been and to look ahead to what can be. now is the time to restore the promise of america. [cheers and applause] many americans have given up on this president, but they haven't ever thought about giving up. not on themselves, not on each other, and not on america. what is needed in our country today is not complicated or profound, it doesn't take a special government commission to tell us what america needs. what america needs is jobs, lots of jobs. [cheers and applause] >> know this, america: our problems can be solved. [cheers and applause] our challenges can be met. the path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place, and i'm asking you to choose that future. [cheers and applause] i'm asking you to rally around a

set of goals for your country, goals in manufacturing, energy, education, national security and the deficit. real, achievable plans that will lead to new jobs, more opportunity and rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation. that's what we can do in the next four years, and that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. [cheers and applause] >> find any speech from both the democratic and republican conventions online at the c-span video library. >> william clancy talks about the people who control the mars exploration rovers from nasa's jet propulsion laboratory and the experiments they're conducting. it's about an hour, 15. [applause] >> thank you.

my presentation today is about the mars exploration rovers which are twin robotic laboratories that began operating, working on mars. one of which is still being used to explore the martian surface today. so my story is about how people relate to these robotic systems. the mars exploration rover mission, also known as mer, challenges how we usually think about the role of robots in space exploration. it provides a new way of understanding how computer tools and a proper social organization can be orchestrated to extend human capabilities. for over 40 years, we have been

exploring other planets and their moons with robotic spacecraft. whether flying by beautiful blue neptune like voyager in the 1970s, orbiting saturn or roving mars like mer. these spacecraft must be computer controlled because the communication time delay at the speed of light and their great distance makes it impractical to control them directly from weather. now, we can joystick a rover on the earth's moon. it takes about one and a half seconds for the signal to be received. but at the speed of light, mars is at least five minutes away, and sometimes 20 minutes. radio time to jupiter is on average about 45 minutes. and saturn is twice that. when the new horizon spacecraft reaches pluto and its moon in

2015 after a nine-year flight, it will take about four hours before we know whether the mission was a success. and it'll be long gone, past pluto by that time. given the great distances, we can't go to these places in person anytime soon. so to carry out a scientific study, we must repeatedly reprogram and redirect the spacecraft, specifying where to go and how the various instruments are going to be used. science teams working together for five or ten years or more interpret the data that's returned and discuss with engineers what's interesting and what's possible to do next. so at its heart the story of planetary ec plo ration today is -- exploration today is about the relation of people and robotic spacecraft. machines that are actually complex laboratories capable of operating in extreme cold with

little power, packaged to handle the vibrations of launch and work for years without repair. sending these scientific instruments throughout the solar system is one of the great successes of the computer age, and it will surely mark our place in history of science and exploration. what these missions also show, that we understand how to design machines and organize people so everything fits. and that's my story today, how the design of the spacecraft, as you see mer here, the organization of people, the software tools and their work schedule makes it possible for scientists to work on mars. now, on the scale of the universe, mars is right next door. it's about nine months' travel using conventional chemical

rockets. mars is about half the diameter of the earth. but it lacks oceans, and so it has roughly the same surface area as the earth. and that's a lot of landscape for us to explore. the climate is often colder than the antarctic with great extremes during the day. but on a summer afternoon on the mars equator, you could survive wearing something like a lightweight scuba suit and a pressurized helmet. now, actually, a scuba suit might have been appropriate three or four billion years ago. we believe then that mars was more like the earth; wet and with a thicker atmosphere. one striking elevation map created from orbit shows the lower areas colored blue and suggests that large parts of the northern hemisphere might have been covered in seas, and there is evidence for ancient

shorelines. so what happened? did life form on mars? why was its atmosphere lost? are microorganisms living today below the surface? and if life formed there, did can it form separately from earth, or are we related? these are the big questions that make many of us very excited about mars. now, as i've said, it's not practical to directly control a spacecraft on mars because of the speed of a radiowave which is the same as the speed of light. and it causes a time delay in seeing and affecting what is happening. but by acting ip directly -- indirectly through computer programs that monitor and control the rovers and their instruments throughout the workday, people have been working on mars for over eight years.

two teams of scientists and engineers operating the twin rovers called spirit and opportunity have driven together over 25 miles of sand dunes in and out of a dozen craters and climbed hills hundreds of feet high to analyze the layers of deposits. and they've also stopped to admire the views and take photographs. the scientists have scraped the rock surface, microphotographed their texture and analyzed their molecular composition. in february of 2004, a month after the landing, i had the privilege to observe mission operations at jet propulsion lab in pasadena for almost two weeks. the two rover teams had twin facilities on different floors of a given building at jpl, and they lived and worked according to the time zone of their rover. because the martian day is longer than earth's, that means

that they reported for work about 40 minutes later each day. if you were at the gate of jpl, you'd see people coming in 40 minutes later than they came in the day before. the main science meeting room was darkened so they could orient to what they called mars local time. each team had about 75 scientists and student researchers organized into what were called science theme groups; min roll and geochemistry, soils and rocks, joe oldy, atmosphere -- geology, atmosphere. they were arranged at their own tables, and they gave presentations interpreting what they were learning and what they'd like to do tomorrow on mars. the long-term planning group sitting off to one side reviewed the overall mission engineering objectives, measures of how far they had traveled, the number of images they had taken, how the

instruments had been used and how these goals affected the plan for tomorrow. in the words of steve squires, the principal investigator of the mer mission, this has been the first overland expedition on another planet. applying the rovers' tools at chosen spots along the martian landscape, we've learned how water has affected the chemistry of soils and rocks, and we found places in the past that were similar to where life thrives on earth. home plate, for example, an area behind the columbia hills, is about 100 meters across. it might be a remnant of hot springs like those we find at yellowstone national park. so this is how planetary field science proceeds, by recognizing minerals, formations and processes that are familiar to what we understand on our home planet. the success of what's called

comparative planetology on mars is partly why it's such an exciting place to study. we're on another planet, but it looks and feels a bit like home. now, just as the mer scientists make analogies with earth, my study of field science on mars started by comparing it to how field science is done on earth. since the late 1990s, i had been joining mars scientists on an expedition in the canadian arctic, a nearly lifeless landscape called heartened crater on devon island. the scientists chose this place because it is mars-like, allowing them to understand how and where life exists in extreme environments. and the expedition itself reveals how people might live and work on mars if they were studying the landscape there. and that's of interest to

mission planners. so when devon -- on delaware von i followed the scientists in the field. it was a big topic at nasa, exploration, but we had never -- even in cognitive science, my home discipline -- had ever discovered exploration in the field as people really explore a new landscape. how did they decide where to go? what tools did they use? i documented how they collected and organized samples that they would analyze with instruments in their laboratories back on earth. i studied how they diagrammed and described their work in their notebooks and how this related to their published work. i observed especially how they tended to work alone or in small groups. but observing the scientists in pasadena, i was taken by the incredible contrast. the scientists are indoors, in a

darkroom, part of a large team doing everything by consensus. people from different disciplines are required to work together. geologists, who in the arctic would race to the nearest outcrop on a hill to survey the landscape, were working with minnologists who wanted the rover to stop and take a new sample every few meters along the way. and among them were laboratory scientists who had never done field work before. so working remotely through a rover creates a new way of doing field science. and this new practice changes the scientists and leaves them to relate to their tools, the rovers, in unexpected ways. so how could the sign at this time -- scientists work together under these conditions, how could they accept the anonymity of the mission team where their names would never be associated in the public press with any of

the decisions of what rock to analyze, how long to stay and what the data means? how could people used to seeing, touching and roving at will study a landscape through a program's laboratory? how was it possible at all to do field science on another planet while remaining here on earth? let alone keep these people engaged for eight years. the key is that although the scientists can't directly see and control what is happening, the design of the over instruments and computer software makes it possible for them to be virtually present on mars. through the combination of stereo and spectral images, and being able to move around and scuff the soil and scrape the rocks, they experience being there. for example, steve squires describes their landing. quote: we realized we had landed in a crater, probably eagle

crater or, and that's where we were. and then we noticed 800 meters away, maybe we can make it, there's endurance crater. wouldn't it be great to actually get there? squires' descriptions are all first person. we had landed, we noticed, maybe we can make it. in this imaginative projection, the scientists become the rover. and this experience of being on mars is essential to the success of the mission. it enables them to actually do field science. to know what rocks and soils are nearby and what they can reach or how long it might take to get somewhere. they use a combination of 3-d images, computer graphics and simulations often overlaying them. these visualizations allow them to point to places, give them names and control precisely

where new photographs are taken and where the instruments are placed. example, they can draw a yellow bounding box to specify where a camera should zoom in for a more detailed image. each photograph can be used like a map of an area on mars because its location relative to the rover is precisely register inside the planning program. as we move in from panoramas used for navigating to images of outcrops to the microphotographs, we can see and mark up details. even small rocks and patches of soil might be named and become targets for a spectral analysis or a microphotograph. combining these planning tools in their imagination, the scientists can work as if they were on mars. jim rice, a geologist on the

mission, said: i put myself out there in the scene, the rover, with two boots on the ground trying to figure out what -- where to go and what to do. how to make that what we're observing with the instruments. day in and day out it was always the perspective of being on the surface and trying to draw on your own field experience in places that might be similar. david demoray, a biologist at nasa ames, described it this way: the first few months of the mission they have these huge charts on the wall engineering drawings of the rover with all of these dimensions. we'd have some geometric question. well, can we see this, can we reach that? is this rock going to be in shade, or will it be in the sun? the -- we'd go and we'd stand and we'd stare at those charts. and over time we stopped doing

it so much because we began to gain a sense of the body. that's projecting yourself into the rove. rover. it's just an amazing capability of the human mind that you can sort of retool yourself. so acting through the robots they control, the scientists look around, they manipulate materials, and they move over the landscape. they may pretend to be the rover, crouching down and gesturing with an arm to better imagine what's reachable. and through the eyeglasses of special cameras, they can directly see iron minerals in the rocks. they're transformed in a way to a kind of cyborg on mars. now, that's all pretty different from doing field science on earth. and this is an odd kind of expedition for another reason. usually sign at this times go --

scientists go off in different directions, different times, using their own tool. for mer the entire team was altogether. 150 scientists and engineers balancing together, as it were, like on a huge skateboard creeping over the sanding up and down the hills -- sands, up and down the hills in craters, meters at a time for acres. so it's something like being on a ship, on an early voyage of discovery. the scientists and the sailing crew were all having to travel together. they had to negotiate how long are we going to stay here, where are we going to go next? and what should we do at each site? and this requires a well coordinated understanding of their roles, schedules, resources, long-term plans and a clear chain of command. if you visited the science and engineering coordination meeting during the prime mission which was the first 90 days of landing

on mars in 2004, same thing we're going through now with curiosity during these 90 days, you could see the scientists up front -- on the bridge, as it were -- with huge displays of the martian surface that lay before them. behind the scientists as if below decks on the ship were the engineers, arrayed behind big, square monitors showing the ship's power, memory and an evolving timeline for tomorrow's work. now, this coordination meeting would occur about 6 p.m., just before din canner local mars time -- dinner local mars time every day. the scientists arrived at work about three hours before. mid afternoon rover time. and they were ready to receive photographs and other analyses that were coming back from the rovers' work during the day. so, you see, the mers are solar powered, so they work roughly on a 9 to 5 schedule.

every morning each rover would receive a new program for its day's work. so between dipper time on mars -- dinner time on mars and sunrise, the sign at this times and engineers must finalize the plan for the next day, and this requires a second shift of engineers who refine and test that program before it's sent to mars, what's called the uplink. now, if that weren't enough, keep in mind we were simultaneously operating two rovers on mars for over fife years -- five years. spirit and opportunity were, in fact, two missions operating in parallel. they had their own meeting rooms, as i said, for science operations at jpl. they had their own engineering programming teams, 6 p.m. coordination meetings and their own cache, of course, of free ice cream. [laughter] but the teams shared a single mission control center where the

engineers attend to monitors, a lot like you could find in houston's mission control. their computers are connected to banks of satellites and earth stations that allow them to communicate with the rovers. so this common engineering activity sharing in the room that i showed a moment ago required two missions to be coordinated in a special way. if you look at the map of mars with the landing sites of the two rovers at mer b and spirit, mer a, you'll notice we landed the rovers about 180 degrees apart near the equator. now, most people will realize that the sun angle is going to be important because of the rovers being solar powered. so that's why we put them near the equator. but few people realized how the geography of the mission relates to the problem of commanding the rovers every day. placing spirit and opportunity

on opposite sides of mars allowed a single command center and management organization operating around the clock to focus on one rover at a time. controlling them as separated by a half day on mars. so this illustrates very clearly why understanding and designing the mission has to be comprehensive, as what we call a total system. the choice of landing sites itself affects the scheduling of facilities and operations in many pasadena. in pasadena. so i've described the logistics, the tools and the mental projections involved in working on mars. but there's another angle to how people talk and think about the rover that i found fascinating and very strange. it's how the rover becomes the hero of the story in official reports on the web, in the press and even in the scientists' own

publications. what i've learned is that anthroto moretizing the rover is both practical and poetic. it facilitates the scientists' work, helping them to work together as a team. and it provides a way for them to express their feelings. nasa's 2001 press release announcing the mer project epitomizes the personification of the robots. quote: in 2003 nasa plans to launch a relative of the now-famous 1997 mars pathfind or rover. this larger cousin is expected to reach the surface of the red planet in january 2004. this new robotic explorer will be able to trek up to 100 meters across the surface each martian day. scott hubbard, mars program director at nasa headquarters said, quote: this mission will give us the first-ever robotic field geologist on mars.

now, the metaphors in this poetic narrative such as referring to the earlier mission as mers cousin simplify for the public's understanding. but they also serve as a kind of cultural cheerleading in praise of america's new robotic explorer. but years later the tone was distinctly sentimental when the associated press reported spirit's demise. quote: spirit, the scrappy robotic geologist that captivated the world with its antics in on mars -- before getting stuck in a sand trap -- is about to meet its end after six productive years. so the drama of the rovers is held here in the genre of a lost person. spirit is said to be in commune caddo, and it's personified like characters in a disney animation. quote: as far as dibbling rival i -- sibling rivalry went,

opportunity was the overachiever while spirit was every bit the drama queen underdog. [laughter] >> ray artisan said he will remember spirit as a fighter. quote: it wouldn't quit, just like the little engine that chugged up the hill. [laughter] now, sometimes this poetry appears a bit overdone, but then we find quite serious descriptions of the rover's character and its accomplishments, like a moral in the chirp's bedtime -- children's bedtime story. the plucky rover will be remembered for demystifying mars to the masses. this is a story of perseverance. talking about the rovers in in this way, in the third person, kes it possible for the

scientists to tell us about themselves. how they feel about the rovers and the challenges they encountered. this is a personal emotional interpretation that you will not find in the journal "science and nature." now, this metaphor of the robotic explorer actually appeared in the first book about planetary spacecraft in the 1970s, and it has become a journalistic cliche. a few years ago andrew shaken subtitled his book: intrepid explorers of the red planet. now, the book is about the passion of the scientists for mars, but in the poetic wrapping, the intrepid explorers are the spacecraft. over the past decade, it became a conceptually, somewhat confused debate between the advocates of science meaning

robotic spacecraft and the advocates of exploration meaning human space flight. partly, this was a debate about the control for money. but a genuine question is as the distances make programming more and more difficult and the robots become more able to identify what's worth studying. some have summarized the dichotomy as human explorers versus robot explorers. at a stanford university symposium that i attended in 2008 called humans and robots in exploration, one topic was quoted to us as when does the human become the tool of choice for solar system exploration. by this phrasing people and robots are both tools. and then they ask, very puzzled now, what is the right mix.

of course, viewing people and robots as interchangeable tools from the start is absurd. i believe some of the difficulties that arise here are occurring because it's hard for us to understand this new working relationship between people and robots. spacecraft that fly by a planet and carry out a canned program and send the data back is a one-time package are very different from mobile laboratories with sensors and manipulators that are programmed by us for every day, for years. and it gives a totally different experience to the scientists in carrying out the mission. this new way of working, which mer epitomizes, can be difficult to think about because it's a relationship among people, technology and work processes. it's not a property or a capability that can be ascribed

to people or robots independently, and that's why the term "robotic geologist" is so misleading. the relation of people and robots in practical work is difficult even for the scientists to describe. mer scientists have said they could do in a day what took the rover many months, but they're thinking mostly about those long drives. astronauts would leave the rovers in the dust, but there's no shortcut for the hours required today a spectral -- required to do a spectral analysis or a pixel by pixel scan of an infrared panorama. nobody's used instruments like this in the field before. ..

it becomes part of us. workers are reaching out mer science touching a rock on mars. there is a difficulty talking about this. the title is postcards from mars:the first topographer on the red planet. the panorama, refers to himself. he writes that the rovers allow us to be able to assess the first photographers on the red planet. he puts scale quote to round

photographers but i would have put them around on the red planet. because he and his colleagues took the pictures but they are not actually on mars. they are photographers. how should we describe this? who sent the postcards? some of this poetry is revealing that this joint action between machinery and robotic systems and people is difficult to think about and describe. these phone cameras many of you are carrying in your pockets provide a good example of how viewing robots as being free agents robotic geologists and giving them credit for doing the work can easily arise. cameras like this today are all computerized. when you print the buttons, computations determine the exposure and other settings. they might even decide you are

taking a portrait and will focus accordingly and compensate for backlighting and still you are going to say i took this photograph. separate the button press and the creation of the photograph by 30 to two forty million miles and that in overnight delay. now you want to say spirits took this photograph today. all the people in between dropped out. it is a narrative short hand. philosophically it raises the question we call agency and it is at the heart of this cumins versus robots dichotomy. ascribing agency to the rovers appears throughout the scientists's writings. for example in the planetary reports in 2007, a lead mer scientists provides the technical summary of the

science. the title spirit and opportunity:martian geologists'. in a clear presentation about agent prophesies that formed and altered the materials near the mer landing sites, alternates poetic attributions about the rover's actions with observations and compliance. after exploring endurance greater opportunity drove itself to investigate the heat shield it used during landing. next to the heat shield we noticed the only rocks seen for kilometers on the plains. opportunities investigation of this rock revealed it as a nickel iron meteorite. a very exciting finding as it was our first discovery of a meteorite on another planet. since then spirit has discovered

two others. spirit costs on quickly to how to recognize meteorites. when i first heard this term robotic geologists' i thought it was just height. unfair to the people who were actually doing the work and it turned the mission's story into a kind of puppet show or something like the wizard of oz. pay no attention to the scientists behind the curtain. are worried this would confuse the public that was obscuring the real story of how people were able to work on mars. people made me begin to wonder should -- why should we send scientists to mars if we have robotic geologist working there? i have already mentioned how viewing the rover, as the third person on mars provides a way for scientists to talk about themselves. over time i have come to realize this perspective has many

practical benefits. superimposing the rover on orbital images which is why this image is so funny provide the bird's eye view of the region we have been exploring. we hover over that land skid. we see mer from orbit. the third person viewing the roker expressed vividly in computer composites like this that showed a rover working alone by mars. makes you wonder who took this photograph. does this express a wish for us to be present and to see the rover? does it make tangible the images scientists and engineers are in that inning in their minds? is it another practical production? another way of understanding the rover's orientation which makes the field science possible? here we see the interplay of

hard, imagination, science and technology all motivating and enabling each other. other less dramatic computer graphics composed with mars images used routinely to orient planning and programming of roots and targets. such third person views provide an important way of locating the rover and by projection locating yourself in the work on mars. yet there is another way of relating to the rover. the second person perspective. when the lead mer rover planner said he viewed the rover as a partner i was shocked. he told me the rover and i work as a team. he didn't mean it was the same as working with a j p l colleagues. he was using the best words he could find relating to the rover as the peer. to express how he delegated work to the rover. in the plan portions of the

roots that he didn't have sufficient time or data to analyze and program himself. he relates to the rover in terms of what i do and what you do. for him this second person, the relation is practical. the rover is an agent you can rely on. talking about spirit and opportunity as investigating and driving and so on has taken hold because it fits so well the convention of scientific writing in which we depersonalize our contributions. reports focus on the bulls, the methods and the data. the emphasis is on mars, not the scientists or how they do their work. individual scientists are also properly wary of taking the limelight's. everyone knows they work as a team. i was surprised to find out this

phrase robotic geologist was pivotal in designing the roker itself and promoting teamwork. a central concept in the original mission proposal is the robotic geologists' that's a physical surrogate for the science team. unlike the boxy spacecraft we send to war before flyby other planets, mer was designed to personify a scientist. with stereo vision, mobile with a hand lens and other sensors. combining the disciplinary team in one persona mer realizes the vision that they call one instrument, one team. the team's ability to identify with the rovers fundamental to mer's designed.

he said the whole idea is these fools work together. look at the discovery of silicon. the mobility system by which he means the rover's wheels french up some soil. we notice a wide angle camera. we did it with the many tests to check for iron. it looks interesting and we go over and figure out its molecular composition. everything works together. having instruments that work together encourage the team's to work together. this was squire's vision which he called science systems engineering. you have those sensors and each provides complementary bits of knowledge. you are going to use the payload to the full list advantage. if people look at it as being entirely at their disposal. if you are out in the field

doing geology with your field partner you might be arguing what this rock means or what that rock means that you won't be arguing about should we use the rock hammer or the compass? or arguing with many test guys. arguing with chemists about exploration? to appreciate that you need to know the design and organization contrasts with, planetary mission. the cassini spacecraft now orbiting saturn has 12 instrument teams each with its own principal investigator. remember mer had one principal investigator. curiosity had 10 or even. these teams are matrixed and have different turf they're

interested in studying the planet saturn, its rings, the moon titan and the other icy moon is. jockeying for control and resources. who gets to use their instrument now and for how long. the scale and reality of being two boots on the ground enables and requires a completely different technical design and social organization. rather than features on a planetary scale seen for more butterfly in by mer's instrument targets are palpable and directly manipulable. viewing the rover as a geologist physical surrogate makes sense so typically a robot is viewed as an automated machine that act without human intervention but the vision of the robotic style

adjust -- geologist is broader. instead of replacing the scientists the robotic geologist was conceived as a collaboration tool. a way of debt -- getting disciplinary teams to work together. it didn't replace them. it provided a way for them to work together. very different. combined with the virtual reality planning tools and commanding every day that enables frequent individual contributions the mer exploration system helped scientists to forge a new kind of field science collaboration. it made from agents on mars working through a mobile programable laboratory. many people speak about humans and robots in space as if there is a choice. human explorers or robotic floors. relationship to these computer-controlled devices is more complicated.

envisioning the field science the scientist become the rover. a first person view. they are on mars. programming the rover an engineer may view the work as a joint accomplishment. a second person view. working as an ensemble, acting together as hardware and software systems everything turns inside out in this third person perspective. the rover become the team and they can write about its exploit proudly. i would paraphrased that associated press story about spirit's demise by saying this intrepid team of scientific explorers will be remembered for defining laws to the masses. this is a story of perseverance. the scientists and engineers have invented a new practice of planetary field science. these are their footprints on

mars. the robotic geologist metaphor in this matter for the team tolerates and in some ways rebel in their anonymity. the more fantastic the historic exploits of spirit and opportunity to more proud you can feel to face small part in this mission. this project in a personal ambition on to the group's efforts and its accomplishments is no small part of our power and july as human beings. the accomplishments of mer are intricately based on relating technology to the psychology and sociology of people. it is a textbook example of how to design a complex system of people and machines so reaching a conclusion the mer mission objective was to travel a third

of a mile, taking dozens of photographs and learning something about the history of mars. in this extended mission over and unimaginable eight years we have traveled 25 miles an taken 300,000 images and the science itself could sell a textbook or two. with a somewhat elderly craft arrived with opportunity added deep crater 14 miles wide with clay soils and a new players to investigate. we had the last marcion when there with his commanding view of endeavour crater sheltered toward the north to better catch the sun on our dusty solar panels. this image from an amazing panorama was completed in may. we were working on mars for

3,000 marcian days, a voyage of scientific discovery continues. using a high-resolution images and scans from or but we have identified an interesting mineralogy on endeavour crater's rim. since arriving we have been exploring cape york and we might set a course, opportunity will spend its last days or years here. as you all know, another mars rover, relative of mer, landed in dale crater. she will climb and explore the central mounds of mount shark over several years. it powers three miles high over the floor of the crater and has been built up over two billion years. we will be especially looking for carbon based materials that

will be essential for life. the mars science weber tory is loaded with new instruments and weighs about a metric ton. the name science laboratory instead of robotic geologist, the mer experience clarified the true nature of these spacecraft as tools for the scientists and this time they will place themselves more publicly on the driver's seat. but there will be more poetry. like spirit and opportunity, m s l has been personified by a nickname. they call her curiosity. and perhaps you can already see how this will play out. thank you for your attention. [applause]

>> thank you for that. we have some of your questions ready here but we will continue to take them. we will talk another 20 to 25 minutes and i do ask that if you have time constraints and need to leave that you do that by the back because it will acquire that with the state for all the questions. we mentioned the book signing. the books in session are available in the gift shop which is right outside the door here. you will be staying for signing. >> i will. as a civil servant of the government i don't perceive any royalty. the price is very low and i hope you will all enjoy it. >> let's talk about the idea that these machines have treated us to mars. is it ultimately the target to put the human being there? >> for sure.

it is very surprising -- all the scientists i spoke to really want to be there. they sense that they need to be there in order to do exploration of the way it should be done. part of it has to do with all those limitations i talked about. they want to go different places. we have accomplished a lot more with six people than six people standing on a skateboard together. your point about anticipating or preparing has become more and more real. i don't think we understood that so well before mer. that we could for reasonable cause to put these rovers in different places around mars and figure out where would we want to go? where should we land? where should the human being landing be? >> what is the time line? >> right to your congressman. it is all about priorities. >> one of the things a human could accomplish in the limitations of the rovers,

rovers are dependent on the sun and need to stay near the equator. it strikes me some of the science we are missing out on has to do with the polar caps and the water systems and that sort of thing. is there anything that will have to wait until humans get up there? >> we have had a lander, phoenix, in 2008 went to the mars arctic. there we were looking specifically at landing on ice as we did in understanding how ice causes different formations and understanding their chemistry. there are limitations. with curiosity, we have learned this combines retrofire and soft landing of the sky crane. that is quite general. for the air bags we were limited relially to areas where the

atmosphere was enough to slow down. people want to land in an area like the grand canyon that extends 3,000 miles. to do that kind of a landing would be very tricky but we have gotten pretty close. >> and the percentage. how much have various programs extended? >> i described this with a couple scientists as being an easter egg hunt. we need to know, how much will you explore before you see in elba legs and what is to be found and is there any way you know? you can tell quite a bit from orbit about different photography's. there are caverns where longitudes have collapsed and we see skylights?

expect a mission that was recently announced to send the rover down into this law but to because a lot faster biologists think that is were likely would be to they especially protected from radiation. maybe there's more moisture down there. there are different habitats might be the word to use. the answer is we have no idea what percentage we have. we have scratched the surface. think of it as landing -- the vikings landing in north america. viking is appropriate having the 1976 mission, asking how much do you see before you understand north america as a whole. >> love this question. how do you know what time it is on mars? >> two answer is to that. you have a special mars watch that tells you the time. will whole issue of time on mars

is very complicated. once you get into it you realize time on earth is more complicated than you thought it was. what you thought of not leave years something simplified from something more complicated. actually, there was a dissertation about time on mars on that topic. i would just point out the whole issue that mars has 24 hours, and a second on mars is longer than a second on earth. that sounds very weird. why not just say it is more than 24 hours? that would make the clock look rather funny. i thought a second was like a physical notion like a kilogram or a meter but it is not.

>> as you come through the sciences with planetary science, you can't always stay on the same clock as the rest of human beings. observations from the great observatories. you need to stay in a room with blackout window sheets and you are working all night. if you are working on a russian mission does that take a toll on the body even though you are earthbound? >> absolutely. when i did my two weeks in pasadena i found a time when i reached some stability so that were not figuring out how to program everything but i chose a time, 6:00 on mars was 5:00 in pasadena. and every day got later and later. easy to get on board and did the same for phoenix as well. the scientists were just moving. the bottom line is it affects different people differently.

they have gone ahead and continue to do it. they're doing it now for curiosity. scientists in pasadena are on martian time. there is a wrinkle that they don't need to be exactly 40 minutes. they should report for work when the data starts coming down. that has to do with when the relay satellites, odyssey or one of the other satellite so we give them a special schedule. bottom line, you can't keep the team going like that for a long. they have families. some are european or japanese and have more time zones to worry about. >> what advantages are there in having humans orbiting mars while interfacing with robotics rather than conducting it from earth? >> great question. that is how it is going to be for sure.

when i have discussed with scientists and engineers we have said we have blue sky meetings where we bring people together and we do imaginings of that is the case and let's say you are on the moon and have something like these mers you drop them off with your pressurized rover and vehicle, and there are all kinds of possibilities. we will definitely have program devices. take a picture and let us know when you get there. >> life on mars. i doubt any scientists expect to have another eyeball staring back. no one was surprised -- >> the joke is martians the jumping around so they can't be caught. that came from 1976.

>> when you talk about life on mars you're talking from tiny to microbial. >> it is going to be tiny. >> say the mission finds there is or was wife, what next? how does that help us? >> you will be analyzing -- a biological fine probably of the time, of the era. you want to know is it dna? do you recognize how amino acids are put together? does there appear to be something like dna and rna that consist of other amino acids in a different order but just a different program? the significance is two cited. one, there will be some possibility that that means light started first on mars and we are martians.

or life was independently created on mars. which doesn't look that lifelike, habitable. now we find thousands of planets out there and we will soon know of many where life could be. that will suggest it is more likely those planets the kepler mission is finding could have wife on it that will raise probability. >> is there and all of this bowl whether expressed implied? when nasa goes in search of possible life forms is there any idea of exploring places for human colonization? expansion of were the human race lives and works? >> it is a parallel line here. definitely people who are thinking more about if you look at their articles they are saying look at this cavern here, this ravine. we could have a habitat on the

wall inside. they are saying the water could come from the ice over year. that is what they are in that inning. the direct connection is not that strong right now because there seems to be water ice around the planet and that is something we would want. >> audience members wants to know about recording sound on mars. >> this was an issue for phoenix and there was a problem. look on the j p l website and there is an instrument for that. >> somebody should have done a simulation what it would sound like. if you were to blow against the microphone it could sound like a hurricane but it was just --

this relationship is not necessarily intuitive. >> but you could hear martians jumping around outside. >> that is the way to get their vibrations. >> what danger do rovers have from solar flares? >> this is an area i am not a specialist in. radiation in general, the bottom line is the computer circuit system this are hardened. if you look at what curiosity has you see it is not as good as the computer i have in my pocket. and what it takes to feel them -- shield them and deal with temperature differences. that is a consideration. >> let's talk about how well they do. we could have mers outliving their expected life time. how did the team at that with the science -- to run free 6

weeks. >> scientists are human beings and they get funding from different sources and always trying to make ends meet. and a full time project, that any sciences are full time. i have a chapter in my book about the personal nature of their scientific live and doing other things and writing about other topics. read about natalie who runs expedition. they are now being explored on this mission. >> to take the vantage of the extended time? >> from the perspective of bringing in new people, i

interview eileen who was part of the second rotation, i forget what the year was. they brought in a whole new set of scientists and she writes about what it is like to come on board. it is like drinking from a fire hose and you have the team that is well established. that has been going on. over this period of eight years you bring graduates and summer interns. >> you mentioned the word funding and that is a big deal and you have a high profile curiosity and support for that and that is the peak of funding and public approval and then on congressman holding up a little green man saying it is a little green man and that is the nadir of funding. how do you whether that as a scientist knowing your funding is a measure of popularity?

>> it is interesting. the most important constraints right now, we have a national budget problem everyone knows they have to deal with and nasa is being fairly treated overall within that range in the sense of getting -- one think it got more but -- facing a huge cuts. the biggest problem is more internal in that we have two mission that costs a lot more than expected. one is curiosity and one is the james webb observatory which is the next generation of hubble. this hurts some of the other missions and the scientific community is being asked to live within the budget. one might argue that they deserve some flack to be given

more. i don't think it is so much popularity as it is a fixed budget. it might be great if the public wanted to argue their budget shouldn't be so fixed that would be a separate matter. >> some people say we have americans starving and infrastructure crumbling while we throwing money into mars? what do you say to those people? >> the cliche response is the money is being sent on earth. it is not being sent on mars and is leading to new technologies. anybody who looks at the curiosity landing can see that we just demonstrated how to plant quite heavy pieces on mars. that is a general thing that will be done for decades to come. you could land habitat modules, power plants, pressurized vehicles. could start bringing down a precision landing a bunch of pieces through separate missions. don't have to have a gigantic

rocket that brings everything at once which would be more of a risk as well. >> we were talking about justifying -- >> you are seeing a capability develop that is free general. if you ask what would be the effect on our sense of pride and enthusiasm to have an american colony on mars. compare that to other things. is a matter of prioritization. >> what about the rise of privately funded space exploration? >> extremely important. in the next five years--we are in a major transition right now on human space flight and a lot of people in the program believe we can be five for ten years

from now were lower for but sending astronauts and supplies, to the space station and bigelow hotel that he would like to build an inflatable hotel and these suborbital space craft going to be spending descending people up in a couple years on the july rise. where the money is to be made, the big idea everyone has caught on to, what if you have these for profit companies contract to provide fuel and water in lunar orbit so that nasa could use it on the moon or take it from lunar orbit to an asteroid or mars? once you get out of the gravity well there is a lot of value for nasa and much more competitive and better price.

>> you talked about this approach reaching further and further into the solar system. one audience member wants to know what human operational protocol when they reach that far away? >> you can see with cassini it isn't planned day-by-day. they know over several months with the program is going to be. they don't decide to what it will look like when stuff is laid out way in advance. there would have to be another study and i have a colleague on the cassini team, an anthropologist studying their team and looking forward to her report which i think will show that they don't have the same engagement because they are not able to get in and individually say i have this idea and they might have to wait months before this idea can be realized and all these competing teams is a

different story. this is not as chummy and rosie. >> when you think about the further we go into space there's a certain poignancy. talking so much about the humanity involved and the human side. human the going to be contributing significantly to programs they may not see the end of. you can work on something and see the blast off and be so fees and by the time it gets where it is going you may not be there to see it. i am sure scientists have to think about that. >> for sure. certainly any mission they worked on they like it to be in their lifetime and i found more of that than i expected. i saw a lot of their motivation is they want to know about mars. they want to know how they get these answers in their lifetimes. isn't just missions but scientifically are they going to find out even after they retire? >> when you talk about pluto --

>> these are by definition multigenerational missions. there are people who started it who are retired. one of the people and i deliberately chose michael carr as one of the scientists to interview for my book because he retired right after he was asked j p l. to see that transition. >> let's talk about the dangers of anthropomorphizing our rovers as we put them up there. i was following the tweets of the martian curiosity and it verged into the adult. it was great fun. was wonderful but as soon as you start injecting that humanity, people get trouble on twitter. i was wondering how much of a boon it is to say how this is our mascot as it is our scientists. >> that is the truth and that was my biggest surprise in going

through my work over these last eight years because i did start as i said rather upset when i first saw that 2001 press release in july when it came out and i remember ranting and raving to anyone who would listen, who is this and why is he saying absurd things? robotic geologist? we are in big trouble. last thing you want to say to the public. to find out it was actually useful, it played a role in the design. it enabled them to say things they wouldn't be able to say, everything sort of fun or how many people were fooled so it is complicated. also the way i put it in the book is an afterword. to say you can be a scientist and you can be poetic at the

same time. squires be penalized that. they told me we go to the top of that hole and took a photograph because it was the cool thing to do. did it have scientific value? he was willing to say it didn't matter. even though if you work out how much it might have cost it is a great image. the willingness to be a person as well as a scientist i saw throughout and that is what we need to realize. you don't lose your rigor by having the poetic aspect and artistic interests. >> we are down to the last couple questions. for one of these curious minds wanting to know the wake up song for the rovers have been different over the years. the wake of songs for various rovers' included love me like a rock by paul simon, come fly

with me by frank sinatra, wakeup little susie, re are loved by golden earring. the theme from mission impossible and my favorite, where is my mind? who gets to pick the songs? >> tangentially, study that or don't know. and -- to get into that. and gbl in their team probably. >> the dress code is a pretty good bunch. the last question you are an expert in is your own trajectory in coming in to the planetary science and enjoying and living i can see you are still enthusiastic about it. what has been the high point and the low point for you in the world of science and what keeps

you enthusiastic about it? >> my whole time at nasa which is almost 15 years is the high point of my career. bringing on computer science, with the philosophical bent, i am interested in taking photographs and like being outdoors. i have been able to do it all with nasa and never anticipated that. i certainly remember the landing on the moon and i could have recited to you all of the different astronauts and neil armstrong who we just lost. i didn't realize you didn't have to be a rocket scientist or a military test pilot to work for nasa. linguists and psychologists and my team, that is the real high

point. the downside as well i haven't gotten -- curiosity and somebody else is doing that. >> i thank you so much. this has been great and i hope you have enjoyed this afternoon's program. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book humanlike to see featured on booktv? send an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org or tweak us at twitter.com/booktv. >> mer firestein leaders of how many brain cells to we have? >> we still think 1 hundred billion. that hung around for ages and is in all the textbooks but couple years ago, a young narrow anatomists in brazil send an e-mail around asking how many we have and where we got that

number from and everybody wrote back 1 hundred million and also wrote back i have no idea where that number comes from. it is in all the books. he identified a new method of counting brain cells. it is not a trivial problem to count brain cells or anything that is several tens of billions but she developed a new method that is very interesting that we didn't go into much as recounted them and found out there were eighty billion. that is an order of magnitude okay so not a big difference. larger difference might have been we thought we had ten times as many so-called glial cells which are the packing sells, the non brain cell heart. it means glue. we thought we had ten times as many. 1000's million glial cells. in one fell swoop we lost 1 twenty billion cells in the brain.

>> what don't we know? >> that is an awfully big question. ignorance is a much bigger question. the question is not only what don't we know but what don't we know the we don't know? the famous donald rumsfeld close. sorry he got to that before i did but there it is. he was absolutely correct although he sounded a bit befuddles because he was worried about a war that wasn't going so well but in point of fact that is a good question. are there limits to our ignorance. that is more important than a limit to our knowledge. >> you say in your book "ignorance: how it drives science" you talk about things you don't know. >> my favorite quote from marie curie gaining her second graduate degree wrote a letter to her brother and said something to the effect of one never seems to notice what has been done. won only cares what remains to be done and that is the attitude

that drives scientists and gets us into the lab early and gets us there late at night and moved along. we don't care what everybody knows. that is done now. let's get to the next thing. what don't we know. what do we need to know or why do we need to know and what would be the next best thing to know. >> page 28, in test at a dinner, albert einstein proclaims science is always wrong. never solve the problem without creating more. >> isn't that glorious which i think it is. that is exactly the right description of science. absolutely. i should say i believe george bernard shaw quoted that from emanual kant just to name draw little bit and years before had come of with the idea of question propagation. the principle of question propagation. that every answer begets more questions. >> do scientists rest on their laurels after a while?

>> every body rests on their laurels at some point. resting on morals is a dangerous thing for science to do because those laurels tend not to be all that foundational or strong a foundation. one of the things that the public recognizes least about science is weekend to have less regard for facts than is generally thought to be the case and scientists all we work for fact we work to get data we also realize they are the most malleable or least reliable parts of the whole operation. whatever you find today will surely be superseded in some way or another revise or overturned completely in the worst case but certainly revised by the next generation of scientists or the next generation of schools. so it has always been in the last 400 years for 14 generations is what we have done and we welcome that. science's revision. revision in science is a

victory. >> you write that science and nature magazines are very important for scientists to get published in but if you were going to recommend to your students to read those you would recommend not reading last issue but ten years ago. >> they should read this issue but what often happens is graduates rush into the lab with this week's nature which has great experiments suggesting that i can see what the next experiment is. we will get our nature paper and i know the people who wrote that paper have already done the next experiment and the next ten experiments and the real place to go for ignorance, high quality ignorance are papers published ten are 15 years ago. high-quality papers. the leading papers of the day but could have asked certain questions because we didn't know them to ask. they didn't have technology or tools to develop in the last week and or 15 years so they are

right to be revisited. >> has technology helps in discovering science? >> technology is a critical part of the arrangement. often science drives questions drive technology and technology goes ahead and drives science. instrumentation is always a critical part of science since galileo and the telescope began 400 years ago. >> besides the number of brain cells what is another fact that we knew has changed? >> my favorite, my laboratory happens to research taste and smell. we work on the chemicals senses. we work on that and one of the best known facts is the so-called taste map which you will find in every high school and college and medical school textbook. most people believe there is a map of sensitivity on your

tongue. you taste sweet things with the to the view tongue and sweet and sour on the sides and better in the back. this is completely untrue. is a miss translation of an anecdotal report by a german physiology professor in the early 1900s which was picked up by a well-known psychology professor in the 1940s. the book is called psychology. you can imagine a joke for many generations of undergraduates. he put this in his book as if it were a complete well studied fact and it was a miss translation and stood the test of time somehow or another even though it is totally wrong. >> what has stood the test of time 500 years ago? >> guest: so many things do but not in there or original form. certainly newton has stood the test of time. newton continues to work.

we can launch space shuttles and build a bridges and all the rest of this sort of thing using newton's laws of gravity and force but they have been revised significantly most notably by einstein and many scientists since einstein so they have been changed. the way we say it is the regime in which newton's proposals were made and were true they are still true within that regime. what has changed is the regime we have expanded the regime. newton's formulations work as long as you don't travel near the speed of light which we don't do very often so they are pretty workable. when you begin to travel near the speed of light un vote feinstein's relativity and we do that. our gps devices which sends signals to satellites and back at the speed of light need to be adjusted by einstein's relativity to work properly or they would be 15 meters off all the time. >> albert einstein has stood up.

>> robert einstein has the so far although einstein wasn't so sure it would stand up. he had some punchs -- one of the biggest mistakes he made, cosmological constant, has come back. he doesn't know that but it has come back and seems to be very important but so far einsteins the the test of time. it has only been a century. >> what is your class called? >> my class is called ignorance as well ended is a pleasure to teach at columbia university where they let you run a class in ignorance and have students enroll and put it on their transcripts. the class started five or six years ago and it was in 2006 and based on my feeling that i was doing students a disservice. i was being made diligent teacher giving 25 lectures a year in neuroscience, using this textbook i am fond of was one of

the leading textbooks in the field but i am fond of pointing out this way 7 pounds which was twice the weight of a normal human brain. that can't be right. so students got the idea by the end of the course that everything was known about neuroscience and that is certainly not true and the way we kept track of what we know is we build a lot of facts and stick them in these books and that is not true. we don't know much about the brain yet at all. we don't even know what we don't know about the brain. we are still finding marvelous thing about that we never would have thought of. i will teach the students the ignorance in neuroscience so i devoted a couple lectures to that at the end of the course and fought why not try a whole course on this and see if it works with other sciences as well so that is what we do. the course meets once a week. a seminar course for two hours in the evening and i invite

members of the columbia faculty or other scientists to come and talk to students for two hours about what they don't know very specifically. another big question -- not what -- how did the universe begin what is the nature of consciousness. they do a marvelous job on that. be the case histories in ignorance. how an individual scientist grapples with what he or she knows and why choose this rather than that question. what happens if you know this rather than facts and things of that nature. >> host: who is the scientist you use in the course? >> guest: in the book i include four case histories of scientists. a couple of them are confabulations of two or three. one is diana reese who studies communication and cognitive processes in animals and i start by saying the only thing harder than knowing red is the same to you than it is to me, there's one thing harder which is knowing what is in an animal's

mind and what they think. she has done marvelous work with dolphins and things like that. i should be honest and tell you she is my wife as well. but she was just a visitor in the class. i highlight three physicists who work in experimental and theoretical physics to compare the two of those. i highlighted a couple neuroscience who work in various areas with new questions abounding we hadn't even thought of a few years ago and curiously i use myself as a case history. that happened because in one class we have a speaker who got ill at the last minute and couldn't make it and i knew what to do and my wife said why don't you be the speaker and i will interview you. so i did and it worked out pretty well and i had the transcript and i thought i will be honest about this and use myself as a case history.

>> host: how important is money to this research? >> guest: how important is money to almost anything? it is extremely important and something we have to think about carefully as a culture and how much money we want to put into research and where we want to put it and how to make a balance work out. the cornucopia of research over 14 generations is a testament to the reason we should continue to support it even when we don't know what we're going to get out of it. my favorite parable is from benjamin franklin who witnessed the first human flight which was in a hot air balloon. this was in paris. human beings lived off the face of the earth and another spectator at the park said to franklin this is fun but what use the this the?

franklin's responses what use is a newborn baby? that is franklin. he is right. what use is a newborn baby? we don't know. many turn out to be quite useful. >> host: stuart firestein is professor of neuroscience and chair of the biological science department at columbia university and this is his book, "ignorance: how it drives science". there is a website associated with this book. ignorance.biology.columbia.edu. >> these images are not promiscuous devastations. they were not printed in books or not necessarily images that appeared in pictorial weekly. they are images people purchased to hang on their wall to decorate their homes to really supplant ort