How can we bring rocks back from Mars?

How many robots does it take to dig up rocks from Mars and deliver them back to Earth?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, have you been ordering stuff online a lot lately. Yeah,
you know, like everyone, I've been clicking on websites rather
than visiting stores. Yeah, you don't need a mass when
you click. I guess it is pretty amazing how inexpensive
it is these days to get stuff sent to your
house from around the world. Even if it comes from
the other side of the planet. It can just be
like a few cents per gram to ship it to

(00:31):
your house. Yeah, you know, I wonder when we can
start ordering stuff from even further away. I've been trying
to order some moon rocks. I wonder how much is
the shipping on those things. Well, I heard NASA spent
about three hundred thousand dollars per gram to get some
moon rocks. But you know, I think it's cheaper if
you have prime. You know, Jeff Bezos is starting his

(00:51):
own rocket company, so he's probably gonna link that up
and make it super cheap. Yeah. Why visit other planets
when you can just order a little bit of him online? Hi,

(01:15):
am or Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of
PhD Comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I
would love to have a little bit of Jupiter delivered
to my house. Really, isn't Jupiter mostly gas? So you
just wanted like a canister or just to like release
it in your home, to know that you breathe it
in a little bit of Jupiter. Well, you know, Jupiter
is mostly gas, but some of that gas is in

(01:37):
a really weird state, like metallic hydrogen. And that makes
me really curious. I really want to see what metallic
hydrogen looks like. It doesn't need to be like super
under pressure. Hey, these are all engineering details. I just
want the metallic hydrogen or to my house. I'm just
clicking and waiting. I want a little bit of that
gas from the red eye of Jupiter, like it is

(01:58):
the gas. Also read what's going on there? I think
we did a whole podcast episode on that one, like
I should listen to it. But welcome to said podcast.
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio in which we let you stay at home
and order in information about the whole universe delivered to
your ears without any effort on your part. We talk

(02:18):
about things in the universe that are super far away.
We talked about the tiny particles that are swimming inside
your body. We talk about everything and anything, and we
try to explain all of it to you. That's right.
We try to bring the universe and the cosmos and
everything in between to your brain free of charge, because
wondering belongs to everybody, and the questions that you have

(02:41):
about space and physics and the universe are the questions
that everybody has, and the same questions that scientists want
answers to, because we're all still learning about the universe,
and part of that learning is exploring, is going out
into the cosmos, into other planets, into the stars, and
figuring out what's going on and what is there for

(03:01):
us to discover. And sometimes it's so depressing to think
that we've explored such a tiny little fraction of our universe.
You know, we've barely gotten off this planet to explore
the Moon, to land a few rovers on Mars. It's incredible,
what a tiny little dot of the universe we have
been able to explore so far. But what a dot
it is. It's a pretty cool dot, and we're lucky

(03:24):
that there is something to explore. I mean, right in
our neighborhood, right next door, there's an amazing planet, Mars,
that really has a lot of tantalizing and fascinating scientific question. Yeah,
Mars is awesome, and so we'd like to know a
little bit more about what is there on Mars. I
mean we can see it, but so far we haven't
been able to really, I don't know, study it up close.

(03:46):
It's pretty hard because it's so far away. And all
we've been able to do so far is send our
robots there and have them do science. But that's sort
of like trying to do science with a ten foot
poll or a ten million mile long pole, and that's
not easy to do. That's kind of a philosophical question,
isn't it, Daniel, Like if you send a robot out
to explore something, have you explored it technically? Like if

(04:09):
the robot touches Mars, did you touch Mars? That humans
touch Mars? Yeah, I mean if you have a robotic hand,
you consider it part of yourself. If you touch something
with that hand, then it's part of you. And so
this is just like a spatially disconnected prosthetic, right, think
about the rovers as part of your body. Then. Yeah, philosophically,
I've been on Mars. I wonder if the Mars were

(04:30):
over would disagree. When he gets to the point that
it can disagree, it's no longer part of your body.
It has its own Twitter account. Do you know that
the Mars rover has its own Twitter account? It has
more followers than I do. Yeah, but did get off
its couch, Daniel, And actually, you know went somewhere. It
has accomplished more in its life than I ever will.
That's true. But yeah, we'd love to know more about

(04:52):
Mars and whether or not it had life on it,
like bacteria or who knows what else we could discover
that Mars had, but it's really hard to do it
from here, and even to do it through robots. It
is challenging, and it's amazing to me how open this
question remains. You know, through history we thought, oh, maybe
Mars has life on it. Then we took a closer look,
where like, actually it looks pretty dry. They're like, wait, no,

(05:14):
there is water on there. Maybe there are microbes, and
so keep going up and down, and it's fascinating to
me that this planet, this one that the closest to us.
We still don't know the answer. If there is life
on Mars, is it's similar to Earth? Did it come
to Earth from Mars, or to Mars from Earth, or
to both planets from somewhere else. It's an incredibly important question,
and it's right there, it's so accessible. Yeah, that's a

(05:38):
huge question, right, But they're not Life on Earth actually
started on Mars. Because it's possible that there was life
on Mars and then got knocked off on an asteroid
and then flew here and landed on Earth, and that's
how life started Earth. That's a theory, right, That is
a theory, and it's not just the plot of a
science fiction novel. It's potentially actually plausible, and it's a

(05:59):
kind of question that we could answer if we had
deeper access to rocks on Mars. Right, we could all
be Martians. Martians could all be Earthlings. Who knows, we
could all be Jovians. Yeah, but it'd be great to
answer that question. And I think the only way we're
going to answer that question is to actually go there
and take a close look at the rocks and the

(06:19):
soil and to like actually like take a super microscope
to it and see if we see any little critters
in there. That's right, But sending scientists to Mars is
unfortunately still many many years away, decades probably if ever.
It's really hard, but we've done it with some things
in space, like for example, we've gone to the Moon
and gone and rock from the Moon and brought them

(06:40):
back to Earth. I think you can order them online, right,
I don't think you can order them online. No, you can. Can.
You get on eBay and like a bid on a
piece of moon rock. I think anything you buy on
eBay is not going to be actually moon rocks, so
please don't waste your money. But we did actually bring
rocks back from the Moon, and those rocks have been
an incredible treasure trove of science. Were like still thinking

(07:03):
of new things to do to those rocks, to learn things,
to figure out answers to new questions about the science
of the Moon. So it's incredibly valuable to have here
in our Earth laboratories a sample from the Moon or
from somewhere else. Yeah. I have actually held in moon rock.
I was at JPO of visiting ones and they let
me hold a little bit of moon dust, And did

(07:25):
you feel transported? I accidentally breedd them in and sneeze
had to go in there for a second. That sounds
like the opening scene of a terrible science fiction novel.
Or he gets infected by a Moon based pathoge and
that's why I have superpowers. You gained the Moon's proportional
strength again, the ambility to moon people. You cause tides. Right,

(07:49):
you'd be a some sort of lunar superhuman. That's right.
I'm like the villain in the next Appman movie. That's right,
You're like the DC version of Magneto. Right, you insulted
me twice over there. You just confuse the DC character
with the Marvel character. No, I'm trying to bring one
from the other, right, Like Magneto controls medals, and so
lunar Jorge controls tides right in the DC universe. But anyways,

(08:13):
so the question is, can we just go to Mars,
pick up some rocks and bring them back and then
study them, and then we would know if life potentially
came from another planet. That would be incredible. And so
to be on the program, we'll be asking the question,
can we bring rocks back from Mars? Or more optimistically,

(08:34):
how can we bring rocks back from Mars? Oh, so
you're feeling good. You feel like it's not an if question,
it's not a physics question, right, there's nothing in physics
that prevents us from moving rocks from Mars to Earth.
It's definitely an engineering question, and as you'll hear, it's
a tricky one. So, as usually, we were wondering how
many people out there had thought about this question or

(08:55):
wonder whether or not it's possible to bring something back
from Mars. So Daniel and out there into the wilds
of the Internet to ask people how can we retrieve
rocks from Mars to study them on Earth. So these
are the answers I got from random folks on the
Internet who were willing to speculate baselessly without any googling
about the questions. I asked them, if you'd like to

(09:17):
participate and hear your voice on the podcast at some
point in the future, please write to us two questions
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Here's what people had
to say. I think that we should send a rocket
to Mars, and then maybe the Mars wherever the acrono
Mars should take the rock samples and put them inside
the rocket, and then we could somehow program the rocket

(09:37):
to fly back on its own. Perseverance is on his
way there right now, and hopefully the next generation of
Perseverances will be able to bring them back to study.
I thought that that was part of the upcoming Mars mission,
or maybe for the next mission to have some sort
of return capsule. It's really difficult to get things back
from Mars, so I imagine that probably have to send

(10:01):
some sort of probe there that would then have to
do a lot of the analysis they're on Mars. I
think the new Perseverance wherever you can actually collect unstored
Mars rocks for a future mission to achieve and bring
back to Earth. I'm envisioning maybe we send something to
like enter into Mars's orbit that can maybe send down
an explosive heads the surface, sends out a bunch of particulates.

(10:24):
The probe gathers these particulates and then breaks out of
the orbit goes back to Earth. We can gather samples
from Mars for study on Earth, kind of how we
went to the Moon, except all robotically right, and instead
of a lamb, we have a mam. Well, I know
we already have a mission going there, and I believe
what they're going to do is h do little core

(10:45):
samples and then somehow package them and leave them for
a recovery mission. Al Right, a lot of excitement about
this idea. I feel, yeah, a lot of excitement. People
are like, I don't know, but it sounds cool. Somebody
out there is like, let's just nuke Mars, and I
have the feeling they were just waiting for the opportunity.
Is that a fellow physicist? I feel like that sounds

(11:08):
like an efficient solution to a physicist. You don't think
an engineer would be like, let's just shoot a string
of nuclear weapons at this thing to guide it back
to Earth. I think you mean a freshman engineer would
be like, maybe there's a better way, that's right, and
also would probably destroy the samples and pollute them with radiation,
so it might undermine the very science that we're trying

(11:29):
to do. Right, that's probably a huge part of it, right,
like not contaminating. Oh yeah, that's a big deal. All right, Well,
let's dig into this topic. Let's get some samples of
it and retreat it and bring it to Earth. So Daniel,
first of all, I guess talk about why we would
want to get rocks from Mars. I mean, I know
that it would be great to study them, but you know,

(11:50):
why can't we just study them there. Well, we can
do a lot of studying on the surface of Mars,
and we have rovers that do that, but it's tricky.
You want to do some science on a rover, you
have to pick an instrument which can survive like launch
and transit and landing on Mars, and then can get
set up automatically without any like a grad students tinkering

(12:11):
with it. You know, every cutting edge lab that I'm
aware of here on Earth, the most powerful instruments are
delicate instruments, and they require like experts tweaking them and
massaging them to make them work and to calibrate them.
So for something to work on a rover has to
be really robust, and that really limits the kinds of
signs that you can do. Yeah, I guess you need
a lab. And it's tricky to handle these samples and

(12:33):
to do the the signs, right, that's right. If you
had your hands on Martian samples like right now, there's
like a hundred things you would want to do to
it right away, but only a few of those ever
make it onto a rover, so you're really limited. And
then you get the answers back, you're like, oh, look
it has this weird thing in it. Now I want
to check with my other funky instrument. But you can't
do that kind of thing all in advance. When you

(12:55):
send your rover over, you have to plan very far
in advance exactly what you're gonna do to every sample.
You can't respond to what you've learned with new ideas,
whereas if you bring the rocks back, then you can
keep coming up with new ideas. And also you have
access to future instruments. Right, cool techniques we're going to
develop in ten years or in twenty years that we
haven't even thought of. Now we have the rocks here,

(13:18):
rather than sending the machines there, then we can use
new machines on old rocks, right, Because I guess it's
you know, it's really hard to take stuff to Mars, right,
I mean, like every gram cost like a million dollars
or something, and these lab equipment machines are really big.
Sometimes they are really big, and a lot of the
engineering challenges of building a rover or how to miniaturize, right,

(13:41):
how to make these things really small. It's got to
be like the size of a shoe box and fit
on the edge of a stick and be totally robust,
Like you have to just be able to send it
one command and it boots up and starts up. It's
gonna have a little bit of AI in there to
get itself going. Right. You can't just like crawl out
there with your screw driver and fix it right once
you send it, it's gone. You can't just call I

(14:02):
T to fix it, and they'll say, have you tried
turning it off and turning it on again? Did you
update your Windows installation like I can. It's on Mars.
I can't even turn it on enough. No, And you
can't even like drive something on Mars. Remember these rovers
operate semi autonomously because Mars is so far away that

(14:23):
it takes light minutes to get there. So you can't
have the kind of feedback loop you need to real
time drive something on Mars. It's like you drive forward,
you stop, you take a picture, you send it back
to the folks in NASA. They figure out what to
do next. And so having it be so far away
makes it really limited. It has to survive a trip
to Like launching from the Earth into space is not easy, right,

(14:46):
Like there's huge forces and you know you're basically strapped
onto a giant explosion. It has to survive that. And
also the landing on Mars, which can be pretty tough,
like sometimes they just fall into the ground and bounce around,
and it has to survive that. That's the landing strategy.
That's the design strategy, right. I mean, remember all those
movies about astronaut training, Like they put those folks through

(15:07):
some tough stuff. They spin around, they shake them a lot. Basically,
take your most sensitive science instruments and put them through
astronaut training to see if they have the right stuff.
Most of the time, it's just gonna fall apart. Like
you go into a random geology or microbiology lab here
on Earth. Most of those instruments are very delicate. They
don't let people in there poking and products. So you're right,

(15:29):
surviving all the shaking and the landing and all that stuff.
It's not easy. So this whole categories of instruments, nobody
has figured out how to miniaturize and make robust enough
to send to Mars. Okay, so it would be a
lot better for science if we could bring some Mars
rocks back so we can study them, and you know,
you can do a whole bunch more tescent. You could
on a robot in Mars, but it's really hard and

(15:52):
apparently it can't just study meteors from Mars. Like that's
another possibility, but it's not, as I guess. Fresh. Yeah,
the amazing thing is that we actually already have Mars rocks, right,
like what yeah, what you were talking about sort of
as a joke, actually happens. Sometimes big rocks hit the
surface of Mars right impact creators and stuff gets thrown

(16:12):
out into space. You know, this can be really big
impacts and some of those rocks get tossed out into
space and eventually a small fraction of them hit the
surface of the Earth and then are recovered. And how
do we know they're from Mars? So they had like
a maide in Mars tag or well they went through customs, right,
and so we can tell they just look at the
forms they I mean, can you tell, like does it

(16:34):
have a special like queue of red or something? You
can tell because of the geology, every object in the
Solar System has a different history and a different composition
and that tells you where it comes from. And so
when you get a meteor from outer space, when you've
got a chunk of space rock. First of all, you
can tell it the space rock because of what it's
made out of. It's made of stuff you don't find
on Earth. And then you can tell roughly where it

(16:56):
came from based on the details of what's in it.
And so most of the rocks that land on Earth come,
for example, from the asteroid Belt, and we can tell
based on the blend of metals and also the organization
of the metals in them that tells you something about
its history, like when it was last melted and how
long it's been frozen for. And some of these things
have composition and geology that's only consistent with the surface

(17:17):
of Mars. Interesting. So, yeah, we have like dozens of
these objects that have landed on the Earth from Mars,
which is fascinating and incredible and wonderful opportunities to do science.
But it's not good enough, right, Yeah, you need like
fresh rocks, Like those asteroids are kind of stale. They've
been floating around face and who knows where they came from.
It's not just that you need fresh rocks, it's that

(17:39):
you need to know where they came from, Like it's
just a random sample. You don't know where on Mars
it came from, so you can't really like fit it
into your science picture of what's going on on Mars.
Which you'd like is to have a rover travel around
and make judicious decisions and say, I'm gonna get a
little bit of this kind of rock, and I see
where it is. It's on the downflow of a slope.
I'm gonna get that piece of rock over there, and

(17:59):
I know the scientific context. It's sort of just like
getting a piece of pottery and having no idea where
it was dug up from. It's much less valuable scientifically.
It's also kind of like when you go to a
Las Vegas bouffet. You know you want judiciously pick a
little bit from everything and know where you got it from,
so you can go back and get the stuff you liked.
That's right, and so you know what made you throw

(18:20):
up and what you yeah, yeah, alright. So it sounds
like it would be a lot better if we can
get go to Mars, get some rocks, bring them back,
and then study the heck out of him to answer
these big questions about life in the Solar System and
about Mars and the history of Mars. But it's a
tough problem, and so let's talk about how we would
actually do that and what has been and is being

(18:43):
done to do it. But first let's take a quick break,
all right, Daniel, we are souvenir shopping in the Solar System.
We're trying to get some original, authentic rocks from Mars.

(19:08):
But it's a tough problem because Mars is really far away,
and you don't just have to get the rocks. You
have to come back with them. You've got to come
back with the rocks. Right, Like we've done the one
way thing. We've sent something to Mars and it's dug
up rocks and studied them, but they're still on the
surface of Mars, and so now we need to do
the second bit, the round trip, to come home and

(19:28):
deliver them to scientists in a pristine condition, so that
we can finally answer some of these incredible, longstanding science questions. Right,
And I feel like the problem is it's not just double,
it's like squared, because you know, it's hard enough to
take off from a planet and land on another planet,
but now you're gonna do it again, take off from
there and land here. But it still has to be

(19:49):
the same machine that you send out, like the same
machine you send out has to do both of those things. Yeah,
it's complicated, and it's not just squared as you're gonna hear.
There's a lot of moving parts. It's more like to
the ninth power or something. It's pretty ridiculous little dance
of machines that we have to get working all together
to get those rocks back from Mars. And you know
what you just said, Nobody has ever done that before.

(20:11):
We've never successfully launched a rocket from the surface of
another planet. Right, Well, we've done it for the Moon,
but the Moon is kind of easy to take off from.
That's right. The Moon is pretty low gravity, and it's
not a planet, and it's not remote, right, there's somebody
in there driving that thing. So now we have to
remotely launch from the service of another planet. I mean,
that's hard enough to do from Earth. So yeah, it's

(20:33):
a big challenge. Luckily you volunteered to go tomorrows right now.
I volunteered to press the big red button. When the
time comes, Oh yeah, first to take off, to take
a button or the Abordan whatever. Man just put a
big red button in front of me and I will
hit it. That's my job. That's how these podcasts get started.
You hit a big red button. Hey, you don't get
to live your dream if you don't ask for it.

(20:54):
So this is my official request to get invited to
press the big red button NASA button pusher. All right,
but you've actually tried before, Like, this is not a
crazy idea that you and I just came up with
here on the podcast. The US the Soviets have been
trying to do this for really like fifty years. Yeah,
and they've been trying and failing. But the failures have

(21:15):
been political and financial. It's not like we've sent a
mission that's attempted to do this and then not succeeded.
The mission has been thought up and planned and organized
and then canceled many times in the past. The Soviets
thought about in the seventies, but they couldn't get their
rockets to work. NASA had a plan in nineteen seventy
nine that was canceled because it was too complicated. And

(21:37):
then recently NASA and the European Space Agency had a
plan that was in twenty twelve that people thought was
going to happen, but then it was aborted again because
it was too complicated and too expensive. This cancel culture
is out of hand. Daniel, Yeah, and I think that
especially was really traumatic for the sort of Mars science community.
People really believed that that one was going to be

(21:58):
the one. It was finally going to come to fruition.
So when that was canceled it was a bit like
the super Conducting super Collider was for particle physics. It
left a bit of like PTSD on the community. There
a little bit more cynicism than there was before. So
it sounds like people get excited about it, they start
the program, but then they realize it's too hard, so
they cancel. It is that, and it's happened over and over.

(22:20):
It's a little bit of a political problem though, because
it's one of these projects that takes years or decades
to pull off. So even if you're committed to spending
a lot of money over many years, you need all
the people who are in charge after you to stay
committed to not have their priorities changed, and so it
takes consistent support over many, many years for this kind

(22:41):
of thing to actually happen. All right, So there was
a big program at NASA that got canceled in twelve
but now now it's sort of been revived. Right now,
there is some activity at NASA to actually do this.
That's right, it has been revived. There's a new plan,
and it's a pretty reasonable plan in comparison with the
other crazy plans, although I think you'll still find it

(23:02):
fairly absurd and amazing. This is the level headed conservative
This is the least ridiculous plan that we have going.
So how they pitched it to to Congress. We have
a new, less ridiculous plan. You guys are gonna love
it now, less crazy. And the most exciting part is
that the first part of it has already launched. Like

(23:22):
the first element of this multi stage plan to bring
rocks back from the service of Mars is already on
its way to the red plan. Wait, what is this
is already happening. It's already happening. They have a new
clever strategy, which is they break it up into pieces
and so they're easier to sell. And the first piece
works no matter what, Like, the first piece is something

(23:44):
you want to do, even if you're not going to
bring the rocks back. Oh, I see they're cleverer now
about the mission planning. Yeah, they're a little bit more cynical,
I guess you could say, or more experienced. And so
this first piece is a rover that launched on July's
the Perseverance Rover here, and it's a this year, yeah,
just a few weeks ago, and it's on the way

(24:04):
to Mars now. And it's an awesome piece of technology.
You may have heard about it. It's going to be
the heaviest rover ever landed on Mars. It's going to
have a little helicopter on the top of it that
can fly up the first helicopter operate on the surface
of Mars. That is so sci fi. Yeah, it's gonna
be really cool. It's have a little laser on it.
But most importantly, it's going to have a device that

(24:25):
can drill into the surface of Mars and extract cores,
which it can then store in a little sample container.
I feel like now we're getting to really transform or territory,
you know, like we're sending a box and then when
the box lands, it's gonna transform into a drilling machine
with lasers and a helicopter. That's right, it's Optimist Prime.

(24:47):
That's what they should have called it. That's right. Forget
Perseverance or something inspiring. Just go with optimist prime. Yeah,
So this thing is going to have a year's long
mission and it's going to drive around and it's going
to collect like rock course from maybe thirty nine in
different locations. And each one is pretty small, you know,
they're like a centimeter wide and a few centimeters long.
But that's gold for scientists down here. To have a

(25:09):
few cubic centimeters of rock from several dozen locations around Mars,
it's incredibly valuable. So it is a rover like the
ones we've sent before, and it's going to run around
and collect samples and then keep them keep them in
like a box. So it's got its own science mission.
It's a good idea anyway, even if mar sample return
doesn't happen. But then it's going to collect these rocks

(25:31):
and it's going to put them in a little sample
container and then it's going to leave them on the
surface of Mars for the next stage to come and retrieve.
Wait what it's going to be littering. It's going to
be preparing a gift for us. Man, it's not trash,
but why not collect them? But it's gonna really leave
them out where it would find them. Yeah, it's going

(25:51):
to steal up in tubes and then it's going to
leave it out where the next mission can come and
collect it. But why not bring them all together so
that it's easier to pick up. No, it's going to
collect them all into one container. Oh, I see, and
then leaves the container there, sees it all nice, and
then the next stage is going to come and pick
it up. And so if you're keeping track, there's three
major stages to this mission. Stage one is perseverance. Go

(26:14):
and create the samples, pack them up in the container,
leave it on the surface. It's also going to study them,
but also going to leave them there. Okay. The next
stage is to get it off the surface of Mars,
all right, And each of these is like a different mission.
It's kind of I think that's when you're saying, like,
don't put it all in one mission that could fail,
but do one mission and if that one succeeds, then

(26:35):
do the next mission, and that one succeeds to the
next mission. Yes, So there's three separate launches from Earth,
Like we're sending three different devices from Earth. They're all
going to work together to make this happen. Three different transformers.
The first one lands on the service and makes these samples.
The next one is I think maybe the craziest, and
it's the one that's going to land on the surface

(26:56):
of Mars and then it's going to deploy a mini rover,
like a little rover that just runs out, picks up
the sample container, comes back, loads that into a rocket
that it has landed on the surface of Mars, wraps
out all up, and then launches from the surface of Mars,
sends the sample container up into space. So on a

(27:20):
rocket will be sending another rocket and a launching pad,
and a launching pad and a little tiny retriever robot
and a mini rover. Yeah, exactly. So the job of
this thing is to land there, pick up the sample
container and it has a robotic arm that will take
it from the rover and put it into the rocket
and then yeah, remote launch from the surface of another planet.

(27:41):
Maybe the most valuable sample ever to be collected. This
feels kind of comical to me, like, you know, like
this giant machine lands, opens up up, there's another rocket
in there. This little robot comes out, picks up something,
runs back, sticks it in the rocket, and then just
launches back somehow that it feels comedic, something like something

(28:03):
out of a cartoon. It does seem a little Looney Tunes. Yeah,
you're right, and if this thing works, it definitely needs
that sort of like comedic music in the background to inspire.
You know, it'll be pretty funny. But this is not
set to go for another five years or so, So
we're talking about launching this next bit in six So wait,

(28:26):
so there must be working on it now, like it's
being built right now. It's being built right now, So
Perseverance will have years on the surface of Mars to
collect these samples. And also we'll have an idea like
how did that go right, how well are things going?
We could change our plan based on where Perseverance is
or how things go for Perseverance, or what it learns,
or how the sample container looks um and so that's

(28:48):
another part of it. You build in these delays so
you can change your plans as things develop. So, yeah,
they're working on that now and they will launch it
in and the ideas they would arrive on the surface
of Mars in twenty twenty eight. Remember it's a two
year trip, and then grab it and launch it out
into space. But it only has the power to get
it into orbit around Mars. It can't bring all the

(29:10):
way back to Earth. Oh, that's still just phase two.
That's just phase two, right, The actual looney Tunes crazy
comedic value comes in the next day. All right, let's say,
let's phase three. So phase three as we launch a
third rocket from Earth and this one at the same
time as we're launching the second one, but this one
just stays in orbit around Mars. This is called the

(29:32):
Earth return orbiter. So this one is a concurrent, like
we're not gonna wait for the second one to finish.
We're gonna send two and three. It's like filming the
sequels at the same time. Yeah, exactly. So the third
one hangs at in orbit and it helps communicate and
do a bunch of stuff. And then it's most important
job is to catch the sample container. Because the surface

(29:53):
rocket is going to launch from the surface of Mars
and get out near orbit. Right, it can't go all
the way out actually out into space, and the one
that's in orbit has to lower itself down to lower orbit.
And then they're going to pass the sample container from
one rocket to the orbiter. Robots are going to do this.
Robots are going to do this in space, you know,

(30:16):
Sending Daniel is starting to seem a lot easier, I know.
And the sample container it has no like radio beacon,
has no tracker on it has no transmitter, has no thrusters,
is just an inert white ball and the orbiter just
has to catch it. Doesn't have like a GPS on
it even or it's just white. They're like, let's make

(30:37):
it white then you can see it in space. Right. Wow,
that is audacious to say the least. But I guess
my question is why can't the rocket just go straight
into orbit? You can't put in a fuel on it
or something or what. That definitely takes a lot more
power to get all the way into orbit. And so yeah,
I mean you have to launch this thing from Earth
and then send it to Mars. And so there's a

(30:58):
lot of risks and costs here that they're trying to balance.
And this was what they decided was the least crazy plan.
I guess it would be a lot to like land
a rocket that can make it all the way back
to Earth. I guess this is smartyr to like, you know,
make this rocket smaller and then save the spaceship part
of it for another phase. Yeah, and now the part

(31:20):
the orbiter only ever has to live in space. It
doesn't have to go down to the surface. So you
have one thing that's dedicated to going down to the surface,
it's good at that, and another thing that's dedicated at
orbiting Mars, catching this soccer ball with the most valuable
cargo humans have ever created, and then flying on its
own all the way back to Earth. It sounds like,
you know, kind of like a whole bunch of robots

(31:41):
that together make one big robot. Yeah, it's a bit
of a Rube Goldberg machine. Right. They should have called
this the Rube Goldberg Mars Mission. It's pretty hilarious. All right. Well,
let's get into what happens next phase three, but first
let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel, we are

(32:10):
talking about transformers in Mars and robots that we're gonna
send there and work together on their own to land
on Mars, get some rocks, shoot them back up into space,
hand it off, and then bring it back. So that's
phase three, is bringing the samples from Mars. Fact, that's right,
that's phase three. So it has to catch this soccer

(32:31):
ball in orbit around Mars. Right, it like opens a
door on the side of the ship and the ball
just like drifts in because remember the ball is not powered,
so it just has to like match it in orbital
speed and get in front of it and then slow
down a little bit and just sort of like mate
with this thing. Yeah, it's gonna catch it. It's gonna
catch it, and it has to then keep it somehow sterile.

(32:54):
It can't like let the sample contain or anything that
was on it infect the rest of the ship. Oh
I see. It had to catch it and isolated, catch
it and isolated fly it all the way back to Earth. Right,
that's not that big a deal. You just had sort
of point in the right direction and have enough power left.
And then it has to drop it off on Earth. Wow,

(33:15):
I'm just gonna drop it off or it's gonna land.
It's not gonna land here on Earth. It's just going
to drop it off, and the sample container is essentially
just gonna fall to the surface. They were like, should
we add parachutes or something to slow it down? But
that seemed too complicated. They're like, no, can't you just
call like uber to pick it up or build a

(33:35):
huge catcher's mit or something. Well, why not build another
robot to go up there and catch it? Why not? Well,
they thought this was simplest, and you know, they already
used up their quota of crazy robots on this mission.
So they're just gonna toss it into what the ocean. No,
it's gonna land on the surface and land around ninety
miles per hour on the surface, and it's not going
to explode or vaporize. It's not going to vaporize that.

(33:57):
It should be able to survive that. And you know,
the samples themselves shouldn't be that delicate, right, It's not
like they're glass containers or you know, anything that's gonna break.
It's just rocks were bringing back. I thought they were
going to be on like, you know, test tubes, but
I guess you want something would have been more sturdy. Yeah,
But the question is like can we keep it safe
and contained? We're basically shipping a chunk of mars onto

(34:20):
the surface of the Earth, and we want to isolate
it so that we can study it for well a
couple of reasons. One is like who knows what's in
that thing? And if there really is like weird life
on Mars. The last thing we want to do is
like eradicate all life on Earth because we imported some pathogen.
Didn't wrap it into plastic bag. First, I've seen that movie.
It's pretty good unless you're living it. But the other

(34:41):
thing is we want to keep it sterile so that
if we do, like find weird bugs in it that
are similar to bugs on Earth, we want to know
they came from Mars and not from like the Utah
Desert where it landed. Wow. Well, this seems like a
super audacious and amazing and incredible plan. And Daniel, you
actually got to talk to somebody who works on this
so ready from NASA. Yeah, there's incredible excitement in the

(35:02):
community for this project. People are hoping beyond hope that
they'll get that get their hands on some of these rocks.
So I reached out to Dr Nina Lanza. She's a
Mars rover instrument scientist. She built some of the things
that are going on Perseverance right now, and I asked
her a bunch of fun questions about this project. Yeah,
it's a great interview, so we'll play that for you

(35:24):
right now. So here's Daniel talking to Dr Nina Lanzon
Mars Rover instrument scientist. So it's my pleasure to be
talking to Dr Nina Lanza Um. Would you introduce yourself
for our listeners. Sure, I'm Nina lanza I work at
Los Alamos National Laboratory and I'm a planetary scientist. Awesome,
And so our question today are mostly about getting your

(35:46):
hands on samples from Mars or the signs you can
do with stuff on Mars. So my first question has
to do with the rovers that we have over there
and that we're sending over there. What do you think
of the most important scientific stens that those instruments on
the rovers are asking? Well, it's important to remember that
each of these missions had a different goal and they

(36:09):
would they build on each other. Right, So, when we
first started sending rovers to Mars um and and even Landers,
you know, we didn't know a lot. We know a
lot more after all the missions we've done. So initial
missions were just to figure out, you know, what's on Mars,
what's it like? And subsequent missions have been trying to
find out the details of that. What has the history

(36:30):
of Mars been like, you know, in terms of climate,
in terms of geology. Now we're asking questions about habitability,
is or was the Martian environment habitable in a way
that we understand. So habitability is not looking for life,
but rather places where life as we understand it, could exist.
And so now after our most recent missions, you know,

(36:51):
we feel really confident that Mars was absolutely a habitable
place in the past, and it's kind of habitable now
for certain arestrial microbes um and so our next goal
is to find out whether or not life ever existed
in the past on Mars, and so that's really exciting.
So I think it's not that one of those questions

(37:13):
is more or less important. It's really that they are
building upon each other, and so are the questions that
are being asked by these rovers or instruments designed for
these rovers that are inspired specifically by things you learned
on previous generations, like we saw this and now we
have a follow up question. Oh certainly, gosh, And there's
so many examples of that. I mean, there are some

(37:34):
big questions. For example, we've seen from remote sensing these
huge mineral provinces, specifically clay minerals and carbonates, maybe less
huge on the carbonates, right, We've seen these from orbit,
and so the question is can we ground through this
and find this on Mars in a geologic context that
we can interpret. We've certainly found quite a bit of

(37:54):
clay on the surface with the curiosity rovers, so yeah, success,
But now we're looking for those pesky carbonates. Carbon rates
are predicted to have formed on Mars, but we've never
really encountered them in any kind of abundance, and so
it's one of these ongoing mysteries. And so as we
have moved forward looking at Mars and detail with curiosity,

(38:15):
we still haven't seen all that mighty carbon rates. So
it's still this question why not, And we're hoping to
answer that with the perseverance were over and its new
landing site, Geserro Crater. Cool. So, I know, when you
start a project, you have sort of like optimistic hopes
for what you know might happen, or fantasy is about
data you might collect or whatever. So if you let
your imagination run wild and you hit all the home runs,

(38:37):
it's like the best case scenario for what you could
discover using these rovers. Well, I think it would be
just incredible and paradigm shifting if we could find signs
that life existed somewhere not Earth. Right, we know there's
life on Earth, you know about how did it start?
We don't really understand a lot about our own origins,

(38:58):
and we don't know how common it is. Right now,
we only have one example of life on a planet,
and that's our planet. If we could find evidence of
life on a different planet, to be remarkable and incredible,
what would that look like in terms of the rovers
that we have now or the rovers that are in route,
what would that discovery look like? I mean, we're not
talking about little critters waving to the cameras, right, I mean,

(39:21):
I think it's pretty clear that there is a macroscopic
life on Mars right there, trees, There's no dinosaurs. We
would have seen those things. So now the question is
microscopic life. Was it there? It isn't there? So those
are actually two different questions and we have to have
different approaches to answer those questions. Right. The Perseverance Rover
is looking for signs of past life and there's a

(39:42):
lot of ways to do that, and we use the
same techniques that we do on Earth. How do we
know when life began on Earth and what were the
signs that it left? So that's our best way of
analyzing Mars rocks to find out if there was life
in the past. I think our best bet, you know,
he's going to be bringing these samples back to Earth.

(40:04):
We have some incredible rovers and they're having great hayloads
of these instruments that just do great things, and they're
doing them remotely. It's just amazing what we can do.
But it doesn't compare to our gold standard instruments that
we have on the Earth, and so there are questions
that we can never answer with our current hayloads. So
we're going to need to just get that sample back
into the laboratory, take a look at it, and then

(40:26):
we'll probably want to do different analyzes. Right, we don't
know what we're going to see, and so we don't
know what the next steps will be. And that's the
excitement and the fun part about doing science like this
is that you can only predict the first few steps,
but it's the next steps are all dependent on what
you find. And why can't we just do those studies
on Martian meteors, you know, bits of Mars that have

(40:48):
been blasted off and landed here already. We're very lucky
that Mars has sent us about hundred and fifty pieces
of itself. So we didn't actually have to go to
Mars to get those pieces of Mars. So thank you Mars.
The problem with those meteorites, though, is that they don't
have any context. Right, they fell out of the sky.
We don't know where they came from on Mars. It's

(41:10):
very hard to make statements about geology and a broad
sense if you only have a hand sample. Right. As
a geologist, people come to me all the time with
some random rocks. They're like, what's this. I'm like, well,
I could tell you some things, but you know, you
just picked that up off of the ground. Where did
it come from? What was the broader context? We need
that context to really be able to answer these questions

(41:31):
about Mars. That's why sample return is so exciting because
we know exactly where it came from. We have documented
that location very well, and so then when we get
results from that sample, we can then integrate that into
a larger context. That makes a lot of sense. And
so if there are creators alive on Mars and little
microubs and we sample them by chance and those samples

(41:53):
come back to Earth, they are we imagining that those
things could still be you know, alive and wiggling. We
measure like you know, metabolic activity in the sample that
returns to Earth from Mars. If there are things living
near the surface of Mars, they have got to be
amazing because the radiation environment on Mars is terrible. You know,
it's um Mars doesn't have a magnetic field because it

(42:15):
doesn't have a dynamo in its core, and so the
surface environment is just it's pretty icky for life. There's
a lot of life on Earth that could probably handle it,
but it's it's not that common. So so I would
say the chances of us finding extant Martians in the
near subsurface where we can access it with the rover,
it's very, very low. But we have to prepare for

(42:37):
that possibility. So one of the things that's really critical
that we do before our samples come back is to
prepare their housing facility. There are a few facilities on
Earth that already are ready for this. A notable one
is at Johnson Space Center, which is the main pository
for all the Apollo samples from the Moon. Because we

(42:57):
had the same questions about the Moon, you know, who
knows what's up there? And it turns out that the
Moon is a pretty sterile place which was out and
maybe that was easy to predict in in retrospect, but
you know, we had no idea, so we had to
take really a lot of precautions to protect both the
samples and earth from each other. And so we'll have
to do the same for a MAR sample return mission.

(43:19):
And so we know from our experience with Apollo and
also just bioscience in general, you know the best methods
for doing that. And so I think that facilities are
going to either be constructed or old ones retrofitted to
be able to handle these new samples. Awesome. Well, I
hope that happens. I've been reading a little bit about
the history of these missions, and I note that you know,

(43:40):
MAR sample return has been discussed for decades and even
planned and then canceled and replanned and recanceled. Do you
think this latest plan by NASA and s A is
likely to actually happen or do you think the political
climate where we change administrations and government every few years
makes it difficult to pull off a long term product. Well,
it's certainly above my pay grade to make political predictions,

(44:03):
so I can't really speak to that, but um, it's true.
That these missions are really big, they require incredible amounts
of collaboration over long periods of time, and they require
quite a bit of funding. So that is what we
need the most. I don't think that anything is impossible
for us if we work together. I think that we've
really come up with a great plan that has a

(44:24):
high likelihood of success. The question is whether or not
we want to fund that, and that's not up to
to me as an individual. If it were would be
funded right now, but you know, we have to make
sure that this is aligned with our taxpayers desires. Um
there's a lot of things that go into that and
is this where we want to put our priorities. I
would note that NASA it's not funded at the levels

(44:46):
that most people think right when I like to play
this game like what percentage of the total US budget
is NASA getting and people are like twent and I'm
like that's great. I know, of like that would be amazing,
you know, but unfortunately, at its maximum, NASA has never
gotten more than one percent of the totally US budget.
It's much lower than that now, you know. So we

(45:08):
are doing all of this work with really very little funding,
which is amazing. We don't really need that much more
funding to make a sample return mission from Mars reality.
So that's that's what I would say. I would say,
you know, maybe it feels like it's a little bit
of extra money now, but the I think the rewards
would be incredible and it would absolutely be worth the
price tag. I agree with you. I think it's incredible

(45:30):
when we have the capability to do something and the
only thing that limits us is the money. It's like,
you're at the universe is like knowledge shop, and you
could just buy this information about the universe and the
money is there, but they're spending it on aircraft carriers.
So we need those two, We need them all, We
need all the things, but we could just you know,
I think people think of it as more expensive than

(45:51):
it really is. It really is a bargain. What we
can do really is. So let's say this mission happens.
There are several parts to it which seemed a little
you know, of wracking. Bit's being transferred from one to
the other. Say this happens. Which part is the most
nail biting for you? Which is the moment where you're like,
you know, holding your breath hoping that it works. I

(46:11):
think for me, the most anxiety ridden part of any
mission is launching and landing. Those are the hardest parts
that we do. It's really hard to launch something off
of another planet and get it onto another planet safely.
And so you know, we've we've done this now for
many missions successfully, right, but we can never guarantee that
it's going to always work out well. I think we

(46:33):
have a good track record, but we're gonna be trying
to do some very different things with sample return that
we've never tried before, and that is we've got to
first get our rover perseverance to Mars. So we're already launching,
We've already launched off of Earth and now we're en
route to Mars. We're gonna land on Mars. Then that
rover has to gather samples, and then we're gonna launch

(46:54):
another spacecraft that's gonna get into orbit around Mars, and
then that spacecraft is going to launch a lander with
a little fete strover, and that rover is gonna pick
up our samples and then get back to this lander
and then launch off of Mars. This is all by itself,
by the way, no help from us. Then it's gonna
rendezvous with that orbiting spacecraft, and then that spacecraft is
going to come back to Earth. That's very complicated. I

(47:17):
think we can absolutely do it. It's absolutely feasible, but
there's quite a bit of risk there, and especially because
we can't operate this in real time, these systems have
to be somewhat autonomous. So then imagine that it's here.
We have Mars samples there, sterile or pristine. They're in
the laboratory, and you're the first person to get cracked
at them. Right, what's the first thing you do to
those samples? What's the first question you want to answer? Oh,

(47:40):
my goodness, that is such a I mean, if I'm
the first person to see them, I don't know if
I could keep it from my friends. I have to
invite everybody over so we can all look at this together,
I think. I mean, the first step for bringing back
samples like this is you must triage them. So we
need to get a general sense what kind of rock
is this, what kind of minerals? You know, just basic characteristics,
because is that will then tell you what the next

(48:02):
question should be. You know, if you have a rock
that appears to be igneous, so from a volcano. The
next questions are going to be, you know, more about
how did vulcanism evolve in this place, you know, what
kind of volcano reduced this material, and then what happened
to it next. If you get a sedimentary sample, totally
different questions. You're like, Okay, so now this is sedimentary.

(48:24):
Was it emplaced in water? What kind of water? You know,
what's the nature of the properties of that fluid, and
then what kind of other minerals were precipitating there, and
what does that tell us about the habitability of that
environment and what kind of things could actually utilize you know,
what are the energy sources that might have been there.
So so I think like, depending on the first canister

(48:45):
that I open, you know, you go in a different direction.
So I'm hoping that we get some sedimentary materials that
are high in manganese, and we'll know that before they
come back from ours because we will select these very carefully,
So that would probably be something that will already know.
So I would pick, you know, my favorite canister to
open first so that I could follow my favorite questions.

(49:08):
And for me, I'm really interested in understanding, you know,
are there bio signatures that are preserved in sedimentary materials
on Mars. So these are chemical or mineralogical or even
morphological features that are left by life that can tell
us something about what it was doing. Um, and then
it can also, depending on the age of the rock,

(49:28):
tell us when it was doing that. So those are
the questions that I don't want to answer first. All right, wonderful.
Well I can hear your enthusiasm and it makes me
excited to get these samples back here. So thanks again
for coming out of program and for telling us about it. Yeah,
thanks for having me. It's been great chatting. All right,
pretty awesome. She's amazing. It sounds like it's totally possible,

(49:52):
Like this might work, Daniel. It's basically a question of
politics and money and then you know a little bit
of luck, like if we actually commit to doing thing
and to sending this thing over there, we have a
reasonable chance of it working. Really, you know, something of
missions to Mars fail. But that's a reasonable chance. Is
that our hit rate, Yeah, that's our hit rate, and

(50:14):
I think we have the best hit rate of any
country on Earth. But it's still it's tricky, it's far away.
These things are complicated. But remember what NASA has pulled
off like they have done amazing things like the sky
crane landing on Mars and all sorts of stuff. So
this some pretty awesome engineers over there. I trust them.
I think they deserve a couple of billion. Yeah, yeah,
you're saying that. The biggest challenges just keeping this project funded,

(50:36):
because you know it takes years and years. It's like
a twenty year project, fifteen year project. Yeah. If the
samples do return, they'll be back here in twenty one
and so it just needs constant funding. And you know
how it is these days with politics. New administration comes in,
first thing they love to do is cancel the projects
from the previous administration, and so it has to be

(50:58):
consistently supported by multiple branches of government in order to survive. Well, sure, yeah,
let's give him all the billions. I mean not all
of the billions, but a few of the billions. I
think of the things we could learn. I'm always frustrated
when there are opportunities to learn something important and deep
about the universe and the only barrier is money, money

(51:18):
that we have. I would totally go into the Universe
knowledge Shop and spend lots of billions of dollars to
learn things about the universe. You would totally press that
red by now, but Mars rock by now. Sample of
gas from Jupiter by now. Secrets of the universe. Click
click click deliver tomorrow please next day delivery please. All right? Well,

(51:42):
Dr Lanson was definitely excited. We're excited, and good luck
to the Mars scientists who are working on this and
tune in one. Well we'll break down for you the
incredible discoveries made by Mars. Sample return. That's right today
on episode three thousand, Daniel and Horror Explained Auniverse. Remember
that time we interviewed one of the scientists. No, it

(52:02):
will be two robots. Two robots will have taken over
the podcast by then, and together they'll transform into an
awesome podcast actually making good jokes that end up on
a trump All right, well, thanks for joining us. Hope
you enjoyed that. See you next time. Thanks for listening,

(52:28):
and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from
my heart Radio visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.