that have the right characteristics and skills and knowledge the right approach to cohesion and working with others putting all of those individuals together doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to have the right team so perhaps we need to do more than just focus on the individuals we need to be able to really work very well with teams and to actually select the best teams to travel in space when we study teams so how do we go about selecting them, how do we go about working with them, how do we go about studying them there are a range of techniques what's been happening probably up until very recently is that a number of times a day teams that are working together that are preparing to go to space or if we're studying teams in other environments which we're going to talk about soon sometimes there are environments that are created to be just like it would be like travelling to or being on another planet small habitats delayed communications different tasks that people have to complete in those habitats members will have to complete surveys this is an example, this is the NASA human experimentation research analog so it has been used to test teams for up to 45 days there's sound effects in there, it vibrates there's communication delays to mirror the kind of experiences that teams would have travelling and being located for example on Mars and so when we're studying teams in these environments we would ask surveys but increasingly we're being able to use technology in new ways to study these teams and there is this idea that just the size of a mobile phone people could wear that around their necks could monitor the type of interaction that one member of the team is having with another it could measure the mood perhaps by looking at facial expression and also the way in which people are talking to one another these monitors could also assess sleep deprivation and general health of the astronaut so technology is helping us monitor health and also could be used to help us monitor team functioning so these these new technologies are really starting to be studied very seriously and giving us new ways to study groups in space so this is in Houston Johnson Space Center but there's some other images here of other sites that are used to study teams and try and mimic the kind of experiences that astronauts would have in space sometimes the European Space Agency for example will study teams in high-pressured confined environments such as these caves training simulation so people can be sent to unfamiliar areas and the way they solve problems respond to stress respond to space restricted space can be studied and examined there's also the winter over crew I think is the next slide of course in Antarctica there are teams that are at research stations there that their communications is restricted they're in a more extreme environment over winter and so at A&U and in partnership actually with the European Space Agency we've studied how those teams function over time over winter to better understand what it might be like for teams who are astronaut teams or for space flight missions there are some other examples here as well Brad this is another example of Mars 500 which was located in Russia and here they studied teams over 520 days so the teams are in this sort of confined space this habitat it was a culturally diverse team with Russians and Chinese French and Italians and they were studying aspects of mental health stress sleep and how people were responding during this time and again they had communication delays like you would experience for example on Mars simulated landings simulated Mars walks to see how the team sort of functioned so I'm just going to have a quick look at these questions is anything sort of relevant to relevant to where we are now okay I can come back to some of those questions towards the end so we can go to the next slide which I just wanted to spend a little bit of time on so this is data that comes out of the Mars 500 study and this is the kind of data that would be able to inform the astronauts themselves and mission control about the way in which a team is functioning so on the Y axis you have the score of the different individuals that were part of this Mars 500 mission and across the X axis across the bottom you have the number of days that the mission that was part of the mission so we can see how every individual A, B, C, D, E E and F are the individuals who are part of this mission and we can see how they're responding to these psychological and organisational really measures across time so you can see that at point zero many of these individuals are starting at a similar point but they're all reacting a little bit differently as you look at their scores across time so you can see in relation to depression I've got a mouse here I can use this is the Brad you'd have to use the mouse sorry you can see that individual E is suffering much more from depression than the other individuals that are part of this team and that is likely to have implications for not only that individual but the team as well so if something like that happened on a journey to Mars what might E be able to do to help them sort of better cope with this onset of this mental health sort of issue you can see when it comes to the third one along confusion and bewilderment that as the mission gets longer there are individuals who are having more challenges with some of that cognitive functioning the idea that the way we process information and think you know might be affected by being in these confined spaces for a long period of time you can also see how they're reacting to stress exhaustion how tired they are but getting this kind of information quickly back to mission control and being able to have confidence in this information that relates to how the team is functioning means that it's possible to perhaps intervene earlier or put countermeasures into place that are going to help the team function better we also know from some of the monitors there's some work being done at Michigan State University with monitors and they can see that people are spending less time with one another the longer a mission goes on so also it was the case here that people are sleeping for longer or isolating themselves from others longer as the mission goes on so this is the kind of information that we can get and we're working very hard as are other sort of teams and groups around the world to get a very high quality data about the way in which teams are functioning because it is so critical to a successful mission and successful performance for space flight missions and getting to Mars so there's also a few other sort of slides here I think just this is another site they've all got the same sort of look about them haven't they they're all trying to mimic the kind of size of the pricing that would be available with a mission to Mars the way in which we could get resources and what could we get to Mars and often they're going to be very small and people have to learn to live with one another well in those places this is in Hawaii this is in Mars Desert Research Station in Utah there are research teams interested in geology which is what Penny talked about and also interested in how groups and teams are functioning in you know applying and going to this site almost all year round doing different kinds of research and studies that will help provide information for us getting to Mars there's also talk about a site here in Australia and we had an analogue site they're called because they're meant to be an analogue to what it would be like in Mars we would be able to perhaps do more research here and build on some of the expertise that we have in Australia to get a better handle on all sorts of aspects of a mission but obviously myself and others at ANU would be very interested in better understanding some of the team functioning and the successful indicators that are going to tell us that the team is going well and I just wanted to finish with where the research is going I don't know how many of you are familiar with Star Trek Voyager and the idea that members of the crew are wearing a disc that can capture and they can use to communicate with one another you know we are moving towards this idea of a smart monitor that might be able to assess sleep and stress mood, how much contact people are having with one another by looking at facial expressions the type of emotion that might be characterising those interactions it's also possible without looking at what people are saying to understand how they're saying it to get a sense of whether people are getting on well or not how are they relating to leaders in these particular missions and this kind of technology I think will help us better understand team functioning in isolated confined and extreme environments ice environments better inform the preparation of teams for a successful space mission help us better understand what things are important for team cohesion help us train teams better but also develop counter-measures for a very successful a successful mission really and a high performing team that can achieve the goals that they have so that's really the direction that the research is taking so they were the main points that I wanted to make and thank you Brad for getting these slides up I'm sure they're helpful visuals to kind of see the kind of points that we're making here so let me have a look at some of the questions that we have one question is wasn't psychology included in planning for space missions before I think certainly after sort of the Skylab incidents I think psychology and team aspects and thinking about astronauts thinking lives and how much they're able to play a role in deciding what they do and when they do it all of that really came about after some of those events I think psychology has always been there for recruitment for trying to work out who's going to have the right character skills, knowledge to be able to be successful in the NASA type program so I think psychology has been there in those aspects I think it's more recently that issues of team scientific understanding of team functioning how we measure team functioning is coming to the fore more recently what criteria is NASA looking for for the perfect astronaut psychologically well a whole lot of sort of characteristics or personality characteristics have been identified often that's about the individual but increasingly this idea of having a cooperative mindset so this ability to get on well with others and to handle sort of stress have emerged as being important in terms of what's more important I guess or we've got better information about those things as being important for the missions so it's not there's a lot you have to be able to do you have to have skills to obviously understand the equipment fly complete all the tasks that you need to do on such a space mission but in addition some of these team aspects are also emerging as important for the missions you mentioned that in space our cognitive abilities are more limited what causes this ongoing investigation we know that some of it is to do with the way sort of fluid moves around the body as a function of being in a gravity or a no gravity environment but certainly coordination movement all of those things are much slower and also this idea that sort of it might feel like the way our thinking is going is much slower in space as well perhaps due to this fluid the way fluid responds and doesn't respond in a lower gravity environment so what sort of countermeasures do they use well it's interesting so some of the countermeasures for example with isolation have been trying to encourage helping people to connect with people on earth so when it's possible to communicate those forms of connection are an important sort of countermeasure making sure that astronauts have time to sort of own their own to sort of think and relax that is seem to be another kind of countermeasure to deal with some of the issues of stress and sleep there are ideas now that in fact you could set up remote training modules that astronauts could do where they've got high quality information while travelling in space that would help some of the time that they have at hand that they could have sort of mental health training insights that they could access they could also access team type information that might be helpful and the more information they've got about how their own team is functioning in real time perhaps the more they could perhaps do things that might prevent more serious elements of team conflict so knowing how to resolve conflict and deal with these stressful situations could be very helpful so this is a very hard question what actions would be taken if there was a serious dysfunction within the team murder, suicide prevent a failure of a mission particularly if the said individual is key to the success of the mission and survival of the other team members so you can see that at its most crisis point there are some very complex issues to do with the way individuals and teams are functioning one of the solutions is to have what's called a leader full team everyone is capable of leading the team such that if something happens to one individual who might be critical to the mission other people can step in and fulfill that role so having some duplication or overlap of skills and abilities could be quite important for mission success but you looking at that Mars 520 data I mean you can see that I mean that wasn't in space it was in a simulated environment but something about being in that confined environment something about team relations perhaps something about isolation loneliness certainly did lead that one individual to experience more and more depression as the mission went on perhaps monitoring that would mean that it might be possible to provide some sort of counselling and support to prevent things deteriorating or getting worse okay so there's some other very interesting charts and it seemed there's a couple of people who perform relatively better than others yeah so if we knew more about how people if we knew that if we had lots of teams in lots of analog environments and we were studying them we would be able to better work out what combination of people might be work very effectively together so this is all pointing to more team research how do we get more women into space so and would Skylab mutiny be due to a change from a military base to a scientific base thinking of NASA more women in space I mean I think there's there are there are many women who've been to space and there obviously is not just an interest a real commitment to having diverse teams in space that includes women there's certain advantages to women going to space in terms of in terms of their size and weight and being in confined type spaces so I think that there's lots of programs working very hard to ensure that women are in the best position to travel in space yeah and I think you're right I mean this idea of the mutiny one of the explanations and I've got a reference list that I can share but one of the ideas around the mutiny was exactly that that the astronaut was almost seen to be like a piece of equipment and so this mutiny example led NASA to start to think a lot more as astronauts as being sort of very valuable members of the team that they actually needed to be sort of included more in terms of decision making and planning to shift in this idea that thinking about the crew kind of changed as a function of this event of mutiny so we've got a little bit longer I'll just do one or two more questions what can be done about dysfunction depression or psychotic behavior while in space I mean this is a very real question perhaps particularly when we think about space tourism and you know there are questions about whether the medicines that we might take on earth actually work in space so there's some research that needs to be done there and we don't know about the medication we certainly need to think about treatments including counselling and other interventions that could prevent mental health issues getting worse so there's another question here any chance of deaf people going in space would it be problematic I'm not sure I know the answer to that question I can't think of any if there's methods of communication and abilities to communicate effectively both within the team and with mission control I can't see why being deaf would prevent people going to space so I think we're pretty much at time I hope you found some of these questions interesting and the human factors I guess are a really important part of the puzzle as well in terms of having successful space missions so thank you