covered by employered sponsored care. do we have any other questions or comments? if not, well, thank you very much for joining us. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to booktv, every weekend beginning at this time here on c-span2. over the next 48 hours we'll bring you programs on nonfiction books, authors, and the publishing industry.

.. >> okay, let's get started. today we have a real treat. i think we all understand after wandering around these beautiful exhibits outside and a perfect day that we have today that tucson is a special place not only for the wonderful people that live here, but for the clear skies. so today we have a talk from two special authors, doug isbell and

stephen strom that are going to talk about the observatories of the southwest and of course we all know why they are here and we have all been curious i think what goes on in those buildings on top of the mountains that you can see driving down the freeway. so we will start with doug isbell first and so we will start with doug isbell first and then stephen strom will talk and i will try to bribe them since this book was published in 2009 what have they been doing since? first we have sponsors and i am proud to say this venue here, the gallagher theater is sponsored by university medical center and our authors are sponsored by the university of arizona press. this is an exciting time. let me start by telling you a little bit about doug isbell. he has 20 years experience in

science writing in public affairs and i knew him back in the days of pathfinder when he was actively involved in promoting various nasa missions. he is also the single point of contact for the united nations endorsed beyond the international year of astronomy 2009. he has international experience and he did work in tucson for a long time at the national observatory but he has moved on to the jet propulsion laboratory and he is helping to inform the public about the radioactive sources that are going to be on the next commission. we certainly want to hear about that. he has a degree in astronautical engineering and journalism from the university of illinois.

without further ado, doug isbell. >> good afternoon. thank you. [applause] >> pleasure to be here. i have been here eight years. i really enjoy being back here. i have been here an hour and feel like i am sun burned. i forgot my hat. i am here to tell you about our book which came out in 2009. this is the cover. it is a paperback book from university of arizona press the covered eight observatories of the u.s.. a guidebook we hope for young people and families in particular to visit these places. it was a labor of love. in addition to regular jobs. he was a full-time astronomer trying to big the next big telescope. and the other observatory working on the national year of

astronomy. the genesis of the book was steve's other book he has done for you and desert photography and astronomy and they have been asking him for years to write a more popular book on astronomy and we decided to do it together. the goal was to inspire people to go to these places. because of the inspiration, steve was at the planetarium as a youngster which you read about in the introduction to the book. mine was the apollo missions to the moon. we want to emphasize you can spark these kids' imaginations early in their lives could lead to a career and an avocation. an interesting career and exciting thing to do. it is a pleasure to go to work every day which not everybody can say. here's a rough map of the eight places we talk about from texas to southern california. we didn't cover mount wilson and

los angeles. we cut it off in san diego and some other great places in california. like big bear. we chose to pick these out because they're a natural bunch and something we could imagine you could visit in a matter of about a week if you wanted to do it right and drive to these places, one or two day you could do it in a week's time frame. why would you buy this book when you can find this information on the internet? that is the first question. it is all in one place. the history of the places, the science they have done in the past. steve brought an essay on each chapter on the science that has been done, if you read seven as a is you get a very good sense of the big question of modern astronomy. we also did a q&a with a person who lived or worked or observed in the observatory, it was all

fresh material, or original material. they are really breathtaking and beautiful in addition to being great scientific places. all of them have bright futures. there are a wavelength you can see from the ground. all these places have new instruments and new capabilities keeping them on the cutting edge. why are there so many of these places? the basic idea is you want to be far from the big city but not too far. you want to drive to the telescope from an airport and have a university nearby the professors and astronomers can live. you can see why to sun has so many. you want dark skies. our skies are very dark. you want a dry climate and

stable weather. astronomers examined 100 different mountaintops in this area for those in the right position and darkness and wind flowing over the top rather than being choppy. and get as high up as you can to get above the water vapor especially into the infrared spectrum. most of it was easily available. some private land and native american land. there are interesting stories how they obtained their land but this land was not very subtle and the 40s and 50s so at the time they were very undeveloped and relatively easy to build on. this gives you a flavor for the progression of dark skies over the years. to sun growing from 1959 to 1980 to more recent times in 2003 and you can see the urban sprawl that has taken place but to sun and flagstaff and other places have been world leaders in

legislation to keep -- maintain these dark skies. this is a lighting fixture that points down instead of a. a shielded fixture does a good job and local leaders have taken it to heart and written things into law so these subdivisions have pretty good lighting. for example astronomers like to study what is above their heads. the darkness within 1% or 2% the zenith of where it was 30 years ago so it has not been damaged all that much even though you can see the scars of phoenix and other places from all these telescopes in southern arizona for example. why so many? one would be enough. really a lot of these places came alive in the golden age of scientific opportunity. hard for people to believe how little we knew in 1930, 1940 about the universe. everyone wanted a piece of the pie. technology was ready to build

these instruments that were initially for tv camera and have become much more advanced with detectors and digital cameras you have today based on astronomy technology for example. there's a mix of public and private. they are funded by the u.s. government and tax dollars and others funded by private universities. each one have their strengths and weaknesses. the public places are open to anyone to compete with time. the private ones usually go to the professors and students of the university so they grow the community because they get undergraduate students for example. it is a mixture and they have complementary instrumentation. they try to do things other places aren't doing with fiber-optic or certain type of camera or a field of view. everyone tries to get a piece of the pot.

there are great personalities in all these places. i encourage you to read the book to find out more about people like, the ultimate professional/amateur astronomer who founded an observatory in the 89s. the first scientific instrument put into the arizona territories. gerard kuiper was instrumental in the mcdonald observatory in texas and the university of arizona's planetary sciences department. edwin hubble with a 200 in telescope on mount palomar which he never used as much as he thought he would. fred whipple in the lower left his most famous for being an eccentric scientist who came up with a dirty snowball pherae of comets but was instrumental in the measurement of the earth's shake from the first satellite. he found various stations to observe early satellites and how their orbits changed over time from the slightly oblique shape

of the earth. in the lower right with his wife, first director of twin peaks who founded the optical sciences on campus and research with those two together on the extinctions in the past of wildlife. he is still alive today. came back for the 50th anniversary celebration which went on recently. everyone of these was founded on the personalities of a core group of people. they worked together. together and began lowell were responsible for the discovery of dark matter, the mysterious mass that is out there that forms 20% of the universe that we still don't understand. fred whipple picked mount hopkins as the site for whipple observatory pointing out the

sites they liked. the son spotted frozen the -- observatory in mexico make up the solar observatory building the -- built in 1962. still the world's largest. finally building a four meter telescope in hawaii that will be done in a few years. we have great supporting facilities like the mirror laboratory on campus that almost every observatory in this book which is building this fantastic new mirror for this project we will talk about. it will open up the entire night sky every week. starting in five or six years. other great characters we haven't talked about. roger angell, mark fox, richard greene has been director of the large binocular telescope in mount graham which is the closing chapter of our book.

let me show you some new things that are happening. you can see why it is called the binocular telescope. it is two 8 meter mirrors which are as big as you can fabricated one piece on earth. the goal is to get them to work together because when you add them together they can simulate the sensitivity of the telescope with a mirror of 22 meters compared to eight meters. on the right is a fuzzy image but this gets astronomers excited. it is a star 200 light years away in the constellation pegasus. it was taken by instruments and an interferometer, taken in the last six months. both mirrors are working together. they also have a separate camera. each one is sensitive to red light, one sensitive to blue light. you get sensitive measurements that way. when you combine these mirrors

this is the most powerful ground based telescope on earth and is in the desert southwest and will probably be that way for many -- a decade or so. there's a move to build a 30 meter telescope in hawaii which was just approved. that is a decade away from full-blown operation. they hope to graft a giant spectrograph and to the four meter telescope out there. basically it is a spectrograph, light from stars into a rainbow of colors in simplistic terms and gaps in that rainbow shows the elements of stars in the gas cloud so this instrument would take 500 nights of observing and observe fifty million objects from galaxies and stars or more. the goal is to look at this mysterious matter called dark matter which bends light but we

don't understand what exactly it consists of. all the stars and galaxies weakens the with our eyes basically 4% of the universe. it is quite amazing we can piece so much information from that but 96% is dark matter and dark energy and we don't know what about that. the partnership with the lawrence berkeley national lab and 35 organizations around the world. coming from a public outrage standpoint if you want to travel around april 9th is mcdonald observatory -- one of the bigger star parties in the southwest happens this fall. september 28th to october 1st. the next big telescope is a four meter telescope as big as the largest one at kitt peak but a modern one with the latest control system that will be built near flagstaff. not actually in flagstaff but

southeast of flagstaff. that mirror is just about complete and they hope to take the first measurement in late 2001. right now there is no major plant but i would think once they get it built it is supported by the discovery channel we will see some documentary's on that and a chance to visit that in the future. that is called discovery channel telescope in 2011. we want to thank the university of arizona press. it was exciting to see my first book on the shelf that came out. here's how you can contact me with questions and i tossed it back to peter. >> we take questions at the end after steve has a chance to talk. have to do something here. hi am not used to these

computers. >> up in the quarter. click on that. the little one. there you go. >> let me introduce stephen strom. steve is a ph.d. astronomer from harvard university and he spent much of his career in new york, massachusetts and various other places back east and moved to to sun in 1998 and has been working for the national observatory. he has a distinguished career in astronomy but he is a renaissance man in a sense.

he is combining both sides of his brain and spent the last 20 years as a photographer primarily landscape photography and has used that talent combined with other writers, putz to produce a series of books and photographs with some very interesting text to go with them. he will talk about the formation of the solar system and are there other solar systems like ours to be found? >> thanks. i hope you don't mind if i stand. i am feeling terribly comfortable in this chair. i am a little shorter than doug isbell. i will get on the same level in 5 stand up. after lecturing for the better part of 40 years it just happened. forgive me for that. one minor correction.

we were in tucson from 1972-1983 and returned to the southwest because we couldn't not be in the southwest. it is in our blood. the question, the book contains a science highlight associated with each observatory. in the section about the very large array, an array of radio telescopes in new mexico are talked-about household assistance form and how instruments like radio telescopes can inform that understanding. i would like to link in to what was discussed in the book and also into what has been in the news recently. you read about the early results

from the kepler mission which was designed to find birth -- r --earths orbiting other stars than the sun. i thought it would be a good opportunity to link what is in the book with what is going on today. obviously our motivation in studying solar systems other than our own is to understand how they came to be and figure out whether our own solar system is a common or rare outcome of the formation of another solar system. that links in with a crucially important philosophical question which is how likely is it there are life supporting planets out there? you have probably figured out

there are 450 extrasolar systems out there if you keep up with the news. most of the known planetary systems don't look anything like our solar system. they have jupiter or higher mass planets orbiting them five times the distance of the earth as in the case of our own solar system. some of them are a few tenths the distance of the earth from the sun away from their parents sun. very different. only 10% of stars like the sun show evidence of jupiter like planets at all. that is rather curious. one thing we would like to know is why is that the case and what does it mean whether our solar system is relatively rare.

what account for the diversity of systems? we now have the tools to answer these questions and i will review with you how plans are afoot to address both of them. here is a plot. i can't resist. it contains information on the y axis, the mass of a planet in jovian masses. number one on the left hand side is one jupiter mass and a number between 0.001 and 0.0001 is earth's mass. it is one astronomical unit from the sun and jupiter is located five times as far away. as you can see from all the red crosses most of the planets that

have been discovered are more massive than jupiter and their orbits range all over the place from inside the orbit of the earth all the way to the orbit of jupiter. planetary systems are diverse. part of the pattern you see on this graph derived from the fact that the instruments used to detect these planets are spectrographs, instruments that brake light into a rainbow of colors and allow precise velocity measurements to be made of the motion of the parent star in the line of sight. a little wobble in the motion of that parent star reflects the gravitational pull of other planets. the sensitivity of those instruments is peculiarly set to

favor the discovery of relatively high mass planets relatively close to their parents' cars. that was part of the motivation for flying the kepler motion which take a advantage of another technique for finding planets, namely a so-called extrasolar planets transit. and eclipse of the parents are by a planet across the face of a star as illustrated in the top picture. when a planet crosses the face of a star the starlight is diminished or earth passing in front of a parent sun would be diminished by 1/1 millionof the brightness of the parent star. what the kepler mission did was to go into space with a relatively small telescope but steady atmosphere and stable

detector and kepler is able to see extraordinarily small changes in brightness. enough that you can see the periodic signal of an earth periodically eclipsing the light from its parent stock. what kepler has done we will have a better idea how many earths there are out there and what the pattern of planetary architecture really is. not subject to the observational bias that the radial velocity surge --search for walls, lebron restored big planets. the bias toward big planets. another seeks to understand how those architecture is came to be. the demographics of the planetary system will be

determined by ground-based telescopes in missions like kepler but understanding how they came to be requires a combination of theoretical studies, modeling of the processes that give rise to a solar system and observations to confront those models and modify the series. what we think happens is based on what we know today that stars form out o dust, largely hydrogen and helium but crucially the elements as well that make up our bodies. the dust you are supposed to think if you want to think of intercellular dust you should think of grains of sand on the beach. they are about the right size and not too far from the propositions and not exactly put together in the same way. these rotating, so-called proto- stellar cors are envelopes. eventually, land material onto a

disc which transports material into a forming star. and it is -- here's a picture. sorry about the light. want to here is a picture. these are pictures taken with the hubble space telescope in the infrared region of the spectrum showing you the light scattered off of those in falling envelops. the stock is hidden by the very opaque dust along the line of sight to the central star. you can see the disk in silhouette against the light scattered off the central star and there are multiple examples of that. eventually that in falling envelope is either exhausted or dissipated leaving you with an almost formed star followed by a disc whose mutt mass might be anywhere from a one thousand to 1/10 the mass of the central

star. here's a picture of some stars surrounded by disks. these are stars in the orion nebula. many of you have seen it in a telescope. it is the current birthplace on the order of 10,000 stars and by good fortune the light from the nebulous itself provides a background against which you can see these dusty disks in silhouette. the hubble space telescope is responsible for those images. here's what we think happens next. the dust is initially suspended in a disk whose shape looks like dark red at the top of this plot. all of you experienced in the desert what happens when we have an extremely windy day. the atmosphere gets filled with dust and you are not able to see the distant mountains anywhere near so well as you do today but

eventually you know that dust settles back down to the ground when the turbulent emotions in the atmosphere are reduced. that is what happens in a disk where you see grains of interstellar dust settle into the mid plain and as they orbit they are not all exactly in the same lane orbiting around their parents are. occasionally they bumped into one another and when they do so often times they stick to one another and such sticking episodes lead to the formation of kilometers sized bodies called planetesimals and collisions between those planetesimals ultimately lead to the formation of solid cores of planetary mass and those planets

eventually over time most of the dust is cleared out of the solar system or the secondary dust produced by collisions still ongoing in the asteroid belt between jupiter and saturn so the question is if this is the right picture for what happens what might the outcome is be and how or are they related to the conditions contained in these disks forming stars? possible outcomes are big planets, many of them orbiting close to their parents' cars. that happens 5% to 10% of the time. are there other times when you have planet tells only? how many times do you get a solar system and why? what conditions lead to the formation of a solar system? we get no planets at all and that may happen in half the cases because half of the stars

are born with stellar masked companions which appear to be disrupting disks around young stars before some of them form planets. to understand what kinds of planets form we need to peer inside planet forming disks and determine their mass and size so we can understand what conditions are in these discs and locate forming planets in the disk and we need to link the outcome system architecture, jupiter far away or close to the start. that is an example of architecture. how to link these 2 out, architectures and what tools are required? large telescopes or a raise of telescopes or telescopes like the large binocular telescope which by their ability to

synthesize using small telescopes the angular resolution that would be obtained with a very large telescope those other kinds of things you would use in order to synthesize very high angle resolution images of these discs and what i mean by end of the resolution is simple. it is the ability of the instrument to separate on the plane of the sky two objects, one close to another. a telescope -- and a ray of telescopes that deliver high angular resolution able to see objects that are very close together in the sky. the kind of tools that are used are antenna arrays. here's an example on the plains of st. augustine. these are radio telescopes operating at cm wavelength. if you imagine a radio wave the

distance between peaks is on the order of centimeters for these particular telescopes. they could be separated as far from one another as 25 miles. i have forgotten the exact number. nobody remembers anything in the age of google including me or maybe it is a. in any event there's a picture of what happens and we discussed our these telescopes have been used to probe disks that are forming planners. national radio astronomy observatory involved with european and japanese collaborators to develop an array of telescopes in chile called the large millimeter array. it operates at millimeter wave lengths and can resolve disks

around young stars 300 light years away. here's what we think happens when a planet forms in such a desk. on the left hand side is a picture of the gap in the disk and the right hand side gives you high-resolution images of those disks. you can detect those gaps. that is where the planets are forming and the sizes of those gaps tell you about the mass of the planet, location of the gap relevant to the central star tells you where the planet is forming and based on these simulations should be able to tell us what the interior regions of the disks look like, where jovian mass planets are forming and how their formation is related to the mass and size of the desk.

we should be able to learn a great deal about the demographics of planetary systems from ground-based telescopes and the kepler mission and we will be able to peer inside the birthplace of planets using radio telescopes and optical and infrared telescopes on the ground, telescopes that will produce pictures like this which will lead us to understand where planets are forming and what kinds of disks. that is it. thank you. [applause] >> the future of astronomy is remarkable. amazing you are able to see planetary orbits from the earth. you mentioned you are also doing some things with your photography avocation. are there any slides on that? >> just happen to have a couple. i am about to rip off my

microphone. >> there is a monograph of landscape interpretations in a book called earth warms published by dow lewis publishing. i will give you some examples. they don't show up well with the lights on but c-span is doing this and like can't go off. here is the cover of earth forms which is an image of the floor of the canyon. here are some mud hills in utah. here are some models in new mexico. we spend time teaching and the navajo reservation. these are in arizona south -- i

have also been challenged over the years to combine whatever vision of a brain to interpreting terrestrial landscapes to put together what i hope will be my next book which is earth and space which are landscape interpretations combined with nasa images obtained with planetary probes and landers. the left-hand image is the bottom of the crater in hawaii. on the right hand side is the near rim of a crater on the surface of mars. it was taken by think by an opportunity to photograph. these are due in the right and side on mars.

windblown sand patterns. frozen ice left hand side, carbon dioxide eyes on mars. and the oregon coast a seaside view and the sand rearranged by water and windblown sand patterns on mars. finally an eroded canyon on mars and a piece of mud hill on the left hand side near fossil beds in oregon. i have a whole series of these. are don't know if the bookstore has them but i have copies here. that is what i have been doing. and haven't quite figured out how to do the writing that would

allow my astronomical and artistic sides to combine but i have to write one have one year and the other half the other. thanks for asking the question. >> now that i asked you to talk about your recent work we need to give doug equal time too. he has some interesting projects he is working on. >> i think your book is for sale outside on the table. i did not close the loop on the image i showed of that blurry looking stalin. that was showing that instrument can reach down and take images of these discs that steve was talking about. you will look these disks and physically see the gaps where there could be planets forming. i got to know peter in the 1990s when i was working at nasa headquarters on the mars pathfinder lander which was one of my career highlights. the first time the internet was available to let people share

these missions and see the images right away. really brought those images alive to the public. i also worked on the mars missions that were not so successful in the 1990s and i am back at j.p. l in california working on communications on the next big mars mission called curiosity. it is a very large rover launched in november or december of the coming year. i probably have too many slides. i might rush through in time for questions. up until now strategy -- if peter should add anything, i am in dangerous territory talking about mars science in front of one of the world's great mars scientists. the story peter helped build was follow the water. where is the history of water on mars? it is clear from steve's images there's lots of water on mars. where it is today as a question but in the past there has been

lots of water. the question is how long did it last and was it there long enough to foster life? the atmosphere and geology of mars and eventually human astronauts to pick up these rocks. you see the large suite of missions in the recent past from pathfinder through the two rovers that are up there, spirit is stuck and its mission is probably over but opportunity is still going after six years and 25 kilometers of driving heading to its fourth or fifth major greater. the largest crater will be the time mars science will get to mars as well. it is incredible to last that long. it has been lucky but really good. this mission coming to study the atmosphere of mars in a couple years and a couple more rovers' a couple years after that. and eventually bring these

samples to earth in 2020 or 20205. this shows some images of the surface taken from orbit. many are processed in and to sun. the current mars reconnaissance or better, this telescope looking down at mars and returned incredible images of features as small as this picture of water. you can see individual rocks on the surface. they do a great job putting those out to the public showing what they show. they are artistic as well as scientifically amazing. that camera is studying the four sites we might visit with this rover. it is a robotic field geologist and roving chemistry laboratory as well as a weather station. it has a large robot arm and a camera similar to the one on

pathfinder but also a laser that can fire and vaporize a rock 20 feet away. the science revolves around the idea was mars habitable and for how long in the past and do the rocks on mars preserve evidence of that? there is pathfinder. on the left is one of the two rovers up there right now and on the right is curiosity which is 2,000 pounds. it is an amazing leap forward in technology and science. that post has a camera and the laser beam. the robot arm carries 75 lbs. of equipment including a drill that dumps them inside the rover into

an organic chemistry lab. the first real mineral logical laboratory sent to mars. we have been looking at individual elements that you couldn't tell what it was combined with so they basically shrunk the laboratory down to the size of a shoebox and that is inside the rover. it helps to look for water in the soil and measure the radiation environment for future human missions and powered by a radioisotope power source as were 2 dozen missions launched by nasa over the years carrying plutonium with electricity. the idea was it could go to higher latitudes and travel much farther and work all winter and all night when you can't use solar energy. to kerri ten pound plutonium and the heat given off to create electricity which is stored in a battery and instruments dropped

from the electricity and the idea is the mission could last. to give you a sense of the hardware every one of these is a little spacecraft in itself. we hope to get images that are coming down. the last few tried to do this and had technical problems. we should have a movie of the landing and the robot arm carries a magnifying glass which will give us very high-grade images of the rocks and function like a geologist magnifying glass on mars. this gives you a sense of the shape in the arrows show like an apollo capsule but bigger. the biggest capsule ever flown in space. it launches next november or december and lands through a crazy maneuver called a sky crane. it is too big to use the air bags that work for pathfinder.

it comes in on a tether. it comes unlike the other one with a parachute and a heat shield and dropped andy to their places it on its wheels and ready to go, the top part fly away and crashes nearby and we are ready to do science. that is the hope. this is where we are thinking of sending it. the places have not been chosen yet. these four places will be the best studied places on mars. you see the mars phoenix which peter worked on which was controlled from tucson and landed in the north pole. you see the places we're looking at in the white. there are four place is being considered. one is like the mississippi delta of mars. one is basically a lake that had calm, steady water for many centuries.

one had some of the oldest exposed rocks on mars or rocks that hadn't been changed in four billion years. can find those on earth anymore because rain and wind have washed that elements away but on mars these rocks still exist. the last one is a giant crater with the five, different layers showing the history of the environment of the climate of mars rover would drive over to this after it lands but basically crawled up this amount for two or three years to study these layers in great detail. here is a perspective on that which was leaked to sell from a public outreach standpoint. the air bags work so well in the past in pathfinder. the six minute challenge of the entry decent landing. 90% of the energy with the

parachutes and the heat shield. the last bit on the rocket power is the exciting part. to give you a sense of scale various the heat shield with a person standing next to it. the size is -- the size of the parachute. a few pictures from inside the clean room at j.p. l. you can follow this for a few more months. we have curiosity cam. live on the internet you see technicians working on the spacecraft. it is having a vibration tests done but most any day you can log in and watch it being built and tested. couple times a day we have a live chat to answer questions. we have a million viewers of that web cam. it is packed together with the rover underneath. there it is with the wheels

deployed. to many details to discuss that you see the torque of these wheels and so many typical car's on earth like a jeep or an abrams tank. you can see the port of these wheels is analogous to what a tank can deliver. the image of a nuclear power source on this mission that will travel farther to high latitudes flown on the voyager missions when they were still going after 34 years. for the first time in fifteen or 20 years they turned the voyagers the other day and took measurements for six hours and turned back and found out they kept on trucking. at the edge of the solar system where the sun's influence ends

in a big bubble where the boundary ends and in a few years they will be in true interstellar space. you have the cassini mission of flying around the saturn system for six years still going strong and next is pluto. we will get there in 2015 for the first close-up images ever of that planet. we discovered -- this gives you a sense what these generators look-alike. there are no moving parts. they have graphite shells and protection designed to survive access and work on the order of 15 to 20 years minimum. you can see relative of this pie chart chances of any accidents are the little slice down below in the yellow.

really unlikely that it will ever get off of the launch site. the impact of water does not release this plutonium. there is a very small chance of an accident for some amazing scientific return. there is the rover learning to take a walk. if you want to know more there are some websites where you can follow the curiosity cam. launch is scheduled for november of 2011. if it launches on time you will get to mars in august of 2012. >> thank you. [applause] time for a little participation. we have two microphones. those who would like to ask questions make your way to a microphone. we have four topics. the observatories of the

southwest, formation of planetary systems and the ability to detect them is becoming more profound every year. we have landscape photography compared with space photography and the curiosity mission. four topics you can ask questions about. are have a question for you since this is a subject close to my heart. the curiosity rover have a tremendous suite of instruments. how did they approach the question whether mars was inhabited or not and what are their capabilities in that regard? life is our most profound questions these days. >> tough question because the mission is not looking for life but the conditions, organic chemistry to support life. there is an organic chemistry lab inside the rover as big as

this table. it carries three, of devices to analyze samples and to see if these carbon hydrogen molecules exist in the right form and combinations to support life. i mentioned the minerals being looked at that were in water for a long time. those questions are the heart of this matter. if there are fossilized elements in the soil they won't be seen but there's a chance they could be seen. the question of life or not is in the future. >> steve, when you go out to photograph landscapes in the natural environment un image of mars you are looking for or do you take thousands of pictures and then compare afterwards? how do you take a martian picture honors?

on earth? >> interesting to enter a psychologically. i can tell you if have an image of mars or have inculcated into my subconscious images of other planets gathered over the decades but i can tell you the procedure are followed in order to make that combination. i have 30 years of partially organized images. i have a pretty good idea where things are. i looked at the 8,000 or so images that had been processed or readily available through e kp o site. i it selected a subset of a couple hundred of those that i might have taken have an on the mountaintop on mars or standing

on the martian surface and i was able to do the cross comparison in my mind. the specific answer to your question is the images on earth came first influenced by planetary surface images or decades-long experience looking at the desert all-around world. how that has been -- i do know those martian images were done by imagining myself as if i were on mars equipped with my camera. >> question from the audience. >> i want to ask steve if his plan to use the high-rise camera photos at all. >> i have. i have and i plan both.

>> the prototype of that high-rise camera is here on campus. i want to ask peter to give an update on the phoenix program. >> the phoenix program lasted five months on the northern plains of mars lat 68 north. we tried to recover in the next summer season which was the mars year is 687 earth days. was a long time later when the co2 vice sublimed away. we tried to recover signals but were unsuccessful. we tried five or six times and thoroughly surge the radio space it was capable of transmitting. we have the data sets that are archived and available to the public. we have web pages that show our

images and articles in scientific journals about our results. the mission unfortunately is over. we have started the next one. we are not dead yet. we have another mission that will go to an asteroid and return samples. we will find out this summer if we win the competition against two of emissions and that will bring a tremendous amount of research funds to the university of arizona. another question from the audience? >> i am not a representative of goodyear tire but i would like to know as far as the materials that you use in the cylinders for the drive trains and stuff for curiosity. what would be our material be made of or the composition? >> good question. i don't know. probably a carbon composite material. i will be sure to get a way to

answer your question. >> thanks a lot. >> other questions? don't be shy. here's your opportunity. please come forward and speak into the microphone. >> what is the atmosphere pressure on mars? >> 1%? >> around 1%. almost entirely carbon dioxide. >> the another question i sometimes read about with meteor's that came from mars to land on earth. is that science fiction? how would you get the here? >> we have 50 meteorite that we know are from mars. >> how do you know that? >> how do you know they don't? there are two ways. when these huge impact hit mars that have enough force to throw rocks outside the g