perfectly candid, that is fair in our support and that, and that does provide support across both sides of the aisle. >> host: david cohen is executive vice president of the comcast corporation, anne veigle is associate managing editor of communications daily. you can go to c-span.org, click on communicators, and you can watch all of our programs online. thank you for being with us. >> you've been watching "the communicators," c-span's weekly discussion with the people influencing our digital future. if you missed any of this program on net neutrality, broadband and other issues, you can see a reair tonight at 8 eastern here on c-span2.

>> an international convention focusing on mars was held over the weekend. we'll show you two sessions with remarks by nasa scientists. here's the first one that runs about an hour, 40 minutes.

>> our first speaker today is dr. brent bos, he's a research physicist at the goddard space flight center. back in 1997 he joined, he started working on the path finder team. then in 2003 he started working on the mars phoenix project which he's going to talk about today. he's currently, though, at nasa goddard he's joined the james webb space telescope team and has an impressive lineup of accomplishments and achievements. he's also an accredited inventer and has 25 patents in the united states, so very impressive. so, brent, do you want to come up? dr. brent bos. [applause] >> thank you, chris, for the nice introduction. good morning, everyone. i'm really happy to be here this morning to talk to you about the phoenix mission which was in the middle of its operations last year at this time, and unfortunately peter smith who

was the phoenix principle investigator, the pi, couldn't be here this morning. he's moving his daughter across the country from arizona to north carolina. but he sends his best wishes to you and his regrets for not being here, so i'm going to be talking about phoenix today. let's get right into it. what i want to cover is give you a little background on the mission. how did it start, why do we call it phoenix, and give you a little background on how it actually came to fruition. and then i'll give you some detail on the spacecraft and instruments, that's what i like, i like the hardware, i like building it, sending it to cool places, so i'm going to go into some detail on that. and then we'll get into the water observations that we made. there was a lot of concern particularly as we were planning the mission and traveling there that we were going to have a difficult time locating it, that we might have to dig and dig and dig, but you'll see we saw water kind of everywhere on the surface. and finally, i'll summarize with

how the mission ended, what are some of the most interesting things we learned and show you some of the most interesting results we have right now. okay. so phoenix was called phoenix because it rose from the ashes of two missions. one was a failed mission, and one was a canceled mission. the failed mission was the mpl, the crash into the martian south pole back in december of 1999. now this, you may remember, was back during nasa's faster, better, cheaper area. it wasn't necessarily better, obviously. and this is a picture of mars, this is a mock-up that was an engineering mock-up that was in the ucla test bed which is where the science operations were based. after we had the failure, nasa convened a review panel to try to understand why did the mission fail, and they sort of found the best you can in terms

of a smoking gun. they found out that the most likely cause was that the thrusters had cut off prematurely, about 131 feet above the surface of mars. there are 12 of them, you can see these lander legs here, there are two of them located on each side of the struts, and what they think happened was when the lander legs deployed, there was enough force generated from that deployment that it sent a signal to the computer saying, oh, we've touched down, we're on the surface. so the computer during the edl phase started to look for signals that it had touched down on the surface, the very first time it looked it saw that surface and said, oh, i'm on the surface, let's cut the thrusters off. but, unfortunately, we were too high above the surface and most likely crash today the ground. this was replicated three out of the four or five times they did this. had we done proper testing on the ground ahead of this, we would have found this and been

able to fix this before we landed. there was also a concern that the review panel highlighted with these descent thrusters unlike viking, which was the other soft lander that the u.s. has successfully put on mars, the mars pole lander had these pole thrusters so they could only be turned on and off. there was some concern that this pulsing action may cause a spacecraft to be unstable as it was landing as well. but we were pretty sure it was this strut issue with the premature sensing of the surface contact. the second mission that phoenix was based on was this canceled mission which was the 2001 mars surveyor lander. i've shown here, this is an artist's rendition of the 2001 mars surveyor. so after the failure review board came out with their recommendations or findings, we kind of lost our nerve, at least in my opinion, particularly for those of us that were working on this. even though nasa had already

spent more than $100 million on the development of the hardware, kind of lost our nerve because the entry, descent and landing portions of the spacecraft were essentially a direct copy of the hardware. so even though we thought we had a really good idea and a smoking gun on what killed mars four lander, nasa decided not to supply it, and its future was really unknown at the time. this was back in 2000 about six months after the failure of the mars lander. but then in late summer of 2001 headquarters, nasa headquarters announced they were going to make all this 2001 mars surveyor hardware that was just sitting on the shelf, they were going to make that available for mars missions. so back then scout missions were kind of a new concept. it was really the first time nasa was going to do a mars scout mission, and the key thing, one of the key aspects is

that it's a principle investigator-led mission. okay, so instead of kind of a big panel of scientists and engineers at nasa decide what the goal of the mission is, the principle investigator is responsible for all aspects of a mars scout mission. the other thing a mars scout mission has to be is it has to be low cost. so in order to, in order to be a mission that sort of supplements what's going on in the normal course of mars exploration, it has to be low cost. you can't spend ten years and a billion dollars trying to build a mission to go off and do your exploration. it has to be relatively cheap, and it also has to be responsive to the latest mars discovery. so those are the key things that mars scout missions needed to have, and this was really the first time that nasa was doing a mars scout mission. so at that point in time i was working for peter smith. here's peter right here. this is him and i up in the arctic in the summer of 2001,

and actually the mars society was involved in some of the work we were doing here. we each did a turn up at efmars, so this is actually we took some of our engineering test unit hardware for cameras and other space flight hardware and in addition to doing the mars, the manned mars simulations, we were doing some unmanned mars simulations as well. this showed the robotic arm digging into the soil in devon. so when nasa made this announcement, peter decided to throw his hat into the ring here which was a little bit late in the game. at this point in time there had already been ten proposal studies funded by nasa given to various teams across the country to go and study their concepts in greater detail. so peter was coming to the game late, but he had a couple of

things going for him. he had a really good reputation inside the small mars exploration community, and he had also built five other mars lander imagers, so he had a lot of space flight hardware experience. so peter put together a proposal, and in august of 2002 he submitted it to nasa. he had the university of arizona being the lead institution because that was his institution, so university of arizona was in charge of everything. he delegated project management to jpl which, obviously, was a good decision. spacecraft management was given to lockheed martin, they were the original fabricators of the 2001 hardware for the spacecraft. and about a year later, august 4, 2003, peter was called up by orlando fig row what, called him up and said, congratulations, phoenix is going to be the first mars scout mission. so what does phoenix have going

for it? besides using all of this hardware that was just sitting on the shelf not doing anybody any good, the other thing that phoenix had going for it, in my opinion, was it was very responsive to a recent discovery, a recent mars discovery that had been made. and this discovery was made from orbit by the speck tommer the, the pi for that was phil boynton, and it had discovered what it believed to be a lot of water ice particularly at high latitudes. so at plus 60 and below negative 60 degrees latitude on mars this instrument detected a lot of, a lot of water, roughly 50 percent by volume. so that's what's shown -- this is a map of the water from that instrument shown here. and the dark blue areas show where detected high concentrations of water. even though it's part of the gamma ray speck tommer the experiment, it wasn't detected by gamma rays. a neutron detector detected

hydrogen. it was interpreted that this was actually a water ice signal. so phoenix proposed to fly to the northern latitude region, and our landing site was right about there, right in one of those "squawk on the street" spots -- sweet spots where there should be lots of water. this is really exciting because the mantra for exploration is follow the water because it gives you your best chance of detecting life. first you look for the water since life as we know it needs water to exist. you first follow the water, and that gives you a better chance of finding life. of course, for those of us that are interested in sending people to mars eventually, water's obviously a very important resource for us. so phoenix had three primary science objectives. the one i'm going to spend most of the time about this morning is studying the history of water, identifying the water. we also wanted to determine if the martian arctic soil could support life, so we had

instrumentation to search for salts, determine the soil ph and search for sulfates and any other microbe energy sources that we might find. and finally, we also had a weather station on board, so we wanted to study martian weather from a polar perspective. so this is a figure of the hardware. this is the phoenix mars lander. we like to say it's the first mars robot with all five human senses, okay? so this is the actual lander hardware right here. this is just as it existed back in 2001. these are the solar panels, the lander legs, i think you can see some of the thruster jets right here. in terms of the instrumentation, our main camera on board is this right here, the surface coppic imager, so that's our robot's eyes. so that's how we use to see. we have an arm right here, this is our robotic arm and mounted to it is a camera, so it allows

us to touch the surface. we also have two sets of instrumentation meaning we have to introduce samples directly to these experiments in order to make identifications and make a study of the surface, so one of those is a thermal and gas analyzer which is shown right here, and we have the microscopy analysis package which we call mecca for short. it has a lot of different components, it has a piece that i'll she you later, it has a chemistry lab inside of it, so that's where we introduce the sample. you take the robotic arm, take the sample, dump it into the mecca. inside the mecca is a wet chemistry lab, so you dump the soil and mix it with water. that allows us to taste the surface. and then once the material's in tiga, we bake it and look at the materials that come off, so

that's like our nose. on the deck we have the weather station, so this is the weather mass with three different temperature sensors. also at the top is a wind tail. we take pictures of it and based on its deflection and the direction it's being deflected, we can determine martian winds and what direction the wind is blowing. and we also had a lie daughter on board, so this was like a laser ranging experiment where you send out a pulse of light and then you wait for how long it takes for the light to come back so you get a ranging information from that. and based on the intensity of the light that comes back to you, you can make some inferences about what the light actually hits. and then underneath the lander you can't see it, we actually had a descent imager which was called marty, and coupled to marty was a microphone. unfortunately for marty, it was one of the original 2001 mars surveyor hardware, and they found out late in the game

actually while we were cruising to mars that marty could interfere during the entry descent and landing phases of the mission which is, obviously, critical, and if anything went wrong during edl, we were going to have a really bad day on mars. so originally they were going to take 20-30 images, and then it got cut down to 10, then it got cut down to 5. we just lost our nerve and said let's not even turn it on. edl is, obviously, too important. so poor marty went all the way to mars and never got turned on. okay. so now i want to go into more detail on some of the key pieces of instrumentation that we used. the first one, of course, actually has kind of a random name or it's sort of, you have multiple choice for what you want to call it. this camera's been called this in different peer review publications and different conference proceedings, so sometimes we call it the stereo

surface engineer, but all of them are ssi, so we just call it ssi for short. like i said, this is the main imaging workhorse. we have four different camera systems on board, but this was the main camera. here is a picture of it right here. so it kind of even looks like a person, here are the two eyes. it has elevation motors to provide panoramic imaging capability. so that allows you to turn, and the elevation motor is located right here, and that allows you to rotate about this axis. so we can look about negative 60 degrees down all the way to 90 degrees up and do a full fan, 0-360 degrees. it also sits on a deployable mast, and this mast extends to about 6 and a half feet above the surface, so we have a pretty good vantage point to try and understand our landing site. this camera, it's new hardware, but it was based on the path finder design. and the only real upgrade is we

included two new mars exploration rover detectors on board. so that offered four times higher resolution than what we had and gave us 1024 by 1024 pix les per eye -- pixels per eye. and gave us 14-degree field of view in each dimension, so it was a square field of view. like i said, here are the two eyes, and they're separated by 15 centimeters to provide stereo data, and then there are 12 filters that sit in the optical path for each eye, and they're designed to help us understand the surface as well as make atmospheric deductions about capacity. this is a picture taken by the ssi while we're building up the spacecraft that shows some of the color chips that we used to try to do accurate color rendering of the martian surface. this is a robotic arm, another key piece of instrumentation

that we needed to do the water experiments, so it's shown right here. and this was the 2001 mars surveyor arm, so it's one of those old pieces of hardware, but significant modifications were done to it after the fact. and it sort of wail a surprise -- became a surprise that we were going to have to do this. it was lengthened because there was all this concern about flying all the way to mars and dig and dig and dig and you just can't reach the ice. at one point actually when they did the design review of this after phoenix was selected they found out there was some plastic in certain parts of this, so that was taken apart and replaced. but it's constructed out of aluminum and titanium, it's about 7 and a half feet long, and it was specked to provide 400 newtons of force at the tip here, at the end of the scoop, but in practice we only ended up going to about 160 newtons, but that's still a lot of force to impart on the surface. we like to think of it as a backhoe, so it has 4 degrees of

freedom. this is its shoulder joint, so to speak, so it can move kind of like this and up and down, and it also has a elbow at the joint, and it also has another elevation motor here down by the wrist, down where the scoop is. and then it also has another degree of freedom actually is this -- now, this is a close up of the scoop. so here's the scoop, and you zoom in here, and you can see this rasp bit. and what it is, it's basically like a drill bit. and the intent of it was was to -- you could bring this out, and if you really hit a hard surface on mars, you could use this to try to dig up and loose material into your scoop. this was the primary blade for digging, and we had some other tines on the back to try to scrape up some material if we hit a really hard layer. the tecp is on the robotic arm as well, but it's part of that meca instrument suite, and this

has to go directly into the surface and measures the conductivity of the service. it's mounted on a robotic arm. the other interesting thing about the arm is because it was intended to actually get in intimate contact with the martian surface, it had to be sterilized by a quite stringent requirement, so it had to be baked out i think it was around 260 degrees fahrenheit, had to be sterilized and then put inside this, this is what we called a biobarrier bag. so this sits on the lander deck, and we tried to keep everything inside there that was going to come in contact with the martian surface clean, a lot more clean than the already extremely clean instrumentation that was just on the the exposed part of the lander. so a lot of care was put in to try to make sure we weren't bringing along our own microbes or organics that we were going to detect once we got to mars. kind of funny thing happened once we got there, but i'll show you later.

another key piece is the robotic camera. this was a big part of my ph.d. dissertation when i was working for peter. there's a picture of me sitting with the flight version of it. but it was 2001 mars surveyor hardware, so this was done actually around late 1999, early 2000 and just sat on the shelf and ended up going through no modification. here's the robotic arm, here's the camera, this is a figure, and here's the scoo. it's intended to document the samples that are dug up in the scoop. and it could also be used to document areas of the landing site that the ssi couldn't see, and in the event that the ssi actually failed and couldn't provide panoramic imaging, the rac could also do that since it was mounted on this movable platform, it could generate images that way.

fortunately, we didn't have to rely on. that it was a pretty simple camera really, so this is the camera. you can kind of make out the lens sitting behind this window. it also had this protective cover that you could rotate down into place so you didn't scratch this beautiful filter window that we had here. the lens inside here which you can see was actually mounted on a focus adjustment mechanism. we could generate 313 different focus mechanisms, and that was required because for imaging things actually inside the scoop, you were relatively close up. and if you were fortunate enough to actually get something interesting right on the edge of the scoop here, we could focus on that and have microscopic resolution, about 23 microns per pixel. but then we could also focus on things far away. the image and scoop contents focus are about 12 different focus motor positions that allows you to image the entire scoop in focus. now, unlike the ssi we didn't

have filters on this camera, so we couldn't take color images in the normal way on mars that we take color images, but we had this illumination system of leds, red, green, and blue leds. if you were close enough to something and the background wasn't too bright, you could move up and illuminate the sample with the whites and get color information out of this. so to take a color image you'd do four exposures, and then one without any lamps on at all to subtract your background. in fact, that's how this image was generated right here. this was a color image from inside the spacecraft while we were flying to mars. about a month after we launched, we did a checkout of the instruments and made sure they'd all survived the launch and that they were ready for their mission. so it's tucked away inside this biobarrier bag because it's mounted to the robotic arm, and we turned it on and took four

pictures. so this was taken in between earth and mars. this is a robotic arm scoop, so you can see the inside of the biobag here. it proved that, you know, this instrument had survived the stresses of launch and looked like we were going to have a good day once we got to land on mars. the camera, though, really is pretty old technology. the ccd inside of it was just the 512 by 256 fairchild c -- transfer cc dnchts it did have an advantage which helps insure you don't saturate your images. for some unknown reason, they didn't have antiblooming -- so sometimes we were dealing with the images washing out. but the rack didn't suffer from that because it had these antiblooming gates that would allow you not to overexpose your images. but it was originally developed for the descent imager, so this

was developed way back in the early '90s. originally flew in 1997, it was the same detector on the imager for mars path finder, and, in fact, the phoenix optical microscope that's part of the meca package used the same detector. so it really was pretty old technology, but it still ended up doing its job that we needed it to do. okay. the final key piece of instrumentation for doing the water observations was the tega or the thermal and evolved gas analyzer, and this was a new piece of hardware. it was similar in design to the 1999 mars polar lander tega, so it consists of eight single-use ovens. these two cells don't have a door on them, but there are four on each side. and the offenses are located -- ovens are located behind these doors, and they're very small.

they're about the size of a pencil tip eraser, so just a small amount of material can go in there. they monitor the amount of power required to increase the sample temperature at a constant rate. so that's all it does, it's trying to do these temperature ramps at a constant rate, and it monitors how much power it needs to do that. so phase transitions can be detected that way. the highest temperature ramp actually goes up to 1800 degrees fahrenheit. it takes a couple of days to actually get there, but that's how high it can go, and it was intended to be sensitive to water. so this was our main instrument for detecting water, particularly if it was really entrain inside the soil on mars. in addition to the opt vens, we had an instrument suite. so the gases once you cooked the material in the oven right here, the gases that come off are directed to a mass speck tommer the which measures the isotopes. in particular it was designed to be sensitive to oxygen,

hydrogen, neon and so on. the other interesting thing about this, the instrument lead for this was bill boynton, and bill was the lead for the gamma ray spectrometer, so he was in a realtively unique position where he gets to go off and build another instrument to verify his discovery on the ground, so it was pretty neat. okay. we finally got to the launch pad in the summer of 2007, and we launch on august 4, 2007. we had a one-day delay due to some weather problems in the area. but fortunately, it went off without a hitch. and then i'm going to show you a little animation here. about ten months later and 422 million miles, we approached mars. we're going about 12,000 miles per hour right now, and we have to get down to 0 miles per hour

in about 7 minutes, so we tried to burn off a lot of that energy by entering the atmosphere and breaking using a -- [inaudible] and the parachute deploys. we're going a couple hundred miles per hour right now. the air fill falls off, our landing legs deploy. radar turns on, looks at the surface, gets an altitude measurement, and then we drop. fortunately, our thrusters turn on, going on and off very quickly, and then we peer wet and try to -- pirouette and try to get the right position. after about ten minutes into the mission, all this stuff happens right here. so the solar panels deploy. the ssi pops up on its mast.

.. now we're grabbing a sample with a scoop. bring it over to the tega. the door opens.

and pour in the sample. start the martian barbecue and we open the lidar door. we start doing this laser ranging experiment. [inaudible] >> yeah, i'll talk about that. the other thing i want to point out is this picture right here. hopefully a lot of you have already seen it, particularly, you know, since we're all mars aficionados here. this is a picture taken of the phoenix a few minutes before it landed on the mars surface. this is taken from orbit on board another spacecraft so the mars reconscience orbiter it orbitz around the mars and it has a camera called high-rise which is run at the university of arizona and weeks in advance they planned it out. they figured out where the

phoenix would be entering the martian atmosphere and commanded their camera to try to take pictures of it as it was trying to landing and that would have been important if we had a failure but fortunately it didn't. it created this awesome image. here's the lander right here at the bottom and here's the parachute and you can make out the parachute lines. this is the first time we've ever done this around another planet. this was pretty neat. it happened a few minutes before we landed. 2 minutes we landed at 7:38. i want to show you a little bit of contrast here. this is what a bad day on mars looks like. this was me and a colleague on the front page of the "los angeles times" after the mars polar landing crash where we were appealing to a higher power to save our spacecraft and mission. unfortunately, it didn't work but phoenix was a whole different story. this is a picture from the "arizona daily star," front page. this is peter again. and it was the day after landing and we were outside of the

science operations center and some reporters were outside and they asked peter what it felt to be a science rock star, and i think the question kind of caught him off guard and he just went into this air guitar routine and started singing the doors come on baby light my fire. [laughter] >> it was pretty neat. everything was just going so well. that was a great day. it really kind of exercised the demons and get the monkeys off our back from the mars polar lander days. okay, so getting right into the mission here, these are the images we took right after landing. we didn't get them back right away. it took a few hours. these were preprogrammed images that ssi took right after it deployed so this shows our landing sight right here and you can see this terrain so you see these troughs and high points here. you can see the delineations. and this is due to the active freeze/thaw cycle that's on the surface. this is what we expected to see. it was really textbook and we had seen this from orbit and you

also see this like if you go up to devin island you see this all over the place. anywhere you have an active freeze/thaw cycle and not a lot of vegetation not to interrupt it you see this terrain start to appear and so that was exciting. it wasn't unexpected but it was neat to see that it met our expectations and then a lot of the other images were actually engineering images. so this is a picture of the robotic arm showing the bag had deployed. unfortunately it got snaked a little bit. this actually delayed us for about a day. the robotic arm team wanted to wait to see if it would take care of itself. they didn't want to snag the bag as they were deploying the arm. the thermal fluctuations ended up making that fold off all by itself. we also had what we called the neil armstrong image which showed one good foot pad down on the ground which looks like we were on a very good good stable surface and we had the images of the solar panels so that we would have full power for the

mission. that was sol0. a sol is our name for a martian day. it's 39 mission day. we saul them sols. sol 0 our first day of landing and on sol 4, after they said we're ready to start moving the arm around and putting it through its paces we said well, first we have to go and look at these other foot pads and make sure that we actually are on a stable surface so we took the arm and went over the edge of the lander deck a little bit and took pictures of this foot pad right here just to show that, yeah, we were safely on the ground. so it was a good image. it was an engineering image but we were really surprised because there was something else interesting in the image. and that was this feature right here. you can see it a little bit in this image. but right here it looks like there's something aftermath, highly reflective. in addition this was directly

below one of the thruster jets. you can see it looked like the thrusters had actually burnt a hole in something and then a chunk of it actually got expelled out. you can kind of see where it hit the ground right here. we were very excited by this image. not only were we on a stable surface but it looked like the thing we had come 422 miles to find and we were worried we would to have dig and dig and never get there was only an inch or two below the surface and our thrusters it looked like had done a lot of the work for us already. and so we called this feature snow queen. i should notice that peter decided -- peter smith, the principal investigator decided the theme for naming things on the mission was going to be once upon a time. so all the objects, all the features that we had or that we named during the mission had to come from either fairytales or foal can lore. so a few months before landing a graduate student was given the task of populating the most of the excel spreadsheet full of names that were from fairytales or folk-lore and didn't infringe

on a disney copyright or a trademark. and so we called this snow queen 'cause obviously we had a pretty good feeling this was the water/ice we'd come for. i don't know if you've seen this. but this gave the, you know, alien bloggers quite a fit for a while saying there was obviously some kind of snail on the martian surface. this was off the spacecraft and when the spacecraft engineers saw this, they were a little worried because depending on what it was, it could either be benign or fairly serious. we actually had to spend time to get get closer images with less compression to figure out what it was. and it ended up turning out to be a spring. it kind of looks like a screw in this picture but it was actually a spring and based on the numbers of turns we measured and how big the spring was that we measured, the spacecraft team was able to tell us where it came from. it was outside the biobag.

so we went trouble to go sterile things and the dirty things springing off and landing in the martian surface so it's kind of funny. so we're pretty excited. sol 4, we got these images what were intended to just be engineering images back and they said we have to take a look another look at the foot pad and those of us on the science look saying we have to look at the snow queen feature because it looks like interesting. we take some more pictures and this was the closer up picture of snow queen but this is the other foot pad and we said holy cow when we saw that image. it looked like -- snow queen was interesting but look at these features here on the other side of the land jury. -- lander. it looked like these flat, smooth surface looks like the thing we had come all the way for. they weren't below the surface. this is only 2 to 4 inches below

the surface. and so again we're very enthused because it was a good indication we weren't going to have to dig too far to actually get to the water/ice and so we actually naming this feature holy cow because like i said that's what we said when we landed and it was on the list. oh, we tried to get color information because -- these are black and white images and to really prove that it was water/ice or lend more evidence to that, we tried to get color images but we could never get quite close enough for the robotic arm camera using those lamps to pull out enough color information. it looked like it had a milkish white hue to it but we couldn't be sure. the images were a little to grainy when you tried to pull color out. and on sol 10, you can get your first sample and it wasn't too critical where you could get that sample but we wanted to dig and make sure the robotic arm could do what it needed to do.

so -- actually let me go back here. this is on sol 6. we decided acquire a sample from the surface. these are three pictures of that first sample. so this was on sol 7. these are all the same picture from the robotic arm camera, just at slightly different focus positions. i think the most focused one is right here. this was basically just taken a swath in the martian surface, just one digging operation. and you can see obviously we're very excited 'cause we didn't even have to try really hard. and there's some more interesting white flecks. finally on sol 10 let's try to actually go get our first sample which was these instruments and our main instrument for detecting the water/ice. this is the first sample we dug for tega and we dug a little trench and we called the sample baby bear. and again, we're real excited. this was a picture taken by the

robotic arm camera before we dumped it into the tega. and it looks like we had a nice big chunk of something white there. we thought we would be very interesting. so we went ahead and we told the robotic arm team, yeah, let's deliver this to the tega. here's the tega right here. you can see the doors were opened and we just dumped everything right on top of it. so tega, they said great we got a sample waiting for us. they commanded the tega to start vibrating the screen. there's screens over each one of these cell doors so you only let small particles into the oven and they were commanded to shake. unfortunately they were designed to shake up and down which when you have a large mass load like this wouldn't have been efficient but it would be better if it was side-to-side. they looked in the oven and nothing there and still didn't see anything. it actually took several days. we didn't get the sample into

tega until sol 16. so we delivered it so sol 12 and it took until sol 16. this material is a lot different than what we expected to be. during the all the simulations on the ground and using the tega and the robotic arm we tried different mars soils and we tried out as salts and none of this was as cohesive as this material could be. this stuff stuck together. no matter what we did in terms of vibrating that screen we couldn't get the sample down into the oven until something miraculously on sol 16 happened, something released the material and it all dropped down into the tega. but, unfortunately, we had waited, you know -- it had sat and baked out in the sun so long that all the interesting stuff, all the volatiles had already been driven off the material so it was pretty an uninteresting sample once they started cooking it. so while all that was going on

with the tega, we kept digging with the robotic arm. this is sol 14 this is the trenches we dug. this is the goldilocks trench complex. we didn't have to dig very far, just 3 or 4 inches below the surface here. you start seeing this highly reflective white-looking material. it looked really promising. okay. this picture is a little bit of a detour. it doesn't have anything to do with the water story. it's one of my favorite missions. it's an iconic image and it was taken by complete accident. this image wasn't supposed to exist. this was part -- this image was supposed to be a part of the mission success panorama and this was a scene that minimizes the spacecraft hardware in the

panorama and so this had been planned out to be just an image of the landscape and either the robotic arm was in the wrong place at the wrong time or the ssi took the wrong picture at the wrong time but i think it's just a beautiful shot that shows the scoop, it shows the robotic arm it, shows the robotic arm camera and you can even see some material in the school here we called the panorama of peter's plan and that's the name we gave it. back to the water story. so this trench complex -- we continued to dig and naturally extended it and made it into one big trench which is shown right here. this is how it looked on sol 20. so sol 20 we decided to stop working on that trench. that trench wasn't all that interesting, we thought. it was sort of a first test trench to see how we were doing. how we could dig into the surface. and we decided to leave it alone while we went off and did other things.

but we continued to monitor it. we continued to take pictures of it using the ssi. and what happened on sol 24 is we noticed that these three chunks of material right here, which were about the size of dice, had actually disappeared. and so this was really the smoking gun that all this white stuff we were seeing was, in fact, waterized. the stuff we had come all that way to study. and, in fact, it was kind of interesting because there were some geochemistry team members who were actually starting to build arguments that a lot of this white stuff we were seeing was actually salt because according to some calculations, the white material was being a lot more stable than what -- than what you would think water/ice would be. it's actually not salt. it is water ice. there's a big press conference and fortunately we could stop calling it these really tortured names like high albedo, highly

reflective material we finally said this is water ice and there's a business press conference and it was a great day for the mission. every time we had an opportunity when we weren't doing digging or we weren't doing delivery samples to the instruments, we would go back and take pictures underneath the lander of snow white -- or snow queen and holy cow and we started to see some interesting things happening on this lander struts, which is these right here. we started calling these features on here barnacles. and i'm going to show you more about that. we didn't see any changes in snow queen until sol 39 which again was kind of the smoking gun, yeah, that was really a waterized feature. at this point in the mission around sol 20 or so, we -- there was a point where we decided well, what should we do?

should we try to really get this first sample from the trench that we dug or the new trench and the team was kind of split in half but peter smith was on the side of the team or in the group and said let's go -- and dig a new trench. this was the new trench that we started. this was the snow white trench. this is how it looked on sol 43 but this trench was a lot harder to dig and in retrospect we probably should have taken our first tega sample out of that goldilocks trench. we hit a hard ice layer pretty quickly and you can actually see that here. you can see the chatter marks on the bottom of the trench floor right here. so the robotic arm hit this hard layer and kind of skipped across it. and the robotic arm guys said it had a consistency of close to cement so this was really difficult to dig into. we spent a lot of time trying to get a sample out of snow white trench. this is a true color image. this is a false color image that

brings up the ice features a little bit more. but these are a little areas where we tried to use that rasp and dig up material to try to get some samples into the scoop. so we did -- we tried that a lot. we would work in this trench. we would dig. we would rasp a little bit and trying to get something into the scoop and then we'd deliver it to the tega completely blind because we didn't want to have the same thing happen with what happened with the baby bear, the first sample where we delivered all the tega all the interesting stuff is driven off on the sample while we wait to look at the image and decide what we're going to do. so we decided to try and dig and deliver in a blind state and we had to do that a lot. it took a lot of practice. on sol 60 we came up completely empty. there's the tega door empty on this side waiting for a sample but no sample was delivered. but finally after a lot of practice on sol 64, tega -- we finally delivered a sample to tega and we started to bake it and we saw the waterized

signature. so this is the -- a trace -- the signal from the oven so this is the amount of power the ovens are putting in as a function of time. you see that we had to pump in a lot more power to keep the temperature ramp being constant. and then also once that vapor was driven off it went to the mass spectrometer and this is the trace as well showing that we got a signal in the h20 channel so this was a big deal. this was kind of the raw data. i don't know if you'll see this published. this is the data we worked with when it was actually discovered and a big press conference was called and reporters were called phoenix has discovered water ice and they were under-whelmed. it was an exciting day for the tega team. as the mission wore on we started to see water actually condense onto the surface. that's what's shown there.

and again, i'm kind of running out of time here but i did want to show you this cohesiveness of the soil again. this is really unexpected. we didn't expect the material to be clay-like where it's holding itself together and you can see on -- what was happening here a picture from the rac shows material kind of falling out. here's a sample on sol 35 and sol 36 between that time we didn't do anything -- we didn't move the robotic arm. we didn't remove the scoop at all and material starts raining out of it. and the soil starts to release. just like we saw with that first tega sample. okay. now i do want to show you -- i've got to take time for this. there's a controversial result or measurement that we made from phoenix, and we think we may have seen liquid water in action on mars. as many of you may know liquid water because of its triple point can exist at least pure water -- shouldn't be able to exist on the martian surface.

but if that water is mixed with some kind of salt or you have some kind of solution it changes the triple point to the point where you could actually have liquid water. and this was actually predicted back in 2001 which we weren't aware of until we started making these observations and did a literature search and actually -- it had been theoretically predicted that you might see this in certain places on mars. so i'm going to show you a little animation here and you can kind of judge for yourselves. so these are rac images again underneath the lander. and what you want to look at is the material that's located on the strut, these barnacles. in particular these two particles. so first the animation goes through just discrete images showing you how the particles change over time. so what it look what's happening

is that it merges and you get a 1 gig drop or something at least that's the interpretation. the next round of images shows you interpretlations between the images. it's a little more convincing at least to some folks. so the idea here is that this is actually liquid water that's sucking up more moisture out of the atmosphere over time and then the particle grows and you actually -- if you look at some of these other particles it seems like they actually disappear and fall off the strut. so this is -- this result has gone through peer review. it is going to be -- it's going to be published in jgr planets in a couple months and this is a title if you're interested in looking it up. let me just skip this in the interest of time. so phoenix went into safe mode on sol 152.

so these are the last images we actually got back from the lander on sol 149. this is a rac image taken of the tecp probe into the surface. this is a sunset we took on sol 150 and finally the last image we got back from the mission was on sol 151. and on sol 152 we got the last signal back. we kept going into this fault mode or lazarus mode as we called it and we had hoped to re-establish control of the spacecraft when we started to have problems on sol 152 but on sol 162 we got the last signal. so the mission was declared over. on november 10, 2008, at the same time "wired" magazine held an online epithet contest. this was the winner of this latin phrase i came, i saw, i dug. some of the other cute ones, what do you mean one-way mission. every robotic lander dies not every robotic lander truly lives and in 2010, will i dream?

to summarize phoenix was a very successful mission. we had our nominal 90 sol mission to 162 sols we had investigations of 149 out of the 152 sols for a quarter of us on the team this was really great experience. it helped us get that monkey off our back from mars polar lander. it was vindication for all the work we had put in for instruments of these types and trying to make, you know, observations at a martian polar area. we returned over 25,000 images. this is the final version of the mission success panorama and you can see they did go back and took the image that doesn't have the robotic arm in the way. this was the final version of the image. and our first real big science results, the peer-reviewed science results were published last month in science magazine so that's the cover shown right here. of course, there's a paper in there on all this waterized observation that is we made and the tega team presented their arguments for the detection of

calcium carbonates and there's an interesting salt that we hadn't expected to see. so i'm well out of time here but i have time for a few questions, two questions. >> dr. gill even believes to this day he found life on mars in his experiment. given what phoenix has found this year, do you think he was right or what do you reckon? >> well, it's too bad. like i showed you in one of the earlier charts phoenix was intended to try to identify organics. what we found out after the fact we were sort of unlucky -- we didn't detect any organics during the phoenix mission and if there was organics there it's likely this magnesium chemical would destroy the organics would kill the temperature ramp on the tega in our quest to find organics on mars. we were just unlucky.

>> you didn't mention anything about dust. on the moon there was considerable problem with that. do you have any information about the dust when you got your soil samples? >> in terms of its size or -- >> could you see -- i didn't see any evidence of dust -- >> well, we saw a lot of dust devils which was really surprising. this was a high latitude and we actually sawdust devils using the ssi. i think they saw 34 or 40 dust devils and i think there are two or three instances where they -- where the temperature change was also indicative that a dust devil had gone directly over the lander. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> thank you, brent. that was great. the water droplets or probably droplets on the legs is just amazing. we're quite fortunate to see dr. steven squires talk about -- dr. paul mahaffy is going to talk of the mars science laboratory which is the next generation of rovers, much more bigger and capable than the spirit and opportunity rovers so this should be pretty exciting. he's the principal investigator for the sample analysis at mars on the science laboratory. he's been -- worked many years as nasa goddard space flight center he's the chief of atmospheric laboratory and science exploration at nasa goddard. he's also participated for many years in the planetary atmospheres and space qualified

instrumentation and he has many publications. ladies and gentlemen, dr. paul mahaffy. [applause] >> thanks, chris. i very much appreciate the invitation to talk here and i'm going to follow up a little bit more on this topic of organics and also how it ties to the question that we're really pursuing, you know, was there ever life on mars, if there was never life on mars, why not? is there evidence of past life of mars and so on? i'm going to talk about msl which is the mission to be landed on the surface after phoenix. but i'm going to get there a little bit indirectly. wander around and talk a little bit about what we now think of the history of earth and mars. talk about how we really get at this question while looking for various biomarkers whether they're in the atmosphere or surface. and then kind of the parameter

space of missions before msl and after msl that will help us get answers, hopefully, to some of these questions. and then a little bit more specifically about msl, which we hope to launch in a couple of years and is the next really big rover on mars. msl just got named curiosity and i got to get in the habit of not calling it msl, which is kind of a nasa acronym but curiosity which a student won in a contest. telescopes are a great things. before telescopes mars and mythology was, you know, the roman goddard of war and temples were built in athens. you can go look in honor of mars. but then telescopes came along and, of course, we started figuring out the planets orbited around the sun and galileo, of course, made these wonderful telescopes. and once people started looking at mars, they discovered things

like the pulse of mars, casani and there's lots of features on mars and because of the quality of the telescopes, imaginations went a little bit wild and he believed -- he called these canelli, these features and made up maps of them. .. the marcion's was happening, it scared the dickens out of all sorts of

people. hollywood picked up on this, since 1964, a few of the movies that involved mars, classics like santa claus conquers the martia martians, little green men who were not friendly to us. now the idea is we are not looking for biped sourcing smith four legs or six legs, we want to understand, did primitive life, microbial life ever develop on mars? that has been a driver for part of the program but as you clearly and do stand, getting to mars is extremely difficult. it is interesting to go back and look at history of human beings

trying to get to mars with robotic spacecraft. the russians put a huge effort into this. the space age was coming, a lot of failures, understanding how to do rocketry and getting things into space was in its infancy, but color-coded here, the failures, launch failures or cruise failures, there's a lot of red, a couple yellows, a bit of data came back from launches in 1971. the u.s. starting little later than that, 64, 71, some partial successs, mariner 9 got to match the planet a bit. there were no canals, but it looked pretty dry, no liquid water, volcanoes and valleys and other stuff and lends 1973, the

mars 5 or better lasted a bit, march 7th lander dodson the send data but didn't get any from the surface. if you look at pre viking, if you're keeping score and figure mars is out to get spacecraft, the home team has 14, the visitors have two. it is really an amazing statistic. 75 came along, the viking landers, amazing how rapidly our understanding of how to get to space and land on another planet had progressed, an amazing vehicle, viking landers landed successfully on the surface. the project scientist is shown here, there is a picture from mars showing this rocky, deserty place, and imprint from the arm, similar to what was described for phoenix. by that time, the missions

really were looking for life, they're looking for microbial life, they set up experiments to do that specifically. i will talk about the gas exchange experiment that was referred to, dealing with the principal investigator on that, where they put some water in a nutrient, mix it with oil and look for a response to see if microbes were catalyzing the soil. they got what looked like a positive result, but there was a gas spectrometers on board, all was well if you had microbes and organics when you heated things up, just like on phoenix like tega did, the instrument was working well, but no organics. that kind of put the exploration for life in tibet of the doldrums for quite a while, quite a few years, although the exploration of mars continued,

the soviets were successful, mars pathfinder was one of the first of the smaller, faster, cheaper rovers, the little yellow guy smiling at work, got some data back from element of composition of the rocks. then there were a couple failures fred talked about as well with the polar lander and the mars climate orbiter. this data is from an -- enhancement that sent a laser beam to the surface, measures the time it takes to get back to the spacecraft, map the surface topography of mars. it is amazing what level of geology can do with this type of data, also designed with high resolution imaging from mars. we have really transformed our understanding of mars, based on the recent set of spacecraft

results. japan got into the game a bit, had a failure but the first mars mission. esa send a mission there was very successful, mars express, they have a wonderful stereo and imager. here's an interesting image. it is doing spectroscopy from mars orbit. if you take infrared spectrum from a rock and get a pattern coming back. nobody really knew whether mars would be so totally covered by dust storms that you could see differences, it turns out you can see differences and you can really identify if not specific minerals, at least classes of minerals from mars orbit. that started with the esa

missions and a nasa mission working remote, mars reconnaissance or better, which is continuing to do that, getting very high spacial images. you saw those images of stuff on the surface, the phoenix lander, and this really beautiful spectroscopy. our understanding of mars from orbit tremendously improved. fred talked about this mapping of the hydrogen, another fundamental result, and then came the rovers which were an incredible success, landed with their balloon airbags deploying, bouncing around the surface, rolling to a stop, spirit and opportunity, the idea of that mission was to understand, if there was chemical evidence on the surface, transformation by

liquid water, work if that was all gone with the geological process on mars, and we some minerals as shown from the experiments that showed surface water had been at the location of the rover opportunity. spirit landed on the other side of the planet. you can see if you're close enough to the front, this image of this dust devil going across the surface of mars. they landed in what they thought was interesting, and old lake bed. the lake bed was covered with this basalt thick material that covers the interesting stuff that is a bit deeper. they did not get to evidence of the prius transformation until they trudge over to the hills. that is when they are now. the roker is still working, but one of its wheels is gone and it has been stuck in one place for a while.

both of these lenders were tremendously successful. there is opportunity again, from space, if you look carefully, you can see the arrows pointing to extracts by victoria greater. just spectacular images of that. being mars society people you should have your stereo glasses on to see this in stereo. this panoramic, if you look at it on the web in stereo, is just incredibly spectacular. and, of course, opportunity went down into various craters and is trudging off, trying to find another one. i won't talk about phoenix, brad talked about that. but just a little bit about how mars is different from earth, earth is covered with both continents and water, mars has no liquid water that we can see to any extent on the surface.

the moon actually stabilizes the obliquity of the earth, so it doesn't vary around in time. that very surround in time least interesting geology, the polar icecaps moving around on these kind of 100,000 and longer time periods. the atmosphere of mars is much less dense than earth, about 1/100, a carbon dioxide primarily, so the question of the day is, is there microbial life there now? more importantly, can we get to the surface and look for what might have happened in the past? and compare a little bit about what we know about the history of early earth and what we think about the history of early mars, earlier if, millions of years ago, 3.8 billion years ago, there was all this stuff lying around as oldest system, the earth was bombarded with lots of

inspectors, a lot of the evidence of what that was like has been destroyed because the earth has played tektronix and the continent eventually get buried, you don't really get a lot of chemicals from the early times. that probably throws out very early on mars, we might be able to get back to a very early time with chemical evidence. there wasn't much atmosphere -- much oxygen in the atmosphere on earth, and as time went on, got more oxygen which. we believe microbial life developed a very early on even without oxygen, and more complex life, multicellular life, probably didn't emerge until much more recently. on mars, it is a different history.

early on, it was very much more water rich. how long the water stayed around, for hundred thousands of years or millions of years, is a question that is being asked, but there's evidence that water flow. early on, there were placlays chemically formed by surface water, that is plausibly the time that mars was most habitable on the surface. and the surface chemistry got influenced by volcanoes. these huge volcanoes on mars, that's a really changed the chemistry, there almost certainly was some sort of fundamental climate change that happened in that time. because of all the volcanic activity, the chemistry got

dominated by sulfur chemistry. so now resurfaced tends to be more acidic, more salt or chemistry dominated. increase in billions of years, the geological activity on mars is probably slow down. we don't really know if there is anything but coming from the interior of mars or not, although we're seeing some interesting results that i will talk about in a minute, simple hydrocarbon methane showing up in the atmosphere of mars. mars may have had a molten core in the middle, had a magnetic field through the magnetic core, that froze out, because mars is a small planet, much earlier than earth and the interior of mars may be cold, that kind of influences what happens on the surface because you don't get things moving around as geologically active as they are on earth. how do you get at this question

of life? life produces complex molecules and simple molecules. in the simple molecules, some of them can go into the atmosphere, you can measure them. one way to start the search for life on mars is through remote sensing of things that might be produced from biology such as methane. in the arctic, there are math and engines, methane producing bacteria living in the permafrost. methane come class from cows and other types of mammals. one way to search for by a markers -- biomarkers is to look for these chemicals. this analysis of data from a

program that got hurt started shows these color coded on the left, signatures of methane in the parts per billion, very low traces of methane. but the really interesting thing is in the atmosphere of mars, pro chemistry, models suggest that methane, if it was produced, should last for quite a few years, maybe 350 years, and when mike and geronimo look for methane, they found it, a few months later, to be totally gone. very difficult set of data taken from a mountain in hawaii, a telescope that tests much of the atmosphere. methane is being destroyed, how is it destroyed is still an outstanding question and where it comes from is not known. it would be really interesting if it was from biology, little

pockets of water way down deep, producing methane, as shown in this animation on the left, or it could be from inorganic reactions, very deep water in the subsurface, and some events leading to the surface. the artist at goddard tried to illustrate that as well, and potentially at certain seasons, the ice is on the side of these hills and the methane has a path to escape. is a fundamental question of where methane is coming from. is it one of the signatures of life on mars or not? life produces in addition to simple molecules, produces complex molecules that will not going to the atmosphere in this cold environment so the only way to get to them is to go down in the surface and dig around and get into old crocks, that is what we are intending to do with the curiosity rover. for those of you who have taken

organic chemistry, these little sticktight figures are carbon atoms, showing the structure of the carbon atoms as illustrated below. it turns out that life can put patterns, creates order out of disorder. if you make organics in space and look at carbon from meteorites, it is random, this radiation chemistry that randomizes molecules but if you look at life produces, little enzymes producing two sets of carbon atoms at a time, you have structure in your organics. the hope would be that we might find some of those organics, at least look for those patterns. if you have a crocodile or alligator or whatever if this is that has a happy life, then turned into a skeleton, similarly, if you have a

membrane of the cell, the cell is dead and gets buried in a rock somewhere, is a robust enough molecule that the molecule might be changed a little bit as shown here, but is still there, so just like you would have a skeletal fossil on earth you might have a molecular fossil that will tell you something about mars. there are patterns in these molecular fossils, the patterns tend to be things that are two carbons apart. just as, in understanding whether a location on earth or mars is a good environment for life you have to look at a variety of things like the chemistry of the elements necessary for life, there is also this molecular record that you want to look at, both isotopes which i have not talked about within the structure of the molecule, this whole thing

gives rise to an ecological pattern. we try hard to understand how to do this exploration by going to places on earth that might be as representative if we can find marcian locations. next week i am headed out to norway, where there are old volcanos that might have erupted under glaciers, similar to mars sites. people carry rifles around just in case polar bears charge us. great respect to the polar bears, it is really their turf. for the group picture, we always dress up as men in black, aliens that are innovating this very pristine area. not too far from the north pole, the sun is always shining this time of year, it will be daylight when we get up there, it is cold and dry, different rock types, different

environment conditions. life is very vigorous and rapidly transforms everything. it is really interesting, we find things that look like things that we observe on mars. here is the sandstone, very tenuous life living on the surface of the rock, things that look like images that came from m mer. they're split 50/50. we look for these molecular fossils', we take mass spectrometers like we are going to fly on an sl and separate the gases into chemical analysis and the see these patterns. here is one of the world's northernmost hot springs. this little green stuff growing on the surface of rocks is microorganisms. we can imagine that that type of

confinement might have existed early on on mars, with heavier atmosphere, it was a bit warmer and little bit more friendly for life. let me talk just a little bit about where we are in the mars program. i covered everything with just a snapshot to the left. i am going to talk a little bit about ms l, then a mission that will look for mars and look for gases that are escaping from mars. then there is really great hope at nasa, we can't do this all alone, we don't have the resources to do this. we are going to try to join forces with the europeans. the most recent thought is in 2016, nasa needs to combine, might send an orbiter around

mars, not only methane but other gases and isotope ratios, how heavier the elements in those molecules are and how they get processed. hydrogen and water in the atmosphere, might be an indication that something is coming from down deep. the atmosphere is much heavier, has been stripped away by the atmosphere and an ridge over time in the heavier species. if this plan works in 2018, nasa and esa will send a letter to the surface. the european mission is a row over, they will see what they can find. hopefully they would follow in 2020 and beyond. we have these wonderful tools

from orbit, the orbiter spectroscopy -- spectroscopy and order imaging, we are looking for stuff, of them. some traders show clear evidence of water flow. the spectroscopic signatures, probably from early mars. the goal of the mission is not stated that we will go find life, or know exactly where we will do that. we don't know what life back then might of looked like back then. we will try to start to get a handle on the parameters. the lending scheme is really interesting, sky crane,

basically the rover gets tethered down and lands on the surface, but the roker itself is really a huge step in the capability of bringing robotic tools to the surface of mars. the camera is two meters and the wheels are kind of that high, so this is a monster rover powered by radioisotope source dependent on such light to charge solar cells. there is a picture of a few people standing around a mockup of the wheeled part of this rover. so the tools on this, if you're interested in hearing about them, some of them are like the tools that were on mer, you have a microscope on the arm, an experiment which is very similar to the neutron detectors from

space, saw this hydrogen but very low spatial resolution, hundreds of kilometers. this is a russian provided neutron source, about ten million neutrons at one time and what comes that can detect water ice. the tools that kind of do surveys for us, some are similar, there is a particle instrument looking similar to composition on the arm. there is a need to experiment that loss alamos is helping to develop in collaboration with french colleagues, there is a laser, and to 10 meters away this laser can snap a rock, then a spectrometer on the laser, from the e missions that come from the rock you can rapidly tell one rock different from another rock. the rocks might be covered with dust and this laser can ablate

the just, then we take dust, the mars science lab, and the x ray experiment identifies minerals. the minerals mer was able to find, does a pretty good job with iron minerals, but with the xrf experiment, we will be able to nail the minerals in the processing that happens to the minerals on the surface of mars. sam is the experiment we are developing at goddard in collaboration with j.p. l -- jpl

and french colleagues, we have a mass spectrometer that ionizes the gas by a master charge ratio. we have a set of very long columns that separate out complex pictures of gas and sent them to the mass spectrometer and it has the tune of a laser spectrum of that j.p. l is providing, and that essentially looks for methane, and does precise measurements of some of the isotopes. so a really core part of the experiment, though not the entire experiment, looking for organics, where might the organics on mars have come from? on earth, all sorts of stuff is coming in the form of meteorites. we go to the antarctic and collect meteorite's every year, hundreds that collected. those are falling on mars. mer found some meteorite.

it may be the carbon that was on mars early in its history, got processed into fairly complex forms, and if we found some of that, that would be interesting, and the organics are trying to avoid, from msl itself, there are all kinds of things on it, so the rover itself can outguess things. we are such a sensitive nose that we've have to worry about a lot. so we are. what might destroy organics on mars, we don't really know. fred talked about maybe the phoenix detection of organics was hampered by perchlorates, that might be true, but we also know that there are hydrogen peroxide produced in the hemisphere, for example, just storms or dust devils do some chemistry in the hemisphere, you can imagine that if this kind of

sterilizing agent could destroy surface organics, we're really going to try to get into the interior from ancient mars. if something sits near the surface, there's not as much atmosphere on mars, radiation helped us detect hydrogen to penetrate to the surface and over billions of years they could destroy organics as well and there is natural radioactivity that can destroy organics. our approach, we don't know where the organics might have come from. that might be very interesting, signatures of life, our approach is to look at this broad spectrum of organics as we can and see what we can find. we are on this roker so we can go 10s of kilometers, the orbital asset points us to. we're looking for a broad spectrum of organics, a broad cent of experiments looking for things that are really

interesting, like amino acids and amino bases current, and the building blocks of proteins. ..

>> if we're lucky enough to find a complex nature of organics, it will separate those out into individual constituents. the real instrument assembled in a clean room doesn't look nearly as neat as the pro-eu model. and with all the little vials, heaters and tubes to carry gas around its just full of wires running from the control electronics to the various devices. and what we do to test it we put it in an environment that is almost identical, as identical as we can make it to the environment that it is going to fit in in the curiosity rover. so we have a cooling loop that comes from the rover that takes the waste heat from the radioisotope source and then circulate it across the top deck, and so we have a deck that

looks just like that in this mars chamber. we have the distance from the size of sam to the walls, are all independently temperature controlled. so we believe that the environment in this chamber full of mars gases at the right pressure is almost exactly what the environment is that we will see on mars. so you really need to test these things under conditions that you will be dish that you will be running on another planet, kind of the philosophy on that is tested five, to make sure that your experiment sees the right environment. so that's what we've been doing at goddard working on in the last few years. was there life on mars? we still don't know, but one plausible path towards getting an answer to that question is really doing the best job we can onlooking for heavy and light organics. date surely may hold clues, and

so we're working as hard as we can to answer that question. celt launch of msl in 2011. it will be a exciting time. stay tuned. it should operate for one margin year, which is two earth years. as we all know, if you build these things robustly enough like spirit and opportunity they really may last for a decade or so. so we will be looking forward to hopefully having everything work, and getting data back from mars and a couple of years. [applause] >> and we have time for a couple of questions? >> i was curies on the science laboratory, how many of the instruments require an absolute calibration? in some measure or another, capacity, lengths, that sort of thing. and do you intend to be able to check these calibrations after

landing? >> yes. all of the instruments require calibration, and because they are very different types of instrument they are calibrated differently. let me talk specifically about how we do a little bit on msl. we run gases that we are similar to guess is that we to see on mars through our instruments. for example, in the flight instrument, we put a little bit of a sol bass and water containing sulfate in a little bit of carbonate and we keep that up. we look for the ewald carbon dioxide and ewald has a two and ewald water. and we get the response of the experiment. what we are doing our calibration is being very, very careful, however, not to put gases like complex hydrocarbons that might be really interesting and mars that might stay around the internet and give us a false positive. so we tend to work in terms of hydrocarbons with chlorinated

compounds that have florian's in several locations. flooring is such a low abundance gas in the solar system, or lower abundant that we are very not likely to see those compounds on mars. shelley keller but out our instrument response with some of those gases. we even bring some of those dumars we can calibrate. another interesting thing we do just to kind of really nailed this organic detection thing, which is really important, is we have a standard which is material that is mostly silica that has some of these trace of floral carbons that will actually on the rover, we will drill into, it will go through the whole sample processing chain, and then we will analyze the floral carbons that are in there. it will let us know when we're on the surface of mars whether the instrument is working right and whether the sensitivity that we believe we have is to maintain it all the instruments require calibration. we are already in calibration plans for the science project and working hard on a.

>> would just be a problem for the spectral photographer? you have to gast sample that gets in there in the path links. >> we worry a lot about dust. not only measure gases coming from a bald old but we tuck in some of the atmosphere. so we put little dust filters in there. in fact, we built a dust chamber at mars where we put some of our components and understand how much does it take to really damage them. so we are really trying to keep dust out of our lines with these filters, just like the gases and the molecules. but it really is a worry. we try to design around a. our inlet covers have doors, and so before we are ready to get a solid sample, the door will open a little dust the sample in and we will close the door. so we're kind of traversing across the surface were not getting dust in. >> will you be checking for c. 12 and c. 13 ratios because i have heard that life has to pleaded in c. 13 as compared to

wall carbon. >> yes, that's really an interesting experiment to make and we do intend to do that. that's one of the reasons we have this tunable laser on more. it measures very precisely the carbon 13 to carbon 12 ratio in co2 only. it is a very narrow bandwidth, and we will measure in the atmosphere. that will be interesting that we will look at carbon dioxide that might come from a carbonate from a very ancient rock. that will be interesting. but then how do we get at carbon and a complex organic that might be in the soil? well, the way we do that is we bring along a little bit of a combustion gas. we bring along oxygen and return the carbon, the refractory carbon that might be there into co2 and delete introduce that into the tunable laser spectrometer. so that is a real interesting experiment, and we are setup to do do that on msl. >> but you will be looking at the methane? >> will also look at the carbon 12 to carbon 13 ratio in the

methane. the issue there is the methane is down in these parts per billion level, and so the tls even some parts per billion, if it really is way down there in about parts per trillion, then the carbon 13 measurement becomes very difficult. but if we are in an area where methane is kind of at the tens of parts per billion then we should get a good measurement on the carbon 12 to carbon 13. >> i see. >> do you intend to run samples on any of the martian meteorites through your instrumentation suite? >> not to our flight instrument. we are trying to be just really fastidious about what we put in there. so that we don't bring any unwanted stuff to mars. but we are in the process of building right now is what we call a testbed, is a nearly identical experiment that we can put into a mars chamber. that will be a really

interesting experiment to run. we ran mars meteorites all the time with this type of processing in the lab. we have merchant samples and so on. our analysis isn't as sophisticated as obviously as some of the laboratory analysis we can do, so it's really interesting to compare with relatively involved gas experiment, what it turns it into compared to these very sophisticated liquid extraction experiments that we also run in the lab. once we get our testbed setup will also be running meteorites. >> you are mentioning the sample, but do we really believe that looked rhetorical on earth can spot something that is so sophisticated robotic laboratory like yours would not spot? >> yeah, no. absolutely. there is a big drive in the community of scientists interested in mars to bring

sample back. and even with all the sophistication we are trying to put in to this experiment, there's no way we can do the whole sweep of analyses, the range of analyses that we could do in inner laboratory here goes lavatories of course are way ahead of the curve in terms of capabilities that we sent to mars. and so, one good thing about sending a sophisticated lab to a site on mars, if you find something really tantalizing, for example, a complex organic chemistry, then that might be a real prime spot to spend a sample return vehicle and return samples to earth. of course, that's expensive. five or more billion dollars, and hopefully it will happen one of these decades. it's been on the books for quite a while. just because of the cost it is very difficult to get autographed. >> but bringing sample back to earth will not just increase the possibility of biological

intimidation? >> yeah, and that's something that people think very hard about as well. we are developing tools to really sterilize and have very, very clean acquisition tools, keep the tools that collected the samples totally isolated from the environment, pull out a tool for example, a core, core out a piece of iraq and then put it back in a sealed container. and then there are all sorts of international agreements that they don't bring back things to earth that might potentially be a danger, a different type of microorganism to earth. so the outside of this container that returns to earth will have to be very, very sterile. and in the sample would have to go into a containment facility and looked at inside that containment facility. and then only if we found out that it was benign would it be distributed to other labs. and i think i am getting a signal here. thank you very much. [applause]

coming up on c-span2 will return to the mars society international convention. for more discussions on the future exploration of mars, later the senate returns at two eastern for an hour of general speeches. that will be followed by more debate on spending for agriculture programs with roll call votes scheduled later in the day.

>> how is c-span funded? >> i have no clue of. >> maybe some government grants? >> i would say donations. >> advertising for products. >> public money i'm sure. >> my taxes? >> how is c-span funded? america's cable companies created c-span as a public service. a private business initiative, no government mandate, no government money. >> and we return now to the international convention examining the future exploration of mars. you will hear from a nasa scientist on his research studding mars like environment. is joined by the director of aerojet space expiration division who talks about his vision for a one way mission to the red planet. this is about an hour and a half. >> dr. chris mckay, he isn't astrobiologist at nasa ames. chris has an analog work all over the world, antarctica, siberia, and the canadian arctic. of course, he has been active, you know, at the research

station. they have big supporter of the mars desert research station, as from the space project which get students to him drs and other places to learn what it will be like to live on mars. he also has worked on many other projects, as coinvestigator of titan, organs, probe, and the mars phoenix lander as well as the msl mission coming up in 2011. he is also on the 2004 the exception battle a couple of years ago. so ladies and gentlemen, dr. chris mckay. [applause] >> great.

>> chris, i need about 20 seconds here. >> twenty seconds it is. 18, 16. [laughter] >> okay. my talk is three steps to mars, and i want to share with you at least my evil things you of what we need to do to get ready to go to mars. and i put my answers up here, as you can see. i think we need to focus on three things to prepare ourselves for a long term, and i emphasize one term, human exploration of mars. i think we need to focus the mars robotic program, number one. number two, i think we need to sail into the deep water.

i think the first way to do th that, and i think we need to establish a permanent research base on the moon. and i emphasize permanent there. so this is the goal, to establish a base on mars, not to go to mars, but to stay on mars. that's the key point i will come back to. a long term research goal based on mars. >> okay great. carry this. can i carry it in my pocket? let me just quickly remind you why mars as we heard from the previous speakers is a question of life, like in the past. did mars have life quest life in the present, can mars support life? is a place where humans can live and work? these are all questioned by the way we don't know the answers to these questions.

and future, can mars have a biological future? these are the questions that drive mars exploration rover robotic and human. why mars? why are we asking these questions of mars? very quickly because evidence of mars had water. the presence of an atmosphere with carbon and oxygen in and the preservation of past life in the cold, dry conditions on mars. as we have heard before, there was water on mars, mariner nine discovered water and it has been rediscovered by every other nation since then. but there is ample evidence. ucd ice from phoenix, the mer images and so on. there was water on mars on the surface, and the fundamental reason why it is interesting. our goal is to establish a research base. argue many, many times this morning, to establish a research base to operate for a long time. for me, a long time is 50 years. used to be four years was a long

time. as you get older, what's a long time gets bigger and bigger. pretty soon it will be 200 years for me. what do we need to do before we can establish a 50 plus research base on mars? again, this is the same three-pointer we need to integrate the mars program with human exploration. right now, one in the mst to use the massive jargon. sample return is the key mission that connects the robotic and human exploration and i will come to that in a second that we need to fly beyond the moon. going to the moon is relatively easy. you never really leave the gravitational system of the earth, moon system, come back pretty easily. we need to learn how to fly beyond that. in an apollo eight mission is to keep there. and i think we need to build a permanent base on the. i will go to each of these in turn. first let me remind you we have to mars programs and i think our

key goal for the immediate future is to push for the unification of use to program. this is what i call nasa's program one, nasa's mark program to is the robotic expiration of mars. these two go to great pains to distance himself from each other to think they were being operated by different not just countries, different planets. and there is really no reason for that. it's a good time to force a coherent now because the mars science program is at a crossroads. partly precipitated by the cost overruns and schedule overruns of msl, but a variety of other things as well. i'm not going to go through them in detail. the bottom line is that the rationale from mars having a separate program has to change. for the last 10 years, it has been the search for life. mars was a special target because it was the only place we

could go to to search for evidence of life. that is no longer the case. now there is other targets that compete and one would even say excel, with respect to mars in terms of the search for life. what's special about mars now and why mars deserves to still have a special robotic program is not the search for life. it's the fact that it is a potential future site for human expiration. they run out of the political capitals associated with the search for life, in my opinion. and it's a msl will test that to its breaking point. okay. sample return is worth the mars program realizes it needs to go to, and it's a good mission to connect human and robotic exploration. the first sample return could be a very simple mission, atlantic

on the scoops up to her, puts it in the rocket and send it back to earth. but ultimately we need to use the same approaches to two sample return that we would use to send humans. so the sample returns will be our first rounder trips to mars. that's an important concept. humans -- robotic missions to mars have in one way trips. i know the next we will talk about humans on one way trip, but at least nasa's official trips is humans will do roundtrips. sample return will be our first round trips. we might as will use that technology that we are going to develop for humans to do sample returns. so there's been a study looking at how we can use the same rockets and vehicles to drive sample returns. so to look at, doing large mass at mars, landing vehicles, to dupe multiple stab returns to earth. and i will just quickly show you some of the highlights of that.

you can pack a lot into an aries five and send it to mars. you can do a sample return in a single mission. and a sample return is key because it's the logical intersection between the two mars programs. and i think that we should focus on that within the mars community, push hard for sample return. why? first, it's got enormous scientific value. as paul just said a few minutes ago, the level of analysis we can do here on earth with return samples is enormous compared to what we can do. it's directly relevant for scientific preparation for exploration. if we're going to land a place on mars and build a base, it would be nice to have a sample of the dirt in advance so we don't have the sort of surprises we had with phoenix, as you saw in the earlier talk, where the dirt didn't behave the way we think proper gert should be a. so you go to mars with all this equipment to move the dirt, the

dirt doesn't do what you want it to do. you are in trouble. so it's almost an operational requirement to get a sample return from the site where you're going to put the base. as well as a safety issue. perchlorate, for example. big surprise for biking. just to put that in context, dod sites, if the perchlorate in the water is about 26 parts per billion, it becomes a cleanup site. 1% is a larger than 26 parts per billion, even i can do that math. [laughter] >> well, what are the applications of that, and what other surprises are in the chemistry of the soil? so a sample return is going to be driven life scientific site selection safety requirements for human base. and of course, is testing technology. like i said it's the return. we've got stages on mars, we have large arrow shows, entry systems and so on.

we might as well tested them out on a sample return. the next key part i think we need to focus on is getting human exploration out beyond the moon. and the natural target for that are near earth objects where we can do small missions that get us out beyond the moon, get us out of the deep space, into deep water without waiting for the development of significant hardware that would be required if we made that mission, say, directly to mars. here, for example, is a hundred and 50 day mission to a small object that was part of a game, a constellation supported study looking at using at constellation hardware for near earth object mission secures a table of possible targets put together by tamar. possible targets, when you can go there, how long the missions would be. these are fairly short missions. they don't tax our capability to do life-support.

they don't tax the technology. you don't need to develop a land or center stage at these are really docking missions picture is a picture of the orien to scale with a typical target object on this list and these are missions that also resonate with the public. i get a lot of calls sometimes for my family think what are you doing to save the earth from killer asteroids? [laughter] i say i just got up a few minutes ago. [laughter] >> i will get right on it. it's very easy to explain to people that nasa needs to be able to demonstrate capability go visit near earth objects are not that any of them are on their way to us now but we want to have that capability to demonstrate and would test our ability to fly beyond the earth system and test out this harbor. it's a key step in getting ready to go to mars. is another image, a larger object and there is the cd and

it is the space station to scale. there are some big ones out there. the third component i think that is necessary for preparing for long term based on mark is having a long term based on the moon. here is the current nasa plan for a base on the edge of shackle the greater. you get a sense of the size here by noting that these are football field putdown for scale, 100 football fields. that's the standard unit now that we are using. we decided he'd are not good. meters are not good. so everything now is done in units of football fields. [laughter] >> so maybe if we join with esa days will be soccer field. its australian rules football. [laughter] and here is what a base might look like. let me just go to, this lie doesn't want to show. i want to go to the point, why moon? why some say the moon.

i think we should go to the moon to stay. often you hear people say we've got to go to the moon and lead and then we make sure to have an exit strategy. i think that is the wrong approach. we don't need an exit strategy. we need to have a permanent strategy, the hard thing to do is not to go, it is tuesday, both for mars and the moon. we know how to go to the moon. what we haven't done it stayed there. and we know how to go to mars now, but we don't know how to stay there. my point is we need to learn how to stay. we need to learn how to stay on the move. we also will learn how to do things that will prepare us for mars, but it's not a literal preparation. the goal of a moon base should be -- a moon base should be a goal in itself. i can imagine that we can't consider ourselves a space civilization if we don't have a base on our nearest neighbor. just like we have bases in antarctica. not that i would personally be interested in going to this base. that's not my size. but there are lots of people who find rocks interesting. they can go.

[laughter] >> is a good thing to do. and this brings me to the philosophical point. i grew up on star trek, the original series of course. and i was always enamored by the tube boldly go. but i realized that we've got the wrong verb. the verb that we need is not to go. going is easy. the verb we need is to stay. the challenge of space is not to go. it is to stay. it is time for a change of urban. we need to boldly state that if you look at what we have done in space, this whole list of things, i have come and gone. getting there was easy. making them stay was hard. they are all -- here's the last saturn five parked in the front lawn. there's the apollo astronauts. there is skylab. getting them up there was relatively easy. having them stay has been impossible. nasa has got a tradition of thinking that missions have -- or projects have a five, 10 year lifetime and then edited.

throw them away and do something else. so yes, we could go to mars. there's lots of designs that show we could go to mars, but we are not ready to stay on mars. we will end up doing what we have done before. boldly go and then stop and come back. and that is it. i want to say we need to boldly stay. how do we do that? well, the example of the one place where we have learned to stay i think, and there is a good model that we want to apply to mars, is the antarctica. south pole station shown here has been operating for 50 years. and tenuously. it's not a settlement. there is no maternity wards or elementary schools on the south pole. but there have been americans in this base for 50 years, and last year we did the ribbon cutting ceremony on the new station shown here. and it has a 30 year lifetime, designed a lifetime. so 50 years in the past, 30

years in the future. that's an 80 year window on south pole. that's what i mean by stay. so it has operated for 50 years, mandated by national interest, to political interest. it's a government-owned facility obviously. but it's operated by contractor to keep the cost down to it was originally operated by the navy when it was first put in and it is now operated by raytheon polar services. science driven research. although it is mandated by the government, by national interest and geopolitical interactions with the antarctica treaty what we do there is only science. science and only science. it is completely science driven with pure review and there is enormous to decisive. and after 50 years antarctica is still interesting. i predict that after 50 years the moon would still be interesting. after 100 years, mars would still be interested. these are natural places with

natural complexities waiting to be discovered. there will be a lot of interesting discoveries on the moon and on mars. on the moon they will deal with roxana geology, history of the solar system. that is great sizer on mars they will deal with searching for evidence of life, as i showed you earlier. in my view that is even more interesting science. so what do we have to learn on the moon? we have to learn how to operate a base for years on end in terms of technology, in terms of human factors, in terms of life support, in terms of operation. the most important lesson we have to learn on the moon is how to transition from an exploration base, which may take enormous fraction of nasa's budget, to a mature base, which becomes a small part of the overall budget. a moon base should be operated in perpetuity and it should take no more than 20% of nasa's budget to do that. that's going to be a hard lesson. will have to go to a contractor

operated base transportation. space x. should fly us to the moon, not nasa and so on. and it should continue as we see in antarctica, peer-reviewed scientific research. so imagine it is not a settlement, not a mining community, but a small research-based that's government-funded, scientists and graduate students go there. they do peer-reviewed research. the main product of such a base, such as the main product of antarctica is phd theses. we continue to manage the program and to persist for 50 plus years. my point is, if we can't do that on the moon, if we can't establish a long term base on the moon, that is done at a reasonable fraction of nasa's budget, and does it for 50 or 100 years, we can't do it on mars. and that's what we need to do. so my conclusion is that we need to be thinking in this long term

mode, where we want to have base on mars for 50 plus years. that means we want to be able to know that we can do that for 50 plus years on the moon. it doesn't mean we wait 50 years after we go to the moon to start doing it on mars. and we use the 50 plus years in antarctica as a programmatic and operational model. and that is the end of the talk. [applause] >> question? >> you need to come to this hydrophone here. >> let robert go first. >> i can give you this one back. >> chris, as you know, there is an infinite series of preparatory activities that

could be advocated to help get us ready to go to mars. and if we allow these to be inserted into our programmatic sequence, we will literally never get to mars. now, if we do -- the only way to go to mars if our program is to go to market if you do that and you design a hardware set that is suitable for sending humans to mars, you could as a preliminary exercise without hardware set send humans to a near earth asteroid because the fact there are no elements of a near earth asteroid mission that are extraneous. in other words, you don't have to develop anything beyond the mars hardware set to do in the near earth asteroid mission. so in fact, you are not being diverted or george is exercising a subset of your mars hardware. you could even do a mars sample return on that basis, for instance, if you are flying a mars direct mission. you could just fly to mars and make the and fly back with a ton of samples.

but a lunar base is quite different. a lunar base requires developing a lot of extra nice hardware that is not needed to go to mars, and to demonstrate that you can quote stay on the moon for long periods of time requires running a lunar base program for significant period of time before you initiate a mars program. and so, in fact, such a commitment would prevent us from reaching mars in our lifetime. so really there's a choice here. if you want to go to mars you got to go to market if you want to learn to live and stay on mars and you've got to go and stay on mars. the resource utilization technologies that will be practiced on mars are completely different from those that would be practiced on the moon. okay. in fact, you have a much more favorable situation on mars in terms of a much richer resource space. you have water. carbon, nitrogen, much more things that you need. you have mineral or in the sense that you do not have it on the moon. the prospects for agriculture on mars are vastly superior. so the thing is this.

one could design an orderly mars mission plan just as in a poll we have a separate program to do lunar orbit space station. we flew apollo eight into lunar orbit as a preliminary exercise of the apollo hardware before we sent people to the moon. but the goal was to get to the moon, to get to the moon within a very definite timeframe and then within the contents of that certain other activities were done using that hardware to gain confidence. and in this case one could do a nel mission or a very robust set of return. for instance, if you think we have to do samper return before we go to mars and you within the context of the robotic program you design a samper return because of course ever return could be done on a smaller scale than to return vehicle of a human mission, but if you do

that you are inserting -- basically you're saying you can't do that program until you do this program. and by the way, you can't do that program until you do this program and this program. in that case you never get there. so this is the way to do a coherent mars program. if you want to beautify the sample return with a human program, just say we are doing a human program and before we send humans round-trip we will send the round-trip spacecraft and returned with a ton of samples. and you'll have a much better sample return and you won't delay the human mission at all. >> there are two points there. one, i agree with you fully that sample return has to be put in the context of human expiration. i agree with that. in terms of the moon base, i think, i disagree with you into a. one is i think that mars onto the ankle but it doesn't need to be the only goal. we can do a lot more things that we can still do telescopes. and i think the moon base off to be a goal as well.

i think that we can do both at i think we can do a moon base, a permanent moon base. >> after we learn to live on mars we can use as practice to going to the moon. [applause] >> in any case, that could be that it would work out that it's easier to dumars first but i think it is not. the reason i think it is not his one big fundamental advantage that the moon has over mars in terms of trying to establish a base there first, and that is that it is a lot closer. >> that if you don't want to stay. if you want to leave the moon is more convenient. if you want to stay, mars is much more convenient. and the reason why we don't stay on the moon is there was nothing there worth staying for. >> i think we want to go back and forth. we don't want to at least nasa can't accept one way missions as the mars program. we've got to be going back and forth. long duration, you still have to come back. something goes wrong, the moon

is a lot closer. so in terms of an initial base, let's imagine in our lifetimes, i don't know about you but i plan to live for quite a while longer, robert. in our lifetimes, we want to see bases on the moon and mars. i think that should be taken as our goal. it is not an either or. i rejected you that we can't do both. we can do both. we can have bases on the moon. we can have bases on mars. we can even keep the base in antarctica or why not? all good places to go. so given that, the question is which do we focus on first? i think we are in agreement that a flight engineers object and a sample return are part of the steps on the way to humans. >> they could be done with the mars hardware set. and therefore if it was deemed reasonable. >> i think those are necessary steps. i don't think you'll established a base on mars without a piece of the dirt.

we weren't establishing a baster we were just walking around and coming back. >> we send a human expiration mission that brings back samples and illegal and established -- >> that's always. i would vote against that. were you just go, grab rods, i'd like, come back. we will end up with the same results that we got on apollo which is -- >> that is complete non sequitur. it would involve at least a year to year and have to stay on the surface. any mars mission that goes and calls very substantial service expiration if there is no such thing as a flag and foot print mission to market any mission would involve vast greater expiration program stack but i do want greater expiration. i want a permanent base. >> anyway, i am going to you because they're other people who want to ask questions to make the arden is over the moon base, and i would argue that that needs to be in our goal set, as well as the mars base. >> i think the doctor has taken the wind out of my sails, but i

am a layman. and i still have questions concerning the choices and the priorities that you place, go to the moon first and then go to mars in effect for settlement. just as a layman, isn't it less energy intensive to send a rocket ship to mars than to the moon? because you don't need, from what i understand, you need more fuels to go to the moon and back than you do to mars. secondly, mars is, once you get there, it is less difficult to state that it is on the moon. you've got a protective atmosphere, don't you? don't you have the ability page you have an atmosphere that you

can make oxygen out of to breathe, but you can't on the moon. and you have the possibility of, you have the protection of atmosphere. so it would seem -- any other thing is, when you are landing on mars, isn't it easier to land on mars than it is to land on the moon? don't you have more of a risk of missing the moon and going off as they were afraid of doing during the apollo program and going off into space. >> let me address that in a more general way than just going through your specific points. there are certainly advantages of mars and disadvantages of mars, vis-à-vis the moon in terms of site for base. i think it is a pointless to debate those advantages in detail. i think we should plan on as a goal have bases at both places. then it becomes a question of which is more feasible at the start, which is easier to do it

at the start. i think if you look at the problem, the moon has one overwhelming advantage that makes it the choice for where you start. and that is, that it is so close. mars is far. ultimately, we do want to have a base on mars. it does use as you pointed out the oxygen and the atmosphere and so on. the moon has different challenges. mars has challenges. the moon has different challenges. and the notion that a moon base is a literal model from mars base facility. by the moon has one big, big advantage in that it is very close. in fact, it is faster to get to the moon than it is to antarctica. and that is important -- that's important for testing out and safety. and i think, if you look within nasa, the consensus has been the moon. and that is the reason. it is not that folks and nasa don't like mars. we love market we want to go to

mars, but when you look at actually doing it, when you aren't looking at actually doing it, it is a lot easier to do it nearby first. and the metaphor is setting up your tent in your backyard is a lot easier than setting it up in a remote desert. so i predict that the moon is going to be first, but the real philosophical point is that it is not a distinction. we should advocate as a goal permanent research bases on the moon and on mars. i personally would be more interested in visiting the one on mars because that is the kind of science i do, but the moon is a world with natural complexity. there is a lot of discoveries to be made there. this is in contrast to the space station, which is not a world of natural complexity. it is a constructive environ. the space station we can do experience of human construction, but we can't discover new things that are unexpected. that are not the result of these experiments. on the moon, or mars, we could go out and discover something that is completely unanticipated, unexpected. and that is what we saw on

apollo. and as part of constellation, we got an e-mail from some of our review committee that said one of the lessons we learned from the space station is that it was in adequately utilized because not enough advanced science planning. and i wrote back and said this is a mistaken view, because the moon and mars as a space station, the moon is a space station are not similar at all. on the space station, you only get the sites out that you put in, that you take with you. because there is nothing there to discover. that is not the case on the moon. on the moon all you have to do is send somebody, and they will discover what's there. the moon is a place of natural complexity and natural discoveries waiting to be made. the same with mark. so the size approach is very different than on space station. so this is i think a key point in terms of both assigned of the moon, and why it should be a goal in itself. the fact that we may not find the signs on their interesting, that's okay. i personally don't find

oceanography very interesting, but i am glad there are some people who do and continue to explore the ocean. i find antarctica site interesting and mars science interesting, so i devote my career to studying those objects. but that doesn't mean there isn't a scientific return in oceanography or in, say, lunar rocks as well. and i think it's a mistake for us to think that we can only choose one, that we have to choose the moon base or mars base and that we are not -- we can't do both of them. question here. >> gets. to question. since mars sample return we seem to agree, a lot of us have thought so for a long time, is a key element in the human presence. do you think that it is better to do a sample return with in situ propellant that offers a lot of returns in the sense of

having many small rockets to test the in situ propellants from stem to stern, top to bottom, front to back, however you want to think about selling your astronaut ultimately turns the key and wants to come on, you've got a good human rating basis. or do you think it's better to do a sample return with one single large copy of say the earth return vehicle that could be marked up and said, test it them to stern but don't get as many tests of the return system by that method? the second thing is can't we settle down and stop getting sort of football team about this moon, mars thing? we've got a trade space. we've got risk assessment that we have reward assessment. why don't we sit down and if the augustine commission doesn't do it, why do we send them back to try and do it, do a true risk

reward study on the relative merits of investment in mars versus the investment in moon and keep it public and keep it clear, and let everyone see what those traits are. because i don't think that we have seen anything like that yet. we would love to generate it within the mars society, we don't often at the database required. what do you think? >> you had two questions. let me go to the sample return one. that is a good question. what should be the design principle of sample return, i would say number one, should be to test and developmen develop y for human landing. so to the extent possible to use the same systems that you're going to need for humans. so if that involves isr you didn't you use a. if it doesn't involve it then you don't. so the only criteria is that you design your system for human expiration, i'm going to test on sample return. and number two would be to get a

interesting set of samples for sides as soon as possible. so those would be the design cricket. nothing else would i think really matter. you keep those principles first. >> many little samples back. >> maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. it may turn into a big thing, the size of the human exploration vehicle. your second question about how do we come up with the decisions and make a case. it's a much more difficult, when you say might be true in an ideal world, but in this real world what happens is that there is lots of yelling and screaming. and people produce plant and then plans are for 20 years and then every three years there's a new bout of yelling and screaming and the plans are a race and we start over again. it's a wonder we get anywhere, frankly. >> that's the rest of my question. the rest of my question is don't we have the means to do a true risk reward study on those two targets? >> that's not the way the

decisions are made. >> that may be the best way they are made soon. i agree with you. >> in an ideal world that is how decisions are made. >> it's our job to idealize the world. it is our democracy. >> good luck. [laughter] >> let me know when the world becomes ideal and i will become a perfect guest. >> i think the disposition on the scientist is very clear. we need to do a lot of science before we are ready to send humans to mars. and then only after we scientists are satisfied, we let you humans go to mars. that is my impression. that we saw in the previous presentation that we need to send five, six spacecraft, and then the sample return mission, and in humans. i think we can cut some of that off and just send humans to

mars. or send humans to mars when humans are ready, not when science is ready. i think humans can wait before site is ready. i think science is ready right now all ready for the humans to go to mars. why do we need to do all that first? and then i think, i agree we need to have a permanent base on mars. i completely agree, but i don't agree that we need to go there when we are ready to have a base on mars. i think we need to go there when we are ready to go there. and then after that, we make the base on mars. and in the last thing, i also don't completely agree about the near earth asteroid. because that is another way to prepare the mission for mars, so why do we try to go to a near earth asteroid to go to mars and let's try to go to mars to go to mars. >> okay. i had to point to your response. one, go is a nicer but i prefer

stay. so i say when we are ready to stay on mars. i'm not so interested in just going. the second point about near earth asteroid illustrates a philosophical point i'm trying to make here is that mars cannot be our only destination. it can be an important destination, but it cannot be our only destination. my brother really called me up and asks what are you doing about these near earth object asteroids that are going to get into my house. he takes it all very personal. so we, at least for nasa, there is more destination. mars may be first among equals, but we have to recognize that in a sense we want to expand into the solar system, and i think that involves moon, mars, and near earth objects, all of them. and so we need a plan that integrates. and your point about science, we already doing science on market what i would like to see is that

science aligned with human exploration. three more concise questions. that was a joke, by chris. he has a great sense of humor. so i will do one, and to hear. we will start, we will hear and then hear. >> he was right when he said the moon is a burned out he. and not mars, colonies. that's what we need. the terraform project. >> i have been focusing on a research base, a colony. and i emphasize that. what we see in antarctica is a research-based, not a colony. now, maybe colonies will follow, but i predict, i go on record as predicting, that government agencies will not establish colonies. nasa is a government agency. nasa may do something which enables someone else to establish a colony, but we are not going to establish a colony. we are going to establish a research-based, just like we do

in antarctica. the united states and arctic research program has no mandate to establish a colony or settlement. only a research-based. and i think that's the appropriate role for the government program. it doesn't preclude individuals coming behind and establishing a colony. no one has deemed antarctica suitable for that. maybe the moon and mars will be different, but in terms of nasa's goals, it ought to be to establish a research-based. and so i am not saying you can't have a colony. i am saying that's not what we will do. question your. >> my name is george drake, and virtual i would like to thank you for coming to the mars society. we are not the moon society. and i think your work is very important that i think your ideas are very important. you should know that i am not a traditional member of the mars society in the sand at i came to hear to this location from the environmental community. and i think that one of the

biggest flaws we have is that as a society, we look at mars and we think, well, there is no deadline. just because obama or kennedy or somebody hasn't said we have 10 years to do this. i think there is a deadline. we have to do this before the environment goes belly up. and so i don't think this is a let's do it right situation. this is a let's do it situation. and goal is terraforming. >> that's a knotty problem and we do have a whole discussion on that. i think that certainly studding mars would help us work our problems are a major help will come from studying earth are the biggest couple come from an attitude change, but i appreciate your point. and maybe there is a sense of

urgency. next question. >> i'm a chemical engineer whose job has always been to make things faster, better, cheaper and i really don't get why you think it's easier to establish a base on the moon. my perspective, you know, we have industries moving across the ocean because it's cheaper to make it there, not because they are in their backyards. and from my standpoint of looking at how you support a base, it cost us thousands of pounds to ship anything into space. we've got to ship all our supplies to survive to the moon. why is it easier to make a base there when we can get the stuff locally on mars? >> it's because the moon is close. i will say one more time. the moon is close, and when you look at the details, that works out to be an enormous advantage in terms of operations, in terms of safety, in terms of rotating crew. it turns out to be a big, a really big, big deal. okay.

last, last question. >> we were together 12 years ago in the founding convention. this is the second time i am here. and i must say that i think we've become more and more scared of mars and the conventional wisdom is also ask lighted. if i may say so. the point here is we don't realize i think still today and it is getting worse that space exploration, as i have said it here in the last two or three days, we have to do everything with space to launch humanity into it because it is the last dimension that will kick off a boom and prosperity in humanity. and that is not how things are going today. so besides all the other noble reasons, one very strong reason,

that's the first thing. second, i would like maybe to come to the rescue between the doctors or grant any argument of the moon. why are we moving altogether into the getting things? why don't we let the japanese handle the moon? why don't we give the job to the jabs to do the moon and the chinese that are so keen? i mean, that is a noble, again, challenge. and we speak to mars and many others of us had this great, practical way of doing it. and i really think it is, otherwise we are being about the bush. thank you very much. [applause] >> i just, and. there is a japanese base in antarctica. but the u.s. has the biggest base in antarctica. and the u.s. will have the biggest base on the moon. that's just the nature of the u.s.

[applause] >> thanks, chris, that was very lively. before i introduce our next speaker, i also just want to say since we are running a little late, please do try to keep your questions short, concise and get to the point quickly just so we can gauge so everybody has a chance to ask questions if we can. our next speaker, joe cassady, one of our sponsors here at the conference. joe is the director of business development, responsible for aerojet new business and nasa expiration program. is also begun to think about about system and architectures is based in washington, d.c., so he is also, he is involved in policy angles to propulsion and space technology as well. and he hopes to stimulate thinking about getting things moving and as joe says, and then there will be no turning back. so ladies and gentlemen, joe

cassady is going to be talking about a one way mission to mars. [applause] . . i had no idea the theme of the conference was no turning back credits would fit. the discussion that is going on is the brilliant segway into the stuff i would like to talk about today. if i can just get a slide show

to start, there we go. okay. we will jump into it because i know the other thing i have the previous discussion of, the only thing between being you all and lunch. the topic of the conversation is a 1-way trip to mars. what i am hearing out of a lot of folks is a patent and impatience to get to mars. i understand that. i started working in electric propulsion, i did my master's research in 1981, and my goal at that time was to develop a propulsion system that would take us to mars. i had a little green subaru, my license plate was go to mars. i understand. the idea of this one way through to mars is intriguing to me. i saw several things had been written about it and that is why i came up with the idea a while

ago when i knew i was going to be coming to talk about this, better do a little research and find out what is behind this and who are behind this, is this a splinter group who were on the radical fringe? when i looked into it and i saw this list of folks who have proposed this, obviously some of these guys have pretty good crops, so it is not just a bunch of crazies talking about this. the idea of going to mars one way, there are a couple variations of this. all babies, who a lot of you have probably heard of over the years in arizona, has given some talks where he has proposed that this could be done as a popular culture thing like big brother house or one of those things, actually send a crew out with

the cameras and hdtv coming back to track and followed this. the idea is they get there and people will pay to keep them alive and keep this thing going on so you will have sponsorships and things like that. is another way of figuring out how to pay for all of this. there are a couple of folks, jim mclean has opposed -- propose sending somebody alone, the spirit of the lone eagle inspired by charles lindbergh. those of you who have seen the movie rocket man, it brought that to mind although he had company including a chimp, but the thing with the isolation chamber, my wife always says she thinks i would be just great in that because i always laugh at my own jokes, he has a sock puppet and when they open the isolation chamber the one astronaut have already gone bonkers, he was sitting in there, and he says can we keep going? i am not for the second act yet. i am not sure of the idea of sending just one person, but

buzz aldrin, james cameron and a number of people have thrown some weight behind this idea and it is all about we would really like to get things going. maybe if we didn't have to do a two way trip it would be better. i will skip quickly through this, the approachs very slightly, a different number of crew members, the details of the architecture, how you actually manifest commission and the ships that would get you there, that philosophy of continued support, could you bring in some public way of doing this rather than waiting for the governments to get their act together? they are all alike in some way is too, most of them look at repositioning the assets, something we have been talking about for a number of years, send some nuclear power plants so that when the crew gets

there, they have a nice, warm place to stay and some way of making power and living. it also primarily relies, folks have brought up, mars has an atmosphere so it is a nice thing, you can use era captured, you can use air gels to get your payload's down, they can use the this delicate rather archer air shells, then we are today. they would potentially send these crews one at a time with no return trip. the idea being you can build an outpost and overtime pay in the capability to return, the first folks who go, go with the idea that they are not coming back. the reason people are looking at that, why would they look at that, what are the advantages? one is reduced cost, everyone sees that as one of the big

barriers. most of the proponents claim you could save 50 to 80%. someone said 80%. the other is reduced risk. we are risk averse nowadays. mcclain got the idea by talking to a russian cosmonaut who worked in nasa training, they just have a different mind set. we are very risk averse, they are ready to go. there was a talking the apollo days, at one point when we were really afraid the russians were going to get their first, there was some colonel in the military, he was ready to go, just put me on a rock and send me up and i will -- we will plant the flag first. there has always been that kind of different mentality, the explorers who are ready to go, they're willing to take the risks. maclean says i am not talking

about a suicide mission, we will find a way to keep the personal lives. we don't have to think about this process of bringing people back. they believe that doubles the risk significantly enhances the risk. so what i did, i took a look at that and i said what does it really mean? does it really say 50% or more? the way i did that, most of the studies over the years that i had seen, the initial figure for cost assessment, how much mass to you have to take off of a rock to get into orbit to get to mars? the design reference missions 3.01998 had thirty-seven% of that initial mass associated with the return trip. that is an available document, you can get it and break it down. if you look at this and figure you're going to send some

additional flights to resupply the outpost, you wouldn't just let the people die, that will cut into the savings too. the total net savings that you would be able to get on something like that might be only in a 25% or 30% range, still reasonable. but i came to the conclusion that it didn't say 50% or more. the next one was risk. what does it do for risk? you are probably talking about loss of crew. you need to compare the two scenarios, one is a claim we dealt into, i guess it was steve maclean and davies, i get them confused sometimes. they believe the risk of a crew loss on mars was exemplified, and -- a risk of crew loss on earth reentry, certainly, proven to be the case, and you have additional radiation exposure on

the return to earth transit that is going to cause potentially down the road some increased cancer risk and mortality of the crew. the second scenario, if you leave these people, you are not taking them off the surface of mars, you are not re-entering earth's atmosphere, they are going to live their lives on mars and we don't know a lot about that. there is some unknown, things besides radiation and the argument is you can bury yourselves under the regular and protect yourself from radiation and things like that but there are other things on mars that we don't know about. i went through my chart, i am not really buying the radiation exposure one. there are other things that could creep in. you're looking at a long -- long to mortality thing anyway. mars is said in a free entry phase, still risky, the risk we know about, what to do about, these are missions we do all the

time. you can kind of deal with that. my conclusion on that one, does it significantly reduce risk? probably not. so far i am not too keen on this idea of it being a great thing. not so much that it would overcome this great psychological thing with the public, we're going to send people out and leave them. the next thing i took a look at, in my mind, the risk assessment, the biggest risk centers around bars entry descent and landing. you heard it the other night, putting the mers down. the mission guys, whatever you want to call it, 7 minutes of sheer terror on every mars mission when you are going in. it doesn't get any better as you get bigger. when we start talking about these missions, we are scaling up from where we have been,

airbags only work up to a point, now we're going back to the propulsive landing again. but with the aeroshells it could be a problem. you're looking at two metric tons, something like tens of metric tons, we are not even sure we know how to do that. the whole scenario you see here, the parachute, the aeroshell, supersonic, hypersonic coming into large, the propulsive landing, works fine up to a point but we are really shingling out when we start talking 10 plus metric tons. it is a very different atmosphere than we are used to dealing with. that is a big risk. we mention retransmission 3.0, chunks of stuff that will be dropped down, 60 metric tons. to recap, why would anybody

propose this crazy idea of a 1-way mission? the biggest thing is it is the barrier to entry. we really think, and all have, mars was the next logical step beyond apollo, started back in '72, yet we haven't gone. we have loads of paper and no mission. what we all want is to move beyond plans to action. we want to see people on mars in our lifetimes. this seems to be a way of removing some of the obstacles, that is what these guys of looking at. if they believe this psychological impediments of sending people one way is not something insurmountable. there are plenty of people who would volunteer to do it, probably some people in the audience who would volunteer to do that. what i would like to do now, i know i am keeping you from lunch, is talk about -- i forgot, i meant to throw this in. the idea of lots of paper, this

is a quote i had to do in. bob said it came up with this a few years ago and it has been true in my 20 years in business, we are constantly doing studies and studies of new launch vehicles because we get to these ambitious missions and we figured the only way we could do them is to design a great new launch vehicle. now i would like to shift to something completely different. those of you who are monty python fans will recognize the lumberjack. i want to talk about an alternative architecture to breakdown, and what i would like to talk to you about today is something i wrote a paper on in 1988. in 1988, we thought we could do this, but we have a lot of technology challenges. i was working on something called an m p 3 forrester, a magnetohydrodynamic thruster.

something like a space station, then you have this electric propulsion with some small tanks, the advantage of electric propulsion, you don't need big propellant tanks. but the really neat thing, i will point out with my little red marker, each of these are individual payloads, individual aeroshells, you can break that up, you don't have to do it all in one lump thing. we start to come closer to what we are used to. you can haul other stuff, stuff that doesn't have to go to the surface. you can have some habitat modules and things like that, you make this thing so it is reusable. you put all this investment in, it will go back and forth, you start to set up something like a railroad. last point, it keeps open the

ocean for crew return, i couldn't let that go. i would like to tell you i am a smart guy, this has been my idea and all that. if this is so great, why has nobody thought of this? the answer is, they have, many times. 1957, before i was born, walt disney, werner von braun made a movie about going to mars using electric propelled space ships, you see the classical rockets, that was there mars decent and asset vehicle, slung underneath the electric chip that was going to go to mars. the russians, many times, have looked at nuclear electric propulsion for going to mars. when i was looking -- working for the air force we have all kinds of intelligence on it, exciting stuff. that is how we got our funding for the mpd thurster.

here we are in 1988, here is the with my mpd thruster, we had reusable launch vehicle, a space station on the drawing board that was going to have -- up here you had a hanger. you could put pieces of spacecraft together in orbit that you could send on out. at the time we didn't have this in a high inclination orbit. that was yet to be decided. and we had something here that is interesting, solar concentrators with sterling power generation. in number of different technologies that didn't all manifest themselves that way and

here is this saturn mission with nuclear elector, nuclear reactor and elected festers -- electric thruste thrusters. something happened that significantly changed things. one thing was the fall of the wall. when the wall came down, technology we didn't know much about became available to us in the west. there are a couple pictures here. this is one that we recently built and tested, and aerojet that is 50 kilowatts of power through a single thruster. something else happened over that time. commercial people have developed very high-powered satellites that are now over hour heads in orbit. these are a couple examples of comsat that are up to 25 kilowatts, they are working

their way up toward 50 kilowatts, power sources, all from solar panels and the use electric propulsion routinely. we have 200 electric thrusters flying on comsats today, that is over the period from 1983 until today. wheat eventually crept up on that target. we have also proposed and looked at the idea of a nuclear electric system. this was in the early days of the exploration program, project prometheus, this got a little long and got sidetracked when the decision was made on consolation to focus on more near-term things. and we build a space station which has something like 70 kilowatts of power. a number of power technologies have been significantly advanced in the timeframe.

we are getting better and better at this stuff. the implications for the mission design for the power technology, now we know how to do it. when i wrote in 1988, it was pretty conceptual, i have a laboratory thruster, i didn't have power distribution system that would really work. all those programs i showed you on those previous pages, working on that technology, it is there. we are in scale up mode. we are not at the megawatt level but we could get there. so that, and something i came across when i was getting ready for the stock, 1988 study done by nasa's office of exploration there really intrigued me, an excellent overview of mission options, takes a look at litter and the international space station. the only thing about it is the

technology status assessment is a little bit dated. take that, coupled it in with the technology development we have seen, you might have something. oh, gosh, that is pretty bad, there were four case studies done, one was the human exploration of phobos, was a human expedition to mars, another was a lunar observatory, and the final one that i am going to focus on is the evolutionary strategy, a lunar outposts leading to early mars. we will talk about each of those a little bit. the first couple are pretty self-explanatory. the human expeditions are apollo style expeditions', one didn't go all the way to mars, it went to phobos, and one went to the surface.

okay. the lunar observatory was thrown in just as an example of something else that was scientifically interesting. we are the mars society so we are not just interested in going to the moon. the last thing is the idea of what does it take to build up to the idea, this i have to throw back to chris -- steve maclean, what does it take to go and stay? okay. this is the key chart right here. four different case studies. let's start, we won't even look at the lunar observatory. let's start with this guy with a huge skyscrapers. this guy is the mars expedition. you can see why we never go. even here, not practical, alternatives under investigation. this is the amount of mass that needs to be launched in metric tons per year to support the

various missions. so you can see the big barrier, that is the big impediment. look at the phobos' expedition. that is not too bad but it jumps over 400 metric tons. what i want to focus on is these two guys, this is the evolutionary approach where we start off,. nehr to mars, take a nice little increase then we are flflat all. check out the years we were going to be doing this. my thesis is widely t-bill and launchers to launch propellant? the whole thing with the tug concept is right now, even on those comsats, do the comsat missions without electric propulsion, 60% of what you lift off of earth is propellant. what we want to keep lifting propellant off of the earth?

i did a little searching and i found this guy machiavelli, maybe you have heard of him. i love this quote. there is nothing more difficult to take in hand more perilous to conduct nor more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of the new order of things, because the elevator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions. okay? makes perfect sense to me. what i want to say is let's -- let's launch a two pronged attack on the old paradigm. let's look better in space transportation and develop ways to make and store propellants off world. i like propellent depots. lot of people talking about propellent depots in the augustine testimony. they're still taking it up from earth. if you put them in space you have to make it out there and bring it to the depots, it starts to make sense. by one football analogy, when i

heard of this propellent depot idea, that is great but you're still taking it up there. i was watching a football taught -- john madden was watching this game, it was raining like crazy, rain coming down, a guy on the sidelines with a towel is wiping the ball and after while the towel is just soaked and he is wiping the ball with a wet towel and john madden said i am not sure why he is doing that, i think he is just stuck on doumb. that is my thought. this resembles the evolutionary study they did using electric tugs. you look at the potential of lunar resources which could be a really big thing if you want to make oxygen on the mission and

useoon and use that as a supplement. it makes an interesting note in martian orbit, definitely want to update the cargo tug design for modern power and propulsion technology. i would consider a solar electric cargo tug for operations in 6 lunar space because we have the technology to do it. you have to and give power available and you don't get the issues of nuclear operations in orbit. you are going to hear of a nuclear advocate, i know people are afraid of it sometimes but reactors are actually better

than radioisotope reactors, there are ways we can work around that. the only thing that makes sense to develop one reactor design that will work everywhere you need it. the same design will work the surface and these tug. that way you don't spend a lot of money redesigning, and you have a common element. that will be a pretty big ticket item. let's talk through this thing, we are getting close and i don't want to keep you from lunch too much longer. this is the idea of a cargo flight, launched with a few heavy lifts or whatever you have got. we could make this work with whatever comes out of augustine. if they want to go with an ares iv, whatever they want to go with, it will work. you are taking up mostly hardware, not so much propellant, you use this electric propulsion system to spiral you out, you get to mars,

come down, remember how that looks, you have a big frame with these individual guys, stuff that has to go down, you can get that down. the other really cool thing is you are entering mars orbit, basically you fly this trajectory out to mars, match velocity nicely, put yourself in orbit, people will say how does that work? this is a fuzzy boundaries. the europeans just did it a few years ago with smart one, the gravity of the planet captures you nice and slow, you go into orbit and you are not screaming in, you are in orbit around the planet so you drop down with stuff that needs to get down and it is a little bit easier to get to the planet's surface, then you keep coming down, go to d m deim deimos, keep coming down, you

have some synchronous -- this is a one sol synchronous orbit, they come down to phobos, that is your final destination, you basically plug in, you have your propellent manufacturing tools that you want to use at phobos and remanufacture some propellent and phobos' basically becomes your martians space station. the crew comes out, this architecture again, not my idea, 1988, studied done by nasa, where you can launch these guys up, there's actually a couple of other pieces to this that you could do or don't have to do. my idea is one way you do it, nuclear thermal rocket to get the crew out, very effective, works with the fuels we are talking about, if you want to you can throw into that architecture the production of

lunar oxygen, come back to earth orbit, less stuff that you have to haul up on these launch vehicle, get out to mars, rendezvous with a cargo vehicle sitting at phobos, you have the lander that was hauled out with the cargo vehicle, take it down to mars. everything set up, you have an infrastructure in place that you continue to use over and over again so it does contribute to the idea that how the we stay, not how we go, but how do we stay? i think i just said all of this. the one other point on this, the idea that these things get broken up into smaller packages. this is closer to what we know how to do than this is. so let's do some comparison and come back and see how this is back up verses hour 1-way mission. they couldn't put 50% reduction. when i looked at this concept,

the comparison was mission 3.0, one in 1998, we had a 30% reduction in the an kissel -- initial mass in leo, the risk for the loss of crew, i think we could achieve some significant improvement and certainly, that is always going to be one of the things in the trade studies, to get somebody to say we can go, you have to convince them that it is not such a high risk saying. that is a big contributor. the third one, we heard about the moon earlier today, and it makes going to the moon mean something. if you do this, not only are you going to have the advantages of all the other hardware experience and things like that we talked about, that people have been talking about with consolation, but you can make something that is useful for

going to mars. it is a piece of the overall plan for getting to mars and staying. it is and evolutionary method. that is one of the big things we have to look at. one of the lessons we learned out of electrical propulsion development, when i was working on mpd thrusters, couldn't get the infighting. the thing that flu, the first electric thruster that flu was a hydrazine resistors jet, it used the same for, the satellite already had, in need much power, it fit. you have to take those baby steps. once we did that, we worked up the hydrazine and we are flying all thrusters and i on engines. it is breaking them down a little bit. you try to wood yourself in and go a little further. the last thing is it gives us the opportunity for international cooperation. backing up a little bit, the

questions last time, i show you the idea of the road map. i think all of these are things that are going to be considered. what they are looking for right now, some of these are very important things. so the technologies that we need, definitely nuclear power. i don't think you're going to go out away from the sun without nuclear power, and bases, there are so many issues with surface power, spirit and opportunity, talked the other night about the dust issue, and you always have the issue of the seasonal variations. nuclear power is the way to go. i would like to see us develop a nuclear thermal rocket because it is a good way to get a crew out there. it will get you there reliably, about 800 seconds to 900 seconds, double what we can do with hydrogen and oxygen. we need to scale up the whole

thrust technology. that is what it is, scale up. we are there, it is a very nice thruster. isru technology would be developed, so again, the idea is you could do this with demonstration missions, you could do a sample return in this way and demonstrate the isru technology before the full scale mission. transfer of storage, the depot guys are pushing out too, the crew habitat, environmental control, surface mobility, all of those are common anyway. you see all the talk stuff, service propulsions of. here is the road map. how do we get there from here? start today. ten year development of nuclear reactors. common element. we need those for the surface,

for the tug. we can do that in five or six years, we will be there for a megawatt class vehicle. put that together and do a lunar tug demonstration. here is the solar electric, we had this program going back in 2005, it got canceled with the advent of the constellations of. who knows? maybe it will come back. that is all real stuff. one eelv lunch to get this up, then you fly a round trip to the moon in a year, dropped the cargo off, come back, basically you have a tug a year that can go back and forth to the moon, build a couple tug, you have a tug every six months. you can figure the math. you can run a railroad back and forth to the moon. you are talking about high as the, those thruster's at 1,000

seconds, not something -- something fine on spacecraft right now. you have a way to get back and forth to the moon, have some r isru technology development. you see the flag, our international partnerships, i was part of a delegation to russia in 2006. they have tremendous interest and tremendous facilities for doing reactor development, for the reactor itself, for nuclear rocket technology. they didn't shut the program down as early as we did so their facilities are in better shape than ours. hours are starting to fall apart. interesting things you can do. esa has flown smart i to the moon, they're interested in electric propulsion. the japanese, somebody mentioned earlier, any thing can do with making propellant on the moon,

doing construction on the moon, we can get japan to help with that. you have the propellant storage and transfer development, the popes in space, got to figure that out a little bit, we want to do that anyway. you can see how it comes to the other -- together, then in 2025 we have everything we need. this is an approach toward permanent human presence on mars. it is a kinder, gentler approach, if someone wanted to come home, they could. the reality, if they got voted off, they don't just have to go to phobos or something. the major hurdle of the entry descent and landing is stressed with this and fits within the structure of what was referred to as flexible scenario. chris mentioned the primitive body -- near earth asteroid.

you can use that as a mission for this approach too, fly out, i thought it was pretty neat that he showed the orion sitting next to it. we worked on the near program and i remember talking to the guys at j.d. el -- jpl, they crept up on it, got closer and closer. i don't know if you remember nier, but it was not a ladder, it was a spacecraft. it and solar arrays and a cruciform shake. what they did, they got close and said let's see if we can go in and touch it. they touch down on the body of the spacecraft and two of the solar panels. they land on the asteroid. you don't have to do special landers. i will leave you with the shot that we could break the lock, chemical propulsion and heavy lift has, and develop a true space fairing infrastructure.

thank you very much. [applause] >> i forgot the pretty pictures. i brought these too. in 1986 at the march conference, we had these beautiful pictures, there is the tug at phobos, there is the propellant rig set up, the guy they're making propellant on phobos. questions? >> what kind of production can you do that would work with a whole thruster? >> hull press tothruster right xenon. it is not the big driver,

hydrogen, oxygen, methane, those are the constituents of chemical rockets used for landers and crude propulsion. i wasn't really looking at doing isrus for that but you could look at that as you look at trace elements in the martian atmosphere. you could run these on argon. initially you just bring the xenon up from earth that you need. thanks. >> a couple questions. at large chart about the masses going to mars, was that study predicate on using a central resource propellant? >> that is a good question. >> i don't think it was. >> the one that had a big bump was the expedition. >> that is the problem.

>> what i compared to, the design reference mission, looked at in situ, it had nuclear thermal rockets. >> what in situ elements the have on phobos? >> everyone says it looks like a carbonaceous chondrite. it is perfect for rocket fuel. >> final question, can't you test your edl system's on earth? >> no, mars has surprised us consistently. what we fought mars's atmosphere would do, therethought mars's atmosphere would do, there are some really good articles, the guy who is designing the parachutes out at jpl, the thing

poking up in my mind, they're worried about getting big macses down on mars. >> he me out. why can't you test them by flying to stagnation at 100,000 feet? then they only enter the outside of the earth's atmosphere, fly to stagnation and a huge altitude, settling down on the surface of mars, there are so many scenarios about how to decelerate a large mass, anyone who knows mechanics is going to claim that you can't find the trajectory that takes an arbitrary large mass to stagnation on the surface of mars. you have to find out how to match the decelerations to what you need in that trajectory. we can test all this in the outer atmosphere of earth, can't we? >> maybe. i will be fair to someone who is a better deceleration expert than i am. i just know that that has been a

concern being raised even with m msl. >> this is a lot to take in. i wonder if there will be a copy of your address available to mars society members. >> it will be out in about half an hour on this table over here. we recorded the entire conference. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> just a note on that, there are two versions of the mars plan, one following robertand and one following j.j. hertag. >> i don't want to hold you up from lunch. please be back at 1:00. we will have a really big paddle, i mean that quite literally.

>> elsewhere in washington, secretary of state hillary clinton will talk to the press, she is joined by the jordanian foreign minister to talk about the situation in the middle east and relations the swing the u.s. and jordan. that is live at 11:45 a.m. eastern on c-span. later today, robert gibbs, we will have that live when it

starts also on c-span. >> david cohen is an executive with the nation's largest cable provider, comcast. his take on the future of broadband in america. the communicator's at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. starting tuesday, the full senate debates the nomination of sonia sotomayor for supreme court justice. coming this fall, the home of america's highest court, the supreme court. >> the director of the federal housing finance agency gave a progress report thursday on his oversight of fannie mae, freddie mac and 12 other federal home loan banks. the agency was created a year ago in the wake of the government's financial rescue of fannie mae and freddie mac. this is just under an hour and a half. >> welcome. thank you all for being here. i am the chief operating officer

and senior deputy director of the finance agency. a year ago this morning, president bush signed the housing and economic recovery act of 2008 which among other things traded housing federal finance agency and in signing that law if both establish the agency and required that the issue some reports, one year later, which is today. one of the things we will be doing today is describing the release of several of these required reports. i would like to begin by introducing to all of you the director of the federal housing finance agency, jim lockhart. director lockhart has had a long, distinguished career in the federal service, serving his country, and in the private sector. and navy veteran, he is also serving in multiple administrations as executive director of the pension benefit

guaranty corp. as deputy director and chief operating officer of the social security administration, director of the office of federal housing enterprise oversight come and as of a year ago today, director of the federal housing finance agency. jim has a long, distinguished career in the financial services industry, holding a number of different decisions in financial services. that background has served him incredibly well in guiding fao a and hfha through the housing crisis of the past couple years. with that it is my pleasure to introduce to you director james lockhart. [applause] >> thank you for that introduction and thank you for being here today. this is our first anniversary. we were going to have.

but i'm afraid they might burst and that might be a bad symbol given what has happened to the housing market. a year ago today, there was an early morning ceremony where president bush sound housing and economic recovery act of 2008, the same day, that created the federal housing finance agency. it really took many years, as many of you know, to get to that ceremony. as i left the oval office, president bush told me it was up to me. it turned out that i needed a lot of help. thank you for that help and your support for reform of the the years. starting in new agency upon signing was very unusual that there is a great sense of urgency. i promised chairman frank we would stand up the agency quickly, pulling together the finance board and hud's mission

team. i am please report today that we did it despite the many turmoils in the housing market. this morning, i would like to talk about our accomplishments over the past year, there have been many, and the challenges we face, and there are many. from the beginning i have stressed the results oriented culture to our work. i can tell you our 425 employees that worked long hours for the past year know that we have extremely important mission. that mission is to provide effective supervision, regulation and housing mission oversight of fannie mae, freddie mac and the federal home loan banks to promote their safety and soundness, support housing finance and affordable housing, and support a stable and liquid mortgage market. i have been especially pleased to see how well fhfa have tackled the challenges.

i have no doubt they will continue to do so. the obligations -- and the federal home loan banks, is $6.6 trillion which is close to the public debt of the united states. a year ago i was able to show this slide and they were much bigger than the public debt of the united states there has been a little change since then. the enterprise zone or guaranteeing 56 this and of the single-family mortgages in the u.s.. turning to the accomplishments, there is a long list, and we have done a lot in a short time. we combined the personnel and financial systems of the two separate organizations quickly. we are working effectively with the enterprises as a conservative even as we continue to oversee them as a regulator. the board of directors worked quickly to refill the ceo positions at fannie mae and freddie mac.

we have been working with the 12 federal home loan banks to develop an accounting platform for the private-label mortgage backed securities. fhfa has been on the leading edge of executive compensation which has obviously been a tricky one. we have parachute's ahead of congressional intention and we ensured appropriate compensation for our employees. we have smoothly transition to a new administration, a new oversight board, which i chair, the other members of the secretary of the treasury, hud, and the sec chairman, and i can tell you they're very much involved. our staff -- was instrumental, working with the treasury, the administration, the enterprises, other regulators and private sector development to implement the full home affordable program to address problems of foreclosure prevention and people with underwater mortgages. we have a seat at the critical

table, financial stability oversight board, the t.a.r.p. board, the president's working group on financial markets. after welcoming the admission team to the agency in january, we began a thorough evaluation of existing affordable housing goals and have developed a much more feasible set of goals for fannie mae and freddie mac. we have been very busy, we published our first strategic plan, our first cuban capital plan, the first report to congress, the first combined performance accountability report which i am very proud to say this was the first time any first-time agency won. i really think these accomplishments are unprecedented in the first year of a federal agency.

it is important to note that an these and many other accomplishments were not done in a vacuum. the last 12 months have been action packed and set us on the right path. we have accomplished a lot but we have much more to do. as both my son and daughter recently had their first wedding anniversaries, i know or at least my wife told me, the present for a first anniversary newspaper. i can tell you we produce a lot of paper for this anniversary. all of it required by error. as you will hear from the panel that follows me that paper is very useful, and hopefully will be very productive. to day, we are releasing three reports including a study of the enterprise, guaranteed fees, another on the federal home loan bank securitization making recommendations. we are also publishing 6 new regulations today, these add to 6 reports, 14 regulations that

we have published in the last year. collectively, these studies and regulations are extremely important to the future of the secondary mortgage market. of course, our key focus is on stabilizing the mortgage market and we have a four pronged strategy. first, most importantly, fannie mae, freddie mac and the federal home loan banks, must work in the market in a sound, a safe manner. second, we are working with our government partners to get mortgage rates down. third, we are to with it -- enterprise and other groups to set best practices for the whole mortgage market. finally, we are actively working on foreclosure prevention to help homeowners in trouble. i have been a lifelong student of american history and feel it helps to look back before we talk about where we are headed. one of the key catalysts in the current economic crisis has been home prices.

american home buyers started to the house prices could only go up. some investors did as well. prices did not rise forever as this chart shows. from january of 2000 through may of 2006, the much more volatile s&p case schiller index rose by approximately 105% and has fallen about 32% since that peak. we have a less volatile index which reflects fannie mae and freddie mac's mortgages. it peaked later, only declined 11% from the peak. as many of you may know, our index is showing signs of bottoming out as you see by that little hole at the end. we are back up 0.3% for the first five month, the case chiller index reported its first up month in three years, hopefully that is a sign we're bumping along the bottom. for years, the enterprise has

set the standard for prudent mortgage underwriting. in 2005 to 2007, the private market, driven primarily by wall street, rating agencies and overenthusiastic that festers, lowered the credit barr. that reduce declining market share, pursue profit and fulfil affordable housing goals. the enterprises began to follow suit by not only lowering their own underwriting standards but also buying hundreds of billions of dollars of work of triple-a-rated some prime private-label securities, as we call them, pls. fannie mae and freddie mac did not create a housing bobble the this cyclical actions helped them despite regulatory efforts. to curtail their growth. falling home prices, financial strain on borrowers tied to inappropriate mortgages and the recession caused rapidly growing

defaults. over the past week to years, serious delinquencies, 90 days or more, have risen rapidly. for some prime mortgages, serious delinquencys have risen 25%. they are far lower than freddie mac and fannie mae at 2.8%, 3.7%. those levels are even lower than the prime market at 4.7%, the home market at 7.2%. although fannie mae and freddie mac have a combined 56% share in the mortgages outstanding, they account for 22% of serious delinquency. on the other hand, those private-label securities i mentioned earlier, which are 13% of the total mortgages, account for 42% of serious delinquency. as these high levels of delinquencies trigger downgrades in the aaa private-label securities, presented significant challenge for investors, fannie mae and

freddie mac and the federal home loan banks were big investors in these securities. currently, 65% of the value of private-label securities in the federal home list, federal home loan banks system have been downgraded to-watch. this compares to 20% at year end. the combined fannie mae and freddie mac private-label securities portfolio, about $167 billion, are much worse, with 84% currently downgraded. as you can see, 68% are junk below investment grade. unlike the banks, the enterprises were large buyers of gold, rich, some prime pls. it was a perversion of the process for them to get credit for mortgages the redesigned to fail. plss and not the only

challenges. as the market began to develop in summer of 2007, the federal home loan banks played a critical countercyclical roll. from june 2007 to september of 2008 secured loans to members, we call them advances, dark blue on the bottom, increase from $640 billion to over a trillion dollars. then, while liquidity sources for many large and small banks were drying up, the federal home loan banks were barely able to step in and provide that much-needed liquidity. if it had not been for that, the current crisis undoubtedly would have been much worse. in the last 9 months, the members have fallen 27%, largely due to a rise in the positive banks and emergence of new federal programs. the expansion and contraction of

the bank's advances demonstrate the federal home loan banks's unique capital structure has the ability to meet the demand for liquidity, having flexibility to shrink without consequence. the federal home loan bank's exposure to pls has impacted their routine to earnings, accumulated comprehensive income, and that capital. as of march '41, the banks held $64 billion of private label securities. these securities had a fair value of $49 billion or $0.76 on the dollar. because of the deterioration in the market, the federal home loan banks took charges for other than temporary impairment in the first quarter of five$.2 trillion of which only half a billion went through the income statement as a credit loss and the rest, 4.7, was accorded oci. ..