 Welcome to the September webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Mitch Schulte to our webinar who will bring us up to date on plans for the Mars 2020 rover. Dr. Mitch Schulte is a Program Scientist with the Mars Exploration Program in NASA's Science Mission Recreate. As a Program Scientist, Mitch manages the science content of a number of NASA's Mars missions. As a researcher, he studies the geology and geochemistry of hydrothermal environments and the life that inhabits them. He has an A.B. and a Ph.D. both in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. So please welcome Mitch Schulte. Thank you and thank you everyone for dialing in this evening. It's great. So can you guys hear me? I just want to do a sound check and make sure you guys can hear me okay? Yep, we can hear you great. Fantastic. Okay. Let me share my slides with you then and we will get started. Okay. As Brian mentioned, my name is Mitch Schulte. I'm a Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. And what I want to talk to you about tonight is our next mission to Mars. We've been sending spacecraft to Mars for about 50 years now, a little over 50 years. We've learned a lot, but there's still a lot that we want to find out. So we're planning a new Mars rover mission. It's pretty much completely built now and is undergoing what we call environmental testing so that we're sure that it can survive the trip all the way to Mars and then survive once it gets there. And I'll show you some pictures a little later on from the high bay at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where they're building the rover so that you guys can all see the great progress that we've made. So without further ado, I'll launch right into my presentation here. So I want to give you a quick overview of what the mission will do. So we're going to launch the rover like we did with Curiosity on an Atlas V541. So this is one of our workhorse launch vehicles and does really well. So we're going to use the same launching system for sending Mars 2020 rover as we used for Curiosity. So the launch readiness date will be July of 2020. Everything is on track. As I mentioned, the rover is largely built now and is undergoing environmental tests. So we're definitely on schedule to meet our July of 2020 launch date. So the first day that will be possible for launching the rover to Mars will be July 17. So market calendars for that date. Once it's on its way, it will take about seven months for the rover to arrive at Mars. So it will be a direct trajectory and a direct entry into Mars. So no going into orbit and landing. It will just go straight there and go straight to the ground. It will arrive in February of 2021. So market calendars for that as well. And then that's when the fun starts and we get to do all the great science. Before we get to the ground, of course, we have to put it on the ground. This little animation here is what it looked like, we think, when Curiosity landed on Mars. The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab came up with this sky crane idea because the rover for Curiosity is about almost 900 kilograms. And so it was too heavy to land any other way. So they devised this sky crane to land the rover on Mars. So the Mars 2020 rover is actually going to weigh a little bit more than the Curiosity rover. So the last estimate I saw for the mass of the Mars 2020 rover is on the order of 1050 kilograms, 1050 kilograms, so over a metric ton. But we're going to use the same sky crane system to land the Mars 2020 rover on the ground. We do have a couple of improvements in the landing system that we've built into the system this time. One is, like Curiosity, it will have guided entries. So the back shell will have little retro rockets on it so it will be able to guide the spacecraft as it's coming in once it hits the top of the atmosphere of Mars. As it's coming through the atmosphere, it will deploy the parachutes and then deploy the sky crane system that you see here. But we have two improvements in that landing system. One is called range trigger. This will allow us, once we're in the right place, we can deploy the parachute at the right time so that we'll get closer to our landing ellipse. The other one is TRN, which is terrain relative navigation. So this will be a series of images that will be loaded into the software on the rover. The rover, as it's looking down at the ground, will compare what it sees with its radar to the images that are loaded on board so that it will be able to divert from any big obstacles that it sees and have a safe landing. So that landing ellipse figure that you see there under the entry descent and landing heading of 16 by 14 will actually be a lot smaller. And we think it will be on the order of about 6 by 8 or 8 by 10 kilometers. So a lot smaller, we'll be able to get a lot closer to the rock so we can start doing science right away. Once we get on the ground, then we will have one Mars year to complete our prime mission. The rover will be built with the capability of going about 20 kilometers across the surface. The Curiosity rover just went past 21 kilometers during its drives. It's been on the ground for about seven years, but we'll be able to do that. Technically, we'll be able to do that 20 kilometers in one year if we need to. We've qualified all of the hardware on the rover mission to last for one and a half Mars years, just to give us a little bit of extra cushion in terms of the warranty as it were for all the hardware on the rover. Now I'll talk about what our mission objectives are in the next slide here. So we have four major objectives for the mission. The first, all the way on the left hand side of the slide, is geologic exploration. So as a geologist, the first thing you want to do when you're investigating a new field area is go out and case the place. So we want to explore primarily an ancient terrain and I'll talk towards the end here about where we're actually going to send the rover. But what we want to look at is an ancient environment on Mars. So what we're trying to find are signs of life as I'll talk about in a second. And so we think our best chance to find evidence for life in the rocks on Mars is to go way back in Mars' history when it was much more Earth-like than it is today. As I'm sure you all know, Mars today is very cold and dry and dusty at the surface. Liquid water is not stable at the surface right now. But we see evidence in the really old rocks on Mars that there was liquid water at the surface in Mars' ancient geologic past. So we'll be sending the rover to one of these ancient terrains and we really want to understand the geology of the area so that we understand the environmental conditions that attended that particular area so that we understand better the chances for seeking those signs of life through understanding processes of the formation of the rocks that we see and any alteration events that have happened to them since. So the second mission objective as I alluded to is seeking signs of life. So again we're not looking for life at the surface now. What we're looking for is evidence in the rock record that life may have left behind an imprint. So what you see in that image in the second panel is an image of a type of rock that we call a stromatolite. These are microfossils that are formed by microorganisms and it leaves these imprints in the rock record. And so this is one of the kinds of things that we're hoping to maybe find when we go to Mars. So we're looking for evidence of past life again in the rock record on Mars. We're also going to be looking for areas to select samples with high potential for preserving that evidence of life. And we refer to this evidence as potential biosignatures. So when you go look at these places on Earth you see these, the evidence in the rocks. And a lot of times it's very difficult to convince people that what you're seeing actually is evidence of life especially in really old rocks. And so we want to gather as many lines of evidence as possible in the rocks. And then what we also want to do related to our third objective which is the next panel is prepare a returnable cache of samples. So we'll have the capability with the rover to collect, I think 43 is the number of sample tubes that we have now. So we'll be able to collect over 40 samples. We want to take blanks as witnesses to make sure that we understand any contamination vectors so that when we bring these samples back to Earth and study them we are sure that what we're seeing is actually Martian and not something that we brought with us and then brought home with us in those sample tubes. So what we really want to do is not just collect samples that give us information about these potential biosignatures but we're also interested in other kinds of samples as well. So we're hoping to collect geologic diversity of samples. What we're currently planning to do is deposit these samples on the ground in what we call the depot so we'll put them in all sort of similar places or put piles of rocks, sample tubes in a couple of different places. And we're currently working on obtaining permission to start the next mission that would be the mission to go retrieve those samples. And I'll talk briefly about that towards the end of the talk here as well. And then our final objective for this mission is to prepare for humans eventually to explore Mars so we have two instruments on board the rover that will help with that. One will be a weather package and I'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later as well. And we have a technology demonstration to extract oxygen out of Mars's atmosphere. So we call this in situ resource utilization or ISRU and I'll talk briefly about that instrument on board the rover as well. So this is an artist depiction of what the rover looks like. Again, it may look familiar to you. The chassis is essentially a copy of the Curiosity rover. We know that rover is working very well and we decided to, in order to save money, we would just reuse that design rather than coming up with a brand new design. It does have an entirely new instrument package. Some of them are a little bit derivative of what we saw with Curiosity and I'll go through each of the instruments. But a couple of things to point out here. One, this rover-like Curiosity will be nuclear powered so no solar panels. So you won't see solar panels on here. Way out at the, on the right hand side you see what we call the turret. This is out at the end of the robotic arm. And we have a couple of instruments out there to really interrogate the rocks in very fine detail. And I'll talk about those instruments individually. And that's of course where the drill that we'll be collecting the samples will sit. So we'll talk about all this as we go along. One other note that I'll make is that you see that the wheels look different than Curiosity's wheels if you pay attention to what the wheels look like on Curiosity. We've determined of course that the wheels on Curiosity are developing a lot of holes in them and some tears in the aluminum. So we had to redesign the wheels to make sure that that doesn't happen again. So the folks at JPL have redesigned those wheels and you'll see that they're a little bit narrower than Curiosity's wheels. The aluminum is a little bit thicker and the tread pattern is a little bit different. And they've tested these out at JPL and they've not been able to poke any holes in them unlike Curiosity's wheels. So we are happy with that redesign of the wheels. So let's take a quick look at all of the instruments on board the rover right up front here. So again what we did was we selected a payload of instruments to measure primarily fine scale mineralogy. We want to get at elemental composition. And we want to again detect potential biosignatures. So this instrument package was really designed to sort of get down to the level of microorganisms which is what we think the nature of life on early Mars would have been. And so we designed this instrument package to accommodate those goals. So you see all of the instruments listed on here. I'll go through them one by one so I won't talk about them individually here. Except to mention that of course this is also a very international mission and you see the flags of a few different countries represented here. And we've been very happy working with our international partners on this, on providing the instruments. And of course we're looking forward to working with them once the rover gets on the ground. So let's go through these one by one. I'll go through them relatively quickly and take any questions at the end that you might have. So the first instrument that I want to talk about is Mastcam-Z. As you could tell from the name, this is on the mast. The thing that sticks up off of the rover deck highlighted in yellow there in the mast are the two cameras that make up Mastcam-Z. And then the yellow boxes that you see inside the body of the rover represent the electronics that provide power for the cameras. And then the one at the very back is the calibration target that Mastcam looks at when it's trying to make sure that it's got the color balance right. So here you see a couple of pictures. As I mentioned, they've been building the rover and it's largely complete. The image that you see on the left are the technicians actually assembling Mastcam-Z and putting it onto the mast of the rover. It's the little cameras down below where you see the big red circle. That's actually a different instrument that we'll talk about in a minute. The rectangular boxes below that and then another one off to the left. So again, the image on the right, you can see them a little bit better. The two rectangular boxes are the Mastcams. So this is an image taken with the Mastcam on Curiosity. So it's the same principal investigator, Jim Bell at Arizona State, who is providing the instrument for Mars 2020. This is the kind of image, though. This is an actual image taken from the surface of Mars with Curiosity. Just showing you the great detail that these cameras actually provide for us. We can actually see a lot of great geologic formations here. We can see differences between rocks. We can see the layering in the rocks and all that kind of stuff. The improvement that Mastcam-Z is going to provide is, imagine this picture zoomed three times. So we'll be able to actually zoom in on these distant vistas with Mastcam-Z, so that we'll be able to get a lot more detailed information from far away. Here's another image. This one's a little bit closer up of, you can again see the layering in the rocks. This one has been a little bit color balanced. So to bring out some of the detail that you can see, which represents some differences in the nature of the materials that make up these rocks, and to enhance the layering so that you can see that in fine detail. So another great thing, since this is the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, I thought I would show you these two images. These were also taken with Mastcam on Curiosity. The image on the left is a transit of Phobos, the larger moon of Mars across the face of the sun. And the image on the right is Deimos, the smaller moon also transiting across the sun. So we can do some astronomy from the surface of Mars with Mastcam as well. Now the next instrument I want to talk about is Supercam. So Supercam is also up there on the top of the mast. The yellow image there just above the Mastcam. And then of course the yellow box inside the body of the rover is the electronics to support the Supercam. So let's take a look at what Supercam is all about. So Supercam is an enhanced Chemcam. So some of you may be familiar with Chemcam, which is the laser induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument on the Curiosity rover. Supercam is Chemcam plus a few things. So in addition to having the libs or the laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, which measures the chemical composition of the rocks, Supercam will also have a laser Raman instrument to be able to look for alteration mineralogy and for organic material, although the sensitivity is a little bit less than the Sherlock instrument that we'll talk about in a few minutes. But from afar we'll be able to look for these kinds of signatures and we'll be able to do it rapidly. And then the other part of Supercam that makes it super above Chemcam is that it will have a visible and near infrared spectrometer to do mineralogy of rocks again from really far away. So from meters away we'll be able to rapidly assess what's going on in rocks and decide whether they're worth investigating more closely. So what you see in this image is before and after the laser that is used to make these measurements is fired. And so you see the rock in the before image is nice surface there unaltered and then after the laser was fired to measure the chemistry of that rock, you see the little pits that the laser made in the inside the yellow circle there. So again, using the laser this gives us a rapid method for doing this again from afar. So this gives us a great surveillance kind of technology and capability for assessing the nature of the materials very quickly. Another very great thing about being able to use these lasers is that we'll be able to look into the holes that we make once we start taking our samples. So we don't actually want to have any of the instruments touch the samples for again for contamination kinds of issues. But once we take a sample we'll be able to look inside the hole that we've made and you see this image here taken again from Curiosity after they had drilled a hole of some laser shots going down the walls of the side of the hole that they had dug so that you can again get some idea about what the nature of the sample is just by looking at the material that you've left behind. So here are some of the kinds of data that the ChemCAM takes when it's doing its analyses and so you can see the axis on the left is intensity or the number of counts that it gets in the spectrometer as a function of wavelength on the x-axis. So you can you can see that in nanometers. So it goes all the way from ultraviolet out to the near infrared. And again what we get from ChemCAM largely is the chemical information. So this spectrum that they took from this rock essentially is a basalt which is not surprising which is because that's the most common rock type on Mars. And so this just shows you that these data are actually fairly well calibrated and actually do a great job of telling us relatively rapidly what the rocks are made out of in terms of its chemical composition. Now I want to move on to the instruments that are out on the turret or out on the end of the arm of the rover so you can see them in so you can see Sherlock and Watson in yellow out there on the turret. Again the electronics inside the body of the rover. Now Sherlock and Watson come as a pair and I'll talk about each of these individually. I'll talk about Watson first. So Watson is a the companion in this case of Sherlock but it's a it's essentially a microscopic imager so it's a sort of a hand lens so that we can look at things relatively up close. It is also the instrument that is used on Curiosity to take these lovely selfies of the rover as it sits on the surface of Mars. So they take a bunch of pictures with the instrument called Mali on Curiosity and stitch them all together to make these beautiful selfies. And I'm certain that you will see many selfies from Mars 2020 as well. But the real purpose of course of that microscopic imager is to really study the materials in fine detail. So for example if you're looking at a nice sediment on the surface and you really want to understand the processes that were involved in creating that sediment you really need to understand the shape of the materials. You need to understand how well rounded they are. You need to understand whether they're all the same size or whether they're different sizes. And so this particular image taken from Mali on Curiosity also shows you very up close the nature of these materials. So that's one of the great purposes. And of course as a geologist when you go out in the field you always carry your hand lens around so you can see things up close. We of course ask our rovers to do the same thing. Now Sherlock itself is the acronym Sherlock stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence and for organics and chemicals and of course the purpose of this instrument is two fold one to look in very fine scale with high resolution camera at the materials on the surface of Mars. It also has a Raman spectrometer on it and can also analyze luminescence. So luminescence is great when you're looking for organic compounds especially organic compounds that have aromatic rings in the structure. So when you shine ultraviolet light on these materials they they luminesce, they fluoresce in the ultraviolet. And so the laser that is used for the Raman on Sherlock is an ultraviolet laser I think it's 242 nanometers. So those materials will luminesce in ultraviolet so we'll be able to detect that. We'll also be able to take Raman spectra and again at very fine scale so we'll be able to look for organic material and we'll be able to look for particular kinds of minerals in these rocks that indicate presence of liquid water in the past. So what Raman spectrometer does is actually look at chemical bonds inside materials and so you'll be able to for example determine whether there are carbon-carbon bonds whether there are sulfur-oxygen bonds for example in a sulfate kind of mineral whether there are carbon-oxygen bonds that make up a carbonate material. So we'll be able to find all of these kinds of materials and again on a very fine scale. So the resolution that we will be able to get with this instrument is on the order of 100 microns so very very fine scale and again what we're trying to do is look in places where we think microorganisms might have lived so essentially we're looking for those areas where the water might have been present inside these rocks. The next instrument I want to talk about is pixel. So pixel lives out on the end of the arm and the turret with Sherlock and Watson. And what pixel stands for is planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry. So what that essentially means is that this is an X-ray fluorescence instrument and it will be able to determine the chemistry again on a very very fine scale which we've not been able to do before with the instruments that we've flown to Mars before. So we'll be able to determine the makeup of particular chemical elements inside the rocks and the abundance of those particular elements. So what you see in the bottom left of this image is an energy X-ray spectrum. So again on the y-axis are the number of counts of X-rays that you get as a function of the energy that you put into it. So there's a high voltage power supply that shines X-rays on the samples. It essentially knocks electrons out of their valences and when those electrons refill it emits X-ray energy and because of the electronic arrangement of those elements it's very diagnostic what the fingerprint is. And so you can see that we will be able to determine the elemental composition of all the way up to atomic number about 40 which again extends the number of elements that we've been able to do before and we'll be able to do it with higher precision and at a much finer scale. So the previous instruments we've sent before were whole rock analyzers. This will actually be able to let us see on a very fine scale. So for example we'll be able to see the composition of a vein, an alteration vein in the rock by itself and not have to determine that by subtraction from doing whole rock chemistry. So the image that you see on the right is a series of elemental maps showing you the distribution of different elements inside a rock or the rock that you see on the left hand side of the picture there. So if I could draw your attention to the bottom of the picture on the right hand side you'll see as an example two really, three really interesting things and very far right you'll see a little spot labeled zircon. So zircon is an element or is a mineral sorry that allows us to date rocks. So if we find zircons in rocks we'll probably want to try and sample those because that will probably give us a pretty good age when we get those samples back and return those to earth. We won't be able to do that with the instruments on the rover but we will be able to do that once we bring those samples back. The other minerals that you see in those pictures at the bottom of that image are detrital pyrite which are sulfide minerals and then magnesium and iron carbonates which of course are often associated with environments where you find microorganisms in both cases. So again we'll be able to see that at a very fine scale so we'll be able to get down to the level that microorganisms exist in. So again to give you an example here is the image on the left. This is one of these microfossils that I've talked about before. These are from 3.4 billion year old rocks here on earth. We call them microbial mats or these stromatolites. This is a very well-known formation from Western Australia called the sterly pool and these are some of the oldest evidence of life on earth and so one of our PI's, PI for Pixel who is a native Australian actually was able to collect a sample of this and they analyzed it with both Pixel and Sherlock and so we can see the utility of having these two instruments on board the rover in analyzing this rock from earth that is known to be evidence of three and a half billion year old life here on earth. So what we see there with Pixel are the the bands where we see carbonates interbedded with silica and then the image from Sherlock we're able to see the silicate minerals as well and we're also able in green to see organic carbon bands that make up the layers where the microorganisms lived and have been preserved all this time. So again being able to see this on this finest scale and being able to see this evidence will be spectacular once we get to Mars. Okay so those are the primary four instruments that we're really going to be using for determining surface properties and surface material, getting information about surface materials. There are a few other instruments on the rover that are also going to tell us a lot about what's going on on Mars. So the first one is rim facts. This is a ground penetrating radar provided by the Norwegians and what you'll see is the antenna for the radar is mounted just underneath the the RTG or the Radioisotope Thermal Electric Generator and then the electronics are mounted on the side of the rover there and so as the rover drives around on the surface of Mars we will be collecting radar data and it looks something like this. So this may not mean much to you guys but to a geologist this is fantastic. What happens is the radar penetrates into the ground when there's a difference in material properties those radar, the radar energy is reflected back and so that you're able to see differences between properties of materials underneath. So as Mars 2020 is driving around and we're collecting these ground penetrating radar data we'll actually be able to see the layering of the materials below the surface and again we're able to do this from orbit but on a much larger scale so having this ground penetrating radar on the ground will actually give us a lot more detail about the subsurface structures of the geology that we've not been able to get before. So this will be a really great a really great instrument to have along. I mentioned that we're sending two instruments that are going to help us help our colleagues in the human exploration directorate by providing a lot of data that we're going to need when we send humans to Mars. The first is the weather station, META. So META is mounted in several different places on the rover because it has several different pieces several of them you see are on the mast and a few of them are mounted on the deck of the rover itself. So let's take a quick look at a few of the things that we're going to be able to study with META. So META stands for Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer. So this will be able to do measurements of the temperature of both the air and the ground. We'll be able to do relative humidity. We'll be able to measure the wind both the speed of the wind and the direction. So we'll have and in three dimensions so we'll have two different booms that will measure the wind velocity and direction so that will be pretty great. And then the other thing that we'll have with META is a dust analyzer. So you see the little box that's highlighted in red there, the dust sensor. So the dust on Mars is very, very fine grained. We think that it could be a problem, it could get into equipment, it could get all over the astronauts' spacesuits, and it could potentially be toxic. So we really want to understand the properties of this dust in terms of its size, its shape, its mass, all that kind of stuff. And so we'll be able to measure that on the ground at Mars with this particular instrument. And then the final instrument that I want to talk about is MOXIE. So MOXIE of course is mounted inside the body of the rover. There's nothing that actually sticks out from MOXIE. MOXIE is the instrument, it's a technology demonstration to show that we will actually be able to use materials we find at Mars to help us once we have humans at Mars. So MOXIE is a solid oxide electrolysis extraction device. It will ingest CO2 from Mars' atmosphere, it will compress it, and then it will send it through this solid oxide electrolysis process where it will strip out the oxygen out of the carbon dioxide. So essentially what it does is it takes CO2, strips out one of the oxygen atoms, and then combine and that will combine with another oxygen atom that is also stripped out. So we'll be essentially producing molecular oxygen. So we will be making oxygen on the surface of Mars that we'll be able to use in the distant future either as air for the astronauts to breathe or as an oxidant for rocket fuel. So that will help us get back off the surface of Mars. So again, this is being flown as a technology demonstration and this is largely funded by the human exploration and operations mission directorate and the space technology mission directorate at headquarters. Okay, so those are the instruments. There are a couple of other features that we have on the rover that I want to talk about briefly. I'm happy to take questions about these if you guys have them. The first is, yes, we are flying a helicopter to Mars. So the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has built the Mars helicopter. You can see the flight model for it on the bottom right hand side. So that's the actual flight model of the helicopter that will be going to Mars. The picture in the middle at the top is the technicians actually mounting the helicopter to the belly pan of the rover. So in that image, the rover is upside down and they're mounting the helicopter to the bottom of the rover. So what will happen is once the rover lands on the ground, the helicopter will be lowered to the ground, the rover will drive away from it, the helicopter will then unfold and then do a series of short test flights to demonstrate for the very first time aerial flight on Mars. So we've never done this before. As I'm sure you all know, the atmosphere on Mars is very thin, so flying a helicopter there or an aircraft of any kind will be very challenging. And so this is being flown also as a technology demonstration so that we can show for the very first time that we're able to operate an aerial vehicle on Mars. And then as I mentioned, we're of course planning to collect samples that we are hoping to bring back in the near future. So the picture on the right hand side of this slide is the technicians installing part of the sampling and caching system. So the sort of circular thing that you see there with the white box around it, that's part of the sampling system. A lot of the sampling system is actually inside the rover. That is the sample handling part of the system that connects the outside to the inside. So the sample tubes will be stored inside the rover, but the samples will be collected by the drill out on the end of the arm. So that hardware that you see in the image is the connection between the arm and the stuff inside the rover that we need to get access to. So we'll bring a sample from inside the rover. It will pass through this hardware and be put into the drill. The sample tube will go into the drill out on the end of the arm. So the drawings on the left hand side that you see is the drill bit. And then next to it on the right is the sample tube. So the sample tube will fit inside that drill bit. Sample will get collected. It will then get passed back through the hardware to exchange it back into the interior. We'll take a picture of it and we'll seal it up and then we'll deposit it on the ground. So once we do that, of course, we'll want to be able to bring them back eventually in the future. So we're currently working on plans to fly a couple of different missions to go retrieve those samples. So this is essentially what the basic notional architecture is for that sample return. On the left hand side of this image, there would be a landed mission that would contain a fetch rover to go collect those samples to bring them back to the lander. The lander, of course, will also have a rocket on it, a Mars ascent vehicle. The samples will be loaded up into a container like we saw in this image with the orange background there and then put onto the launch vehicle sent into Mars orbit where it would be collected by an orbiter and then the orbiter would return the samples back to us here on Earth. So again, we're currently working on these plans and we're working very hard to get permission to do this as a new start. So stay tuned for that. We're hoping to have good news in the upcoming budget cycle for that. Mitch, just a quick time check. We're in a quarter to. Okay. I think I have three more slides. So I think I should be good. Okay. So this is fairly important. Where are we actually going to send the rover? We threw a series of workshops with the scientific community where people argued and debated for several years. We had a series of four workshops. We finally have decided on Jezero Crater as the landing site. So I guess you can't probably see it very well depending on how big your screen is, but the image on the right hand side is a topographic map of Mars. There are four black boxes with text in them. There's a cluster of three. The one on the right hand side of that is labeled Jezero Crater just to give you a sense for where it is. It's right at the edge of a large impact basin called Isidus. But Jezero Crater itself is a crater lake and or was a crater, an impact crater that filled with liquid water and into that liquid water lake, a river came in. And so the image that you see on the left hand side, the very far left, you see the river channel. And then in the middle of that picture, you see a beautiful delta that has formed inside that crater. So again, material came from through that river system and was deposited into a delta inside the lake in that crater. I've labeled some of the mineralogy that we see from orbit here. And again, all of these are very interesting for a variety of reasons. Halloween generally is the type of material that makes up the basalt that makes up most of Mars. So if we were able to collect a sample of that, perhaps we could get an age date for that crater and for those deposits. Iron magnesium, smectite are clay minerals that are particularly good at trapping organic material. Carbonate minerals again often form in these nice quiet lake environments where we often see organisms like stromatolites like we see in Western Australia forming. So again, a really great site that might have preserved organic matter, provided some evidence for liquid water alteration of the original rock materials, also probably has a volcanic unit that will enable us to age date that, again, once the samples come back. So we won't be able to put those age dates on it with Mars 2020, but it would be important to collect a sample of that and bring back so that we could get those age dates. So that's where we're going. So I just wanted to sort of finish up with a quick video here. So as I mentioned, the rover is assembled. This is a short video of the rover undergoing what we called the spin test. So what they have to do is make sure that everything is balanced as it's launching and flying to Mars. And so this is a short video of them doing this spin balance test. It's sped up 28 times because they actually spin it really not that fast, but they spin it relatively slowly so that we can make sure that everything's in balance. The rover is right now undergoing environmental testing. It's stacked with all the other pieces of the cruise stage and the descent stage and the back shell and heat shield. And it will undergo testing for a little while and they'll take it out and unstack it and test all the individual parts again. And I believe that the very first shipment of hardware to Cape Canaveral, where the launch will be in July next year, will start this December. So things are getting very, very close to being very real for Mars 2020. So I want to give you a quick reminder. They mentioned at the beginning that you can send your name to Mars. So there's the website for that. Essentially what you do is you type in your name, it will give you a boarding pass. They will collect all the names and they will make microchips and put everyone's name who submitted one onto the microchip and put it onto the rover. So your name will actually then fly to Mars. And then a reminder that K-12 school children are invited to submit an essay where they will give an actual name to the rover. So we talk about the mission as Mars 2020, but the rover needs a name. So we have curiosity, we had spirit and opportunity and sojourner. And so we want to give this rover a name as well. And so we're opening that competition up to the kids to provide a good name for the rover. And then as always, if you want to know more about the Mars exploration program, all the great missions that we're doing, you can go to Mars.nasa.gov. And you can start there and get to all of those other things there as well. And that's all I have. So I will leave you with Sunset on Mars, captured by Curiosity. So thank you. Thank you so much, Mitch. And so since your camera's not functioning this evening, so we can't see you, let's go ahead and just leave this up for right now. And more interesting than looking at a red screen. So I want more interesting than looking at me. We do have a few questions here. And so let's see what we've got here. And so Bill asked this a long time ago. And I think you might have addressed this, although it's somewhat of a mystery. And you might reiterate this. And so you're going to be cashing some samples on Mars. And so how exactly will the return mission find them once it goes up to retrieve them? That's a good question. So as you know, we have a million cameras on this rover. So we'll actually be able to locate them very well in terms of where we leave them. So it's not like we're just going to drop them and not pay attention to where we are. So we'll actually pay very close attention to where we are when we drop the samples on the ground. So we'll locate that through various sets of imagery. We'll take pictures from orbit of where the rover is like we can do right now with curiosity. So we're able to take pictures of where it is. So we'll actually be able to do that pretty precisely in terms of making sure that we document exactly where we are when we drop those samples. All right. Well, since we do have a lot of astronomers on the call tonight, we have an astronomical question from Tom. He's wondering about are there specific astronomical observations that are planned in advance? Or would this be an evolving concept once on Mars? And I know that curiosity has made some nighttime sky observations. Yeah, they're generally done just as opportunities arise. I don't think anything is really particularly planned out because we have a surface mission that we have to do. But if we do get an opportunity and we want to take some sky surveys, we'll be able to do that. The other interesting thing that curiosity has been doing, and I'm sure we'll do once in a while with Mars 2020 is taking images of clouds as they go by, the dust devils that occasionally occur in particular areas and all that kind of stuff. But no, the astronomical observations are not really planned very far in advance. Again, they're just done as opportunities arise. All right. So Robert asks, how much does the rover weigh and maybe give a comparison to curiosity just so we have a sense of some of the engineering logistics? Yeah, so the mass of curiosity, I think the rover itself with everything on it was 800 and it is 899 kilograms, might be a little heavier now with some dust on it. But it's also losing mass out of the wheels, so maybe it's still about the same. And Mars 2020, again, they're still racking that up. But my last estimate that I had was 1,050 kilograms, so about 50 kilograms heavier. So presumably they've scaled up the rest of the system to accommodate that, that it's not just duplicating what succeeded with curiosity. So yeah, so curiosity was actually designed to accommodate that large a mass as 2020. So we didn't really have to do too much more. But we did, as I mentioned, the wheel design was changed a little bit to accommodate that because it would be a little bit heavier and we want to make sure we've dealt with that. And we did slightly stretch the chassis just a tiny little bit. So we have done a few design slight design modifications to accommodate the additional mass. So that's actually an interesting question and one that I didn't realize. You mentioned that the 2020 Rover wheels were a little bit narrower along with the other design changes. And what I would have thought that, you know, from my kind of intuitive sense that narrower wheels might increase the potential for some damage. And so what was the thinking on narrower wheels? Yeah, so it turns out that having the wider wheel base on curiosity is exposing more of the surface and just giving more potential for sort of flexure points. And so they narrowed it a little bit to cut down on that. But they did, again, increase the thickness of the wheels a little bit to sort of make up for that. It also will help with some of the rock mechanics. And so they did all these studies when they started having the trouble with curiosity. And it turns out that having the wheels be a little bit narrower actually turns out to be a little bit better because you don't have the wider surface to cause the problem. OK. So William asked the question, what was the scale on the map of Gisaro crater? How much of the delta would the 21 kilometer range take up? Right. That's a good question. And so the crater itself is 40 kilometers across, and so the delta itself is only on the order of about 10 kilometers across. And then if you go up into the hills, I know that that's one of the goals that I saw on the path was to get up into the hills, which I think is where the basalt layers are. Is that correct? So the basalt unit is actually in the floor of the crater. Yeah. So we'll probably land, well, the simulation sort of put us right at the either at the just off the eastern part of the delta or on top of the delta. And so either way, we would have to drive one way or the other. But again, that's well within the 20 kilometers that we've kept there. OK. So Anthony asked about the rover's expected lifetime. And we know that the rovers that we've set up there have exceeded their lifetime. One can't expect that. But realistically, you've got kind of that built in warranty for it. But what are your ultimate, I guess, hopes for the rover? Yeah. So again, we're designing it. We're qualifying everything for one and a half Mars years, which is three years here on Earth. So that's a fairly long time. Curiosity was designed to last one Mars year. So we've added another half a year on Mars, which is another year here on Earth. And sort of depending on how things go with the sample return campaign, it may be nice to have Mars 2020 around when we actually start flying those missions. So we're hopeful that it will be around at least that long. And again, it's nuclear powered. So we'll have enough power to last us for a couple of decades from that perspective. Yeah. Curiosity has been there for a little over seven years now. Spirit lasted six years, opportunity 14 and a half. So they have a pretty good track record of building these things. So we're hopeful that it will last a while. All right. Well, this will be our last question. And this is from Ray. He asked, what is the age of Jezero crater and how is it determined? You know, we don't have rocks to do the dating on. So how do we do that? Great question. So the age estimate for Jezero crater is on the order of three and a half billion years. So again, those ancient kinds of terrain that we're looking for when Mars was warmer and wetter. So we're in the right timeframe. The way that they estimate those age dates is by counting the number of craters in a particular area and then looking at, for example, the calibrations of the cratering record on the moon and understanding how old those are. So again, a lot more impacts early in the history of the solar system because there was a lot more debris around. So they essentially do crater density counting and then use that to put the ages on it. But this is actually one of the things that we're hoping to get once we bring samples back as an actual age of some of the rock units so that that can help us constrain those crater counting ages as well. But that's a great question. All right. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Schulte, for joining us. This is fantastic. I love to hear all of these. As a fellow geologist, I always appreciate these missions that are out to, you know, look at some of the different rocks and try to determine the history of a place. So thank you so much for joining us and for all the great information. Well, thank you guys for dialing in this evening.