assume that this congress and any future congress is going to jump to four percent of gdp. >> [inaudible] >> one percent, we may get to one percent. one percent would be like a gold mine. a modest increase -- but we have to be able to demonstrate that we can do what we said we can do. commercial cargo was a first step. people said it could not be done. we have to get a commercial crew and we have to demonstrate we can do it and we can do anything. -- before we can do anything. we will fly orion in the fall. that is really important. thank you very much.

[applause] >> i want to take you on a tour of what the science discoveries from ours are, especially in the last 14 years of our program of exploration known as the mars exploration program which is implemented in our jet propulsion laboratory and i want to leave you with a thought that the science discoveries i hope to convince you are real and they come from a large community of scientists across universities, nasa centers and private industry. they are really the impetus for human exploration of this planet. many of us have been working these missions. i hope i can give you that sense. want to remind you of where we are. we are a long way today from ours, even though we are in a close approach right now.

i reminded our administrator of this 15 years ago. mars is not our mother earth. it is a profoundly different world. it does not read our textbooks. our ideas are changing. there is a large community of science working with -- scientists working with the missions of curiosity. we don't totally know what we have. that is important as we look forward to the era of human exploration. mars is an ever-changing frontier. we are just realizing the questions we have ask you to allow us as aware human explorers on that service to do the jobs we do so well, that situational awareness. this is a view of where we see we are going with curiosity over the next hundreds, and as we drive every day we see elements of the new mars, the same with opportunity, spirit, all the way

back to viking. science organized itself in different ways. for the last almost 20 years, we have looked at mars science thematically, through four primary themes. we would like to know whether we are alone in this universe. and is a profound question he goes back further than we can record in history. ofting into the question life, active biological systems, is a really tough question. it took humanity a long time on earth to understand the past record of life on our planet. even sometimes the extent level of life. that was a joke. get into the question of life, we need to look through the record books, recording elements of climate change, change of environment, the rock record, the pages in stone that don't lie but are not always available to us, and through the preparation for having us be there to make those discoveries.

we have organized our program through these themes following different threads, understanding the role of water. mars is a water planet. understanding whether there are places that could be inhabited by organisms, and understanding what the signs of life are and, could they be preserved. if they were there and not preserved because they cannot be , we need to parse those through our program. what we have done for the last 14 years with the restructured was develop a robotic science exploration program. every step is driven by questions we have had, hypotheses we are testing, things about mars we want to in many ways enhanced by technologies, new approaches, new measurements. the mars we have seen during the course of this program goes all the way back to around 2000, and

moving forward, it is about questions, measurements, approaches. the same way people would attack problems in science. this is all about stem. it puts together the engineering, science questions, the math and technology to solve problems. we have been doing that remarkably effectively. many teams in major league baseball would love to have it. it is a partnership with engineering. we cannot do all of this without engineers helping us do that. many of these missions survive today, way beyond design life, opportunity being a good example. let me splay in the discoveries we have been making. this would be the movie version. many of my colleagues would like to tell it. let me try to do that.

let me remind you, the mars we see is rather foreboding. it's not really waiting for us. is oxidizing, cannot breathe the air, lost its magnetic field, though to understand why the surface is covered with large deposits that are very inconvenient. micron scale, not good for spaces or rovers or actuators or camera lenses. go for not the place to your summer vacation. scientifically, it is. we have learned that since the first voyages of the 1960's and into the viking era. it is what we see and what we get are really a little bit of a misnomer for what really mars has done. we have to look at the mars today and project back in time to a planet that we think records in its record book something to really help us understand our planet earth.

mars has an extremely rarefied atmosphere today. we have often talked about the temperature on our toes versus our head. through gradients of tens of degrees. common on mars. the kind of surface liquid water would like here on earth, necessary for microbial life, cannot exist today. , at least on state the short term, is unstable. that could change. mars does climate change really well. the record of water on mars in the minimal's and landscapes, and much wherever we look is there. we learned that. if someone said we discovered water on mars, one of our science colleagues will say we kind of knew that, thank you. what does that mean? how much was there? where did it go? how would that have affected the geological history, the climate,

and looking for signs of life? many of us believe the mars we see today at one point reflected a history where water was a prominent surface feature. lakes and seas covered the lowlands. the reason we can do this kind of study is because way back in the 90's we made measurements of the fine scale topography and character of the landscape, so we can flood mars and go back in time and ask what it would have been like. that is what we have done. this allows us to figure out the land in an engineering sense. we flood mars. these areas would have been underwater, and we see landscapes that reflect some of the signs that you more for clean in the rocks and the landscape to tell us this may

have been the case. we are still looking for the shorelines and how that would be reflected in the shape of the planet. we see that. then there is a question of the record of life. on earth we sort of know that, or we think we do. we look back in time to the earliest times of our planet. the planet became at least habitable by the single celled we knowto the world with primitive dna, a few billion years ago, that is recorded in the records. things got better in terms of the atmosphere and more complicated organisms, eventually us came about. think we knowe very simplistically about on earth. we see records of these things recorded in the record on our planet, which is extremely dynamic. could this have happened on mars, and could it have been preserved? if it happened and it's not preserved we can't tell.

how do we ask, is the mars of today reflecting a history like this or a flat line history or even a history of extant life? what we did 14 years ago after some setbacks in mars exploration in the late 1990's, we restructured the entire program. thebest women and men in country together, working with our team. we put together a mars exploration team driven by science with a strategy that go?, where do you it's a big planet. you can't go everywhere. let's understand where the action is from orbit, with land where the action is, and move around as if we were there. apollo without the astronauts. and eventually get to a point analysiscan do in situ and return stuff from mars to earth. while we were doing this we realized there were media rights delivered to us from mars, favorably by mother nature.

meteorites delivered to us from mars, favorably by mother nature. rangers like phoenix, and curiosity, and moving onto [indiscernible] on the way, we have really rewritten the textbooks. those young millennial stemmers will see a new mars in the textbooks 2014. we did not know about the paleo magnetic field back then. some of them have huge science value. the topography which is good enough to land things on. understanding of the minerals in context of dust, the character of the family -- planet. we have seen complexity over

time. let me fill in the tape. over those years, what we have been able to do for our missions is increase the resolution and thedetail across wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation to see the planet. observingmini mars system in place now on the surface in orbit to study this world. some of them tell us about the character of what the service is like. others tell us about the character at the scale we would walk on. when we first put together the roadmap that have cameras that can see things the size of beach balls on the planet, many colleagues said, we don't need that. i can say now with some able to buildwere these amazing instruments for orbit. the success of those have allowed us to watch ourselves

drive on the planet and make choices that help us with where we are. what did we learn from all of this? we started to see exposures should -- exposures. rockionships between layers the history of water and wind on the surface. we went from an era of first landing viking -- this is viking 2 -- there is the flag, of course. amazing site. the probability of landing safely in this boulder field was about 40% to 50%. we did not know it was a boulder field and we landed anyway. we landed with new delivery pathfindere airbag sojourner, moving onto the era of the rovers which gave our program division at the surface to ask the tough questions that beget curiosity, where we are

today. startingce missions, with the first lander on another planet from viking, have painted a continuously changing picture. super desert, nothing would survive that. transitioning into the walk mars we sawk world with pathfinder into the history of water world that we saw and still see with the rover into this world we are probing with new instruments with curiosity. what have we learned? a lot. we still have not assembled the jigsaw puzzle. mars has lots of interesting variations in compositions. avalanches, vulcanism, impact craters,

that expose the surface like natural drill rigs. this together with areas where we have seen the water. there's a little trench from our phoenix scout mission in 2007. exposing the water that we measured and verified. we have seen surface layering with radars that have been partnered with italy through the polar caps that show us the way the climate record on mars is put together. all this paints a picture for a planet that is really profoundly andresting, alluring, compelling to get ourselves there. there are still problems. on our convenient earth we have mother nature's natural force , protecting us from all that nasty stuff that bill and mike talk about that you would experience if you left the protective sheath of our magnetic field. mars does not have bumps on it. it has relic magnetic signatures we discovered from the surveyor.

we think that mars inside versus earth is very different. we are a dan amick planet exchanging injured -- dynamic planet exchanging energy. mars, that story changed. maybe it wasn't quite big enough to retain the convective energy to do that. there are new missions we would like to fly. insight will contribute to understanding this picture as it launches in 2016. a different world. of places diversity on mars, and the things you see here in terms of these strange names of mineral stages, i will not go through them at nausea with you. everyone of them has a bearing on how you record the history of water and sediments that could preserve potentially the history of life, if it is preserved as organic chemicals. things seen all these

since we began our program in 2000. gives us the impetus to want to be there, to want to touch the rocks that contain molecules, to go to the place with chloride that might preserve records of life. we see chloride deposits in earth on supercold -- in supercold, dry places on earth that preserve microorganisms. able toalso been organize the landscapes of mars in time, from the early time before the floods of early mars all the way to the present through the different landscapes we have measured from orbit with these powerful reconnaissance steps. the mars reconnaissance orbiter still relating most of the data from curiosity is a recon asset like no other we have ever sent into deep space. we put it in there in 2000 against many colleagues to give

us the vision to be able to do this. this is a record book. we have fossil river deltas on mars. imagine what the mississippi river delta would look like in 10 million years. places that reflect the layering history of the role of water. pummeled by the stuff of space. our atmosphere shields us. everyone of these blemishes on the order of 300 of them tell us about the shallow interior of as it is affected by the exegetical world of space. -- exogenic world of space. on mars, they are not meteor showers.

some of the bigger ones excavate craters the size of football stadiums to small cities, and they expose the shallow subsurface. that is important. what you see on the surface is not always what you want to see when you measure things on mars about some of these very tough questions we are asking. we have also discovered that mars experienced major changes. from the time it was wetter, and the kinds of volcanoes that erupted work explosive -- erupted were explosive, to the kind that are today oozing la vas. we have also seen with our rovers and amazing history of water and the rocks. this is something we had not

anticipated. we rename things, blueberries and new berries in different sites. we asawn sheeted -- rocks. we began this program in 2001 we looked at the identity of putting the most powerful vantage point we could. this behemoth the size of a mini-cooper or vw bug carries with it 14 experiments, including ones that deal with weather and radiation. for dissent imaging, chemistry in different ways. a beauty,en performing beyond any expectation. i will give you a brief synopsis. we had made more measurements and even the slide pervasive, almost 500 gigabytes of data has been released. everything ranging from our own -- good job,

curiosity -- to the measurements we have made without actually touching rocks, by using laser induced breakdown. a partnership with france. the instrument that can measure things on mars as good as the labs that measure the rocks that buzz brought back from the moon, we can do that on mars without bringing it home. talk about engineering vision. science can now measure parts per billion at the level of detection where we can see that we contaminated aspects of our experiment with air. are a long way from home. they are small dots relative to this dust view from curiosity. laboratory, even though sometimes she moves up the pace of a giant tortoise, is an amazing feat of engineering as she makes her measurements.

she is seeing things that to me as a geologist are spectacular. these conglomerate to crocs with bits of rock made of other rocks is what we expect to see when streams and rivers leave deposits that are baked into stone. this is geo one. here it is on mars. water flowed. shallow water. we now know what it was made of. we drilled mars. the surface,ed measured down centimeters, collected it and made measurements inside our billy with this integrated belly with this integrated spectrometer. it allows us to measure exactly what made the stuff you see here. you can see the surface materials we have excavated are not the classic brown-read, -- brown-red. what we have discovered on mars is there are environments on

mars that are habitable. the buildup of the chemistry we know and love, this is the classic elemental stuff we need for life to exist. the minerals and oxidation suggest there was energy, the kind of energy that some microorganisms used on earth. we have found habitability works on mars. what might have been there. that is the challenge we face with curiosity and beyond. one of the things we did, not even imagine when we launched the mission. we took that rover with its mass spectrometer and we were able to use it to measure not only what stuff was made of, but by using some clever chemistry, our teams at caltech were able to measure the actual age of the rocks. this was a huge goal for mars, as early as 2000.

we also measured the surface exposure rays. ,hile the rocks are really old older than any rock on earth, they have only been exposed for a few tens of millions of years. what we see in those rocks exposed is very important. we now know from new lab work it has been done -- that has been were that nasty stuff we talking about earlier today destroys organic molecules. if you sit them there for tens of millions of years, they will not look organic. be more creative and clever. we think we understand the materials buried deeper relative to these little hills are protected from space radiation relative to those who are constantly being scavenged by the wind. if you're trying to find organic cannotes, you really

look out on the parking lots. they will be baked by radiation for tens of billions of years. have to go into places where they are exposed or more protected. this will be important for human explorers to understand that when we start exploring ourselves. the mars we see today is like the badlands of the american southwest or mongolia. layered rocks. we love them. ofs is an artist's rendering what the ancient mars could have been like. the measurements we made of these isotopes of key elements suggest that we can possibly understand the earlier atmosphere of mars to be a window into whether it could have been habitable. this could help us understand what kind of place we could ask is our record of past life. we have done that. the mars we see doesn't not look like beachfront to rain today.

not look like beachfront terrain today. we know it was habitable. what we don't know is how long that stage of habitability existed. our science team on curiosity and in the mars program is trying to understand that. was it a long period? did it cycle? carl sagan talked in much better language than i about the nature of climate on mars. we don't know. we have more measurements to make. that is why the robotic program, the science push for human exploration to open our eyes to the window are so important. humor.to show one bit of we found interesting rocks on mars that one of our scientists found. we did not find a mummified seal on mars. your imagination can take you wherever you want it.

i found my initials many times. some people think they found walmart. more importantly, we have been pursuing this line of reasoning. we have found the water. water has altered rocks. we have discovered there were habitable zones on mars, certainly in gale crater. we are still looking for this one. connecting these things up to here, and may be able take this. maybe we will get so far and then it will take to humans. potentially the record of past life, which will be a better hypothesis to test scientifically, is really important. we have made great progress. the real question is, how can we era of almost renaissance like discoveries with a large science community,

literally more than 1000 scientists across universities looking at mars now -- we have built up that community internationally. how can we use that to ensure the sustainment of this questioning regime to transition into human exploration? i leave you with my final thoughts. unfortunately, it's not easy. we really want to see whether the typeany record of of carbon that would record the signature of past life in the chemistry. , it shows them action. we don't know how things are escaping from mars. we have not understood how the water percolates. we don't know yet if there were brian close -- brine flows.

carmen goes through a long cycle, whether it is mineralized -- carbon goes through a long cycle, whether it is mineralized. some colleagues believe these may be flows of brine, salty water that erupts at certain times they are favorable. access to the shallow subsurface where there are reservoirs of these low melting point fluids? we don't know. our next mission is on the way. a lot of people ask, another orbiter? we would love more rovers. this mission is all about getting a key question for mars that links to earth. how has mars lost its atmosphere? it has done that. the mars atmosphere of today is not the primordial one. on earth, hemisphere recycled itself.

after it asks primarily how an today has evolved in time by reading the record of what is happening today in situ, the various experiments, even mass spectrometer, and looking back in time to how it might have got into that state, how this would inform us about mars. the mission was selected competitively on the basis of its science and engineering. that's how we do things in science. it's like the stem olympics. lot of whatever the judges score now. this is curiosity taking a selfie. maven will do that. we know from curiosity measurements with the team that

the record of this critical ratio that tells you about escape rates through atmospheres from mars versus ours is different. this is the range of uncertainty from viking. this is what we thought we would see from the media rights -- met eorites presumed to be from mars. we want to fill in how it might have gone from this to their. these are big changes. we need to get at that. maven will do that. after maven does it science, we can use maven as a relay satellite using the electro payloads from jpl to allow us to talk to rovers and other things on the surface. our program is integrated the way human exploration will be. big final thing i want to leave you with is, this is what we're up against on mars. 10,000 feet of layered rocks. it has taken us 600 days to get halfway, up into this zone here. it is a long drive through rough

terrain. astronauts will tell me they can walk it in a day. it has taken us 600. different economies of scale and efficiency getting into different areas and then sending a rover. i hate to use these diagrams, but i do love them. program here,nce a science driven program asking questions like what curiosity does. are leading humans to mars. this is not new. this would be a kind of goal discovery to be scientists, experiential, having women and men in contact with the science, not light minutes away.

we have not done this before. their own,d be on adapting, because of light time delay. this is what we are doing because of the space station and be on that. we put this together, moving toward the goal. so, how do we move forward with people? final point is, there are lots of opportunities. use the kind of science we have already used in the ocean. this could operate and do the kind of things we want. there are different models in human exploration with different roles for people. the more important to get people there with the questions to ask. and this partnership, that i have been talking about all the time, where we start to put the

human exploration in place so we can really ask the question of whether we are alone is important. however we build them, how long we take, we will never catch up. we will always be able to adapt, ly,etimes non-linear differently than our robot warriors, and that's good. it's the partnership that matters. so i finish with this. we have been here and here. we want to be here. a couple of people doing climatology and biology. this is a big step. i would like to leave you with two thoughts. science has given us the to ask where we want to go. this will change everything.

this will be like the columbus moment, when women and men touch mars themselves to ask the questions we cannot ask today. i don't think you have seen anything yet. disappointed. it is a discovery engine. let's keep going. thank you. i am told i have limited time for a question. remember, i am one guy representing a scientific community of thousands. , me with too much. >> you mentioned water. you talked so much about organics. we have a search for organics and signs of life. u.s. andhe plan in the what is the next mission you

think we need? >> thank you. jim green will be talking about that this afternoon. but good question. the mars 18 mission is the leap to the surface we have all been waiting for ever since i was an intern to get below deck where the radiation will modify the chemistry. by sampling that stuff with a very powerful set of instruments , together with an instrument developed in germany, we will look for organics for the first time directly in the sample. beyond is a key step everything i showed you. and the potential for xo mars is critical. as will the mars 20 rover. as we look at all this stuff going on, we are not done.

the programs have to be done. there is the mars mission and 16 to look at atmospheric chemistry. there is the mars 20 rover. 20 and beyond is for all the young people here. partneredilled to be with xo mars 18 and the next-generation rover whose mobility is both horizontal and subsurface. today, drilling gets us this deep and other stuff gets us this deed. we want to go two meters. this mission will get us there. folks, science lives, thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, michael. what michael lays out

there is a lot of technological challenges that require about 6-8 eureka moments, if you are keeping score. could we go to mars today? in a perfect world, if we had a blank check, could we go? impossible? >> i do not think it is impossible but we have to work on many of these things that we talk about. landing will be a challenge. >> one way to look at it, apollo 13, with the event that it had 84 hours, we had to keep the crew alive for 84 hours, we have life-support systems they have to work four months, possibly over a year. we have to take the steps. that will take some time to get a reliable system in place. we can land -- that is about the size of the mini-cooper car. there needs to be something bigger than that.

there are challenges we have. it will take some time to get those capabilities ready. >> how many breakthroughs do you need? >> i am not sure there are breakthroughs. i think we can build on what we know now today and expand it. life-support, we have life-support on station and it works pretty well. we need to push you to where it is more reliable, does not require so much maintenance. we need to look at the ability to do repair. i do not consider those big breakthroughs, but we have to get comfortable that this technology is at the maturity level that you are ready to go use it. that is the way i look at the challenges. >> the station allows us to do that. the proving ground, that is the

key. we have to take systems and turn them into longer durations. we need the time and capability to go do that. >> i think we have to make sure that every piece of technology is extensible to mars. that is the judge of the technology we are working on. does it really extend to mars? i want to be putting systems together that we can use for mars. that is the basic architecture you will use to transport cargo to mars. we are looking on missions built on using that as the key piece. orion an sos, we know where they are going. we will take the systems to space and see how they work. >> what do you see -- as you work on problems, what is the hardest problem? radiation exposure? >> radiation exposure needs some understanding. there is not much we can do with background radiation unless we put some kind of magnetic shielding in their.

we went to the institute of medicine. we said, could we push those limits a little bit? is it acceptable to change those limits? could we change those? they gave us some considerations to talk about that. we are looking at the requirements we have and are they realistic requirements or is today's medical environment allow us to do some things differently? >> the restrictions themselves may be to restrictive? >> yes. and we have basic guidelines from the institute of medicine. >> that solves a lot of problems if you change the rules like that.

>> the point is, we are not looking at a single solution or breakthrough. we are looking at all aspects of the problem to figure out a solution that gets us to where we want. >> let's talk about iss, it is a proving ground. it sounds good. as a drain on the budget, it is a problem. does it give you more than it takes? >> i believe it does. it forces you to make decisions right up front.