than we do from the moon, even accounting for the more than 800 pounds of material that apollo astronauts brought back from the moon. moon. we have significantly more from vesta. we do. here's a picture of a meteorite from vesta. i took these pictures myself at a museum. they're very common. you can find them anywhere. in fact, one of them landed in this box. [laughter] so these are very, very common here on earth. and i think that's really remarkable that we have so many samples of this alien world, and we're able to confirm that with dawn's mission there. that's the meteorite story. but let's get back to vesta itself. here's our view of vesta prior to the dawn mission and this is what dawn revealed and, of

course, we then got in much closer and revealed this alien world in all of its richly detailed intimate character. and one of the first things we saw is this triplet of craters, which you won't be too surprised we nicknamed "the snowman." [laughter] and this is part of that big crater at the south pole. show you another view of that in a little bit. this is the big mountain there. and to our great surprise, this network of about 90 canyons some of which rival the grand canyon in size, and these are now understood to be a result of the big impact here, almost completely destroyed vesta. it hit with so much energy that that energy reverberated inside vesta and broke up the ground hundreds of miles away. i think that's really remarkable. we took 31,000 pictures of vesta. i requested permission to show

all of them to you tonight but they wouldn't allocate me enough time but we can put them together in an animation to show you what it would look like if you were there. and one of the first things you'll notice is that the northern hemisphere is much more densely cratered than the southern hemisphere. and by the way, here are some of those canyons and you'll see them elsewhere here as part of the network as well. why is the southern hemisphere so lightly cratered compared to the northern hemisphere? it's because that big impact at the south pole sprayed out so much material that it re-surfaced the southern hemisphere, and the record of cratering had to start all over again. so there are many fewer craters there. here's part of a wall of this south polar crater. part of it has been destroyed over the subsequent millions of years by the continuous rain of other interplanetary debris coming down on it. again, here's the wall of that crater. this crater is 300 miles --actually more than 300 miles in diameter. think of that. this is really remarkable. and the mountain in the center,

110 miles across at the base, and it soars to more than 2 1/2 times the height of mount everest. your planet doesn't have anything like this topography. so i think that's really remarkable. i included this to be honest because it's one of my favorite views of vest a it's the triplet of craters, the snowman. i don't know how you see it, but there's a great deal of detail, a lot of structure in here, showing that there's complex geology on this world. and here, you can see the more densely-cratered northern hemisphere, the more lightly-cratered southern hemisphere, and part of the network of chasms running in between them, so this one view i think captures a lot of what's

so cool about vesta. so that's a quick overview of vesta. let me tell you about the mission overall. we started from many people's favorite planet, earth. we launched in september 2007. and we started out with a big rocket. i just threw that sound in to help keep you awake. on the way out to the asteroid belt, we flew by mars in order to get a gravity boost or gravity assist. you've probably heard of that. we fly by mars and rob of it some of its orbital energy around the sun in order to help fling the spacecraft even farther. and as a fully responsible and environmentally responsible and otherwise institution, nasa and jpl believe very much in conserving energy. and so in order to speed up the spacecraft, mars had to slow down. so mars actually orbits the sun more slowly now because of dawn's fly-by than it did before hand. so if you're keeping track,

following the february 2009 fly-by, mars moves more slowly by a rate of one inch per 180 million years. [laughter] and in july of 2011, dawn got into vesta, went into orbit around it and we spent 14 months there studying this unique body. then we left orbit and spent 2 1/2 years more traveling through the solar system to get to ceres, which we reached in march of last year. the spacecraft is in orbit around ceres now, and it will stay there essentially forever. and at each body, we make a comprehensive set of measurements. we take many, many pictures. you're visual creatures, we're visual creatures, we all love to see neat pictures, so we've taken a lot of pictures and i've shown you some of those. we also take pictures in stereo

at different angles, in order to make a topographical map, which is how i was able to show you the animation i showed you earlier of ceres, was the accurate topography on it and that's how i was also able to tell you the height of the mountain on vesta. we also mapped the elemental composition; that is, what kinds of atoms are there. if you remember high school chemistry or physics with your periodic table of the elements, which items on that periodic table are ones of geological interest occur on these bodies. and we also mapped the mineralogical composition, that is what kind of rocks are there. that's how we also know that bright material is salt. that's the mineralogy. we also measured the gravity field because that tells us about the interior structure of these bodies. how are they organized inside? so for example, one of the

things we learned at vesta is that it has a dense iron nickel core surrounded by a mantel surrounded by a crust, similar to the architecture of earth. the core of vesta isn't currently molten like part of earth's core is. but once again, that illustrates these aren't just asteroidal chunks of rock. in fact, in most ways, vesta is more closely related to the planets, the rocky planets of the inner solar system than it is to asteroids. it's like a miniplanet. we also search for moons because these objects are certainly large enough they could have them. as we flew in towards vesta and ceres, we used our camera to look for moons orbiting them. interestingly, we didn't find any, and we don't know what the scientific implication of that is. however, i can say we do now know that ceres has a moon. its name is "dawn." [laughter] dr. rayman: so i think that's kind of neat. so this raises sort of some interesting points. dawn is the only spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt.

it's also the first spacecraft to reach a dwarf planet and the only one to orbit it. and it's also the only spacecraft ever in more than 58 years of space exploration, the only spacecraft ever to orbit any two extra terrestrial destinations. when you think about it, it's a surprising thing. it seems like an obvious mission to undertake. go some place, spend enough time there, linger in orbit, make detailed comprehensive measurements, then go some place else and do the same thing. and yet it had never even been tried prior to the dawn mission. it's not as if nobody ever thought of it, right? it happens in science fiction all the time. go to some planet, do whatever you want to do there, beat somebody up or make out with them, and go to some other planet and do the same thing. but it had never been tried before. so that raises the question, why is that? why had we never tried it? well, thank you for asking that

question as well. the reason is, because until recently, engineers were confronted with the problem of they were just trying to do something that was beyond their technological capability, right, it was just too hard with the technology that was available. so here at jpl a number of years ago, i got together with some colleagues and we asked the question: how can we travel around the sun more easily and less expensively? and our answer to that was ion propulsion. now, if you're like me --and i know some of you are --the first time you ever even heard of ion propulsion was in science fiction. first time i ever heard of it was in a "star trek" episode and there was good use made of it in "star wars" where the thai fighter was used to fight the members of the rebel alliance and it stands for twin ion engine. it was one of the coolest

futuristic technologies george lucas could think of. to me, one of the things so rewarding about working on projects like this is the opportunity to turn that science fiction into science fact. so here's an artist's concept of dawn using its ion engine just a little bit more than one year ago, thrusting with its ion engine as it goes into orbit around distance dwarf planet ceres. and this is a photograph of an ion engine operating in a vacuum chamber, and we have a facility just a few hundred yards from here up the hill, and you can see it really does produce this cool blue glow like in science fiction movies and the reason for that is because the propellant zenon, which is like helium but heavier. it's like an inert gas. it happens to glow blue, like neon, its chemical cousin, and it gloze orange like for neon orange like for neon

signs. ion propulsion is 10 times the chemical propulsion. this would be like having your car get 300 miles per gallon. that's really the key that allows us to undertake a uniquely ambitious mission. because without it, dawn would not be just difficult, it would be impossible, truly impossible, to orbit two different extra terrestrial destinations. now, it's interesting, although the ion engine is very, very efficient, we only flow a very small amount of zenon through the engine at a time. so although it's very efficient, thrust is also very gentle and, in fact, i'm going to do an ion propulsion experiment for you, it's pretty safe. you can do it yourself at home. the ion engine pushes on the spacecraft as hard as this single piece of paper pushes on my hand and yet in the zero gravity frictionless conditions of space flight, gradually, the effect of this thrust can build up. so it would take dawn two weeks at full throttle, two weeks to

expend just one gallon of propellant. so that's why the thrust is so gentle. and, in fact, if we thrust for --it would take four days to go from zero to 60 miles per hour. doesn't exactly invoke the concept of a drag racer. but instead of thrusting four days, if you thrust for a week or a month or a year, or as dawn already has for more than 5 1/2 years, you can achieve fantastically high velocity. and so this is what i like to call acceleration with patience. and if you're patient --and i am, i'm a very patient guy --it's a great way to explore the solar system, and this is really the key to what has allowed us to undertake this mission which, once again, would be impossible without it, without the ion propulsion.

excuse me. now, i told you ion propulsion has been around in science fiction for a long time. once again, because of the constraints of time, i can't give you the entire history of ion propulsion, but i can tell you that it goes back quite a long ways. but let's focus just on dawn, which you can see here in an artist concept. and the first thing you notice is it's dominated by these huge solar arrays. when we launched dawn in september 2007, the solar array wing span was the largest for any interplanetary spacecraft nasa had ever launched. why? because we go far from the sun. so we need a large area of solar cells to capture enough of that faint sunlight to produce electrical power to operate all the systems and, in particular, that ion engine is power hungry. it takes a lot of electrical energy to ionize and accelerate xenon. so the solar arrays, wing tip to

wing tip are 65 feet. that's the distance from a pitcher's mound to home plate on a professional baseball field and, in fact, if the full-sized spacecraft were here in the room with this solar array here at the front, basically at the screen, this one would reach almost all the way to the back, would reach to just about the people who are sitting at the back of the room. and for those of you who are watching this on your laptop, that's a long way. so this is really a remarkably large spacecraft. for another sense of scale, this is our main antenna, which is 5 feet in diameter, and this is how we communicate with the spacecraft even from across the solar system. this is one of our ion engines here. here's a second ion engine. and what do you know, there's a third ion engine and so we do the star wars type fighters even better.

[laughter] dr. rayman: here's a photograph of an ion spacecraft being built on earth. and this is one of the solar array wings. here's another one and they fold up because you can't fit a 65-foot spacecraft in the nose cone of a rocket. when the spacecraft gets into space --when the rocket takes into space after the nose cone releases or separates and the rocket releases it, the solar arrays open up and to me it's like a big interplanetary dragon fly taking flight. i think that's pretty neat. here are some of the censors we use to study vesta and ceres. this is an ion engine and this 1-foot diameter metal grid here has 15,000 little holes in it through which we shoot the xenon ions at speeds up to 90,000 miles per hour. 90,000 miles per hour.

that's why as these xenon ions depart with such velocity, they give a push on the spacecraft and it makes it so efficient. as i mentioned the xenon, it's stored inside the tank of the main spacecraft structure. i thought i would show you a picture of xenon. actually, it's my camillion xenon, my pet camillion and because of the bluish color, he has an affection for xenon and he gets a kick out of being included in my public presentations. when i go home tonight and tell him not only did a bunch of people in the pasadena area see him, but a bunch of people at home watching on their laptops saw him, he'll think that's pretty cool. [laughter] dr. rayman: back to the spacecraft, here's the structure. here's the 5-foot diameter antenna. here's tom, and this is one of the two solar array wings.

each individual wing at 27 feet is the width of a single's tennis court. we have a very large spacecraft and i don't know about you, but i think spacecraft are neat things to look at, right, they're neat, and the people in the room can look at some historic and fascinating spacecraft. right, they're cool. they're neat to look at. but to me, neater than what spacecraft look like is what spacecraft do. so i'd like to spend a moment talking about what spacecraft do. because we use them to go far from home. this, of course, is home. and to the accuracy i can do powerpoint, this is orbit. it's space, that is not very far away. not very far away. in fact, from here to san diego is comparable to the distance of the surface of the earth to low earth orbit. and the space shuttle when it was flying, and the international space station now, this is how they work. space, but not very far away. so let's zoom out and now

introduce what's called geosynchronous orbit. and geosynchronous orbit as i know some of you know, a satellite takes 24 hours to go around earth. so if we have a satellite going around earth in 24 hours and earth itself rotating in 24 hours, then the satellite is always over the same point on earth, or from the point of view of earth, the satellite is always in the same place in the sky. and so that's why this is a very convenient location for weather satellite, communication satellites or other satellites that you want to have --either have a fixed view of the surface of earth or from our perspective here on earth, have an affixed location in the sky, so you

don't have are to always be repositioning your antenna here on the ground. and of almost 22,300 miles away, geosynchronous orbit is a long way away. that's a long distance. that's far, even compared to the diameter of our planet. and in the more than 58 years of sending spacecraft or satellites into space, the overwhelming majority have gone to somewhere between low-earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit. so now with that context, let me move the same setup down here, and now i'm going to introduce the moon and put the moon where it belongs at the same scale. the moon is really far away. the moon is 10 times the distance to geosynchronous orbit. the moon is 30 times the diameter of our planet in distance. the moon is a quarter million miles away. that's really far away. and you may have heard legends, stories told, by our ancestors that long ago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 24 men traveled the distance from the earth to the moon. people don't do that today.

people don't do that. people go further than the distance from here to san diego, but not as far as the distance from here to san francisco. but one time in the distant past, people did. and so what that tells me is this picture is of the scale of the entire range of first-hand personal human experience throughout all of human history. it's all contained in a picture of about this size. and dawn passed the orbit of the moon the day after it launched. so we launched on september 27, 2007, and on september 28, we had the moon in our rear-view mirror. so now let's introduce the next scale here, which is earth's orbit around the sun. and as earth goes around the sun, of course it carries the moon with it.

so let's bring the sun into this picture now. this is the sun. and so the correct scale, this is the orbit of the moon and this is the size of the earth all to the same scale. the sun is large, even compared to the orbit of the moon. the sun is large compared to the entire range of first-hand personal human experience, throughout all of human history, it could easily be contained inside the sun. the sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. the sun is 109 times the diameter of the earth. from this, we can conclude the sun is big. [laughter] dr. rayman: okay. so with this context now, let me get rid of some of that stuff and put the sun down in the lower right corner and bring the orbit of the earth in here, magnify it for a moment to show

you that little bluish thing. that's the orbit of the moon. earth itself is much, much too small to show up in this scale. so the sun down here, the orbit of the earth here, that's the orbit of the moon. dawn was as far away as the sun in 2010. this year it's four times as far away as the sun. more than 1,500 times as far from the earth as the moon. well in excess of a million times farther away than the international space station and that, to me, is what's really cool. and corny as it sounds --and that's okay, i know it sounds corny --on nasa jpl missions i've worked on, including dawn, when the spacecraft is passed on the far side of the sun, i've gone outside and put my thumb up and blocked out the sun and thought, gosh, we have a spacecraft on the far side of the sun. i mean, this is the same sun that's shown down on our planet for 4.5 billion years. this is the same sun that's the source of virtually all the energy our planet has ever had or will ever had. this is the same sun that so dominated in human art,

literature, culture, philosophy, science, mythology and religion throughout all human history, this is the same sun that's the gravitational master of our solar system. it's a third of the million times the mass of our planet. this is the same sun that's our sign post in the milky way galaxy. and yet we can send spacecraft to the other side of the sun. and when i say "we" i don't mean the dawn team. i don't mean everybody here at jpl or everybody at nasa. i don't even mean the entire engineering and science community. i mean everybody. i think everyone participates in missions like this. to me, everyone who's ever looked up at the night sky and

wondered, anyone who has any curiosity at all about earth and how it fits in, anybody who feels that longing to know the cosmos, or who wants to understand the nature of nature, and for that matter, anybody who's just ever felt that drive for bold adventure, right, a noble undertaking to go beyond the next horizon and see what's there. everybody participates in a mission like this. and that, to me, is what's most exciting about this kind of thing, because i think dawn and the other spacecraft around here truly as human kind's robotic ambassadors to the cosmos --and i think we all share in that --and that's what i think is really rewarding about this. so that leaves the question, how do we do this? well, we start by putting the spacecraft on top of a huge bomb and hoping that it blows up in a controlled fashion, and it usually does. and we've got dawn off to a quite a beautiful launch. in fact, dawn launched at dawn --i don't know how well you can see it here. the sun is rising in the

background. we left cape canaveral at dawn in 2007 and when we got into space, this is our trajectory and once again, it's this conventional view with the sun in the center. here's the orbit of earth and the orbit of other bodies and as we follow the trajectory for dawn along when it's this nice xenon camillion blue color is where it's thrusting with the ion engine and where it's dark is where we're coasting. we launched in september 2007 when earth was here and you can see we coasted a little bit, and we had some thrusting and coasting as we were checking out the ion engines and others as we were getting the spacecraft ready for its interplanetary journey. then we got into a regular pattern of ion thrusting most of the time and as a subtle technical detail, the durations of these coast periods here,

that is where we're not thrusting and exaggerated in this, because the software used to generate these trajectory samples just once a day, so we're really thrusting more than it looks like here. you see thrusting most of the time and then we have this long coast period during which we flew by mars in order to speed up the spacecraft and slow mars down, but we continued spiralling gradually farther and farther and farther from the sun until july of 2011 when we got to vesta, went into orbit around vesta, accompanied it 14 months, making our comprehensive set of measurements and maneuvering extensively from one orbit to another around vesta. one of the benefits of the ion propulsion system is not only do we get into orbit, but once we're there, we can fly to different orbits in order to optimize our scientific investigations. but we use the ion propulsion system to break out a vesta orbit, undertake this 2 1/2 year climb through the main asteroid belt until we got to ceres just a little bit more than a year ago, went into orbit around ceres and the spacecraft is staying there and will stay there essentially forever and,

in fact, where this line turns from bold to light represents the end of dawn's prime mission, which was june 30. so we successfully completed this 8.8-year 3.5-billion mile journey just a couple of weeks ago, but we're very grateful that nasa has decided to extend the mission because it's going so well and there's still more neat things we can do at ceres, so we're continuing our exploration there. so we can zoom in right now and see where dawn is today. so we can see we've progressed a little bit beyond the end of the primary mission. and on this scale, you can't see the difference between where dawn is and where ceres are, but basically in the same place on the scale of the solar system, but we can also zoom in and see where vesta is today. and so one thing that's sort of interesting is we departed vesta from here, so that was a little bit more than one vesta year ago. and actually, dawn is now farther from vesta than the earth is from the sun. again, to me, this is cool.

this is a reminder that this is an interplanetary spaceship, right. we go to distant bodies. we orbit them. then we can travel from there huge distances to go elsewhere to explore as well. and so since i mentioned earth, we can zoom in and see where earth is today and that's actually where it is right now and, in fact, those of who you came here drove in through the guard facility here, went in here, parked up here, and we're in here right now and actually unfortunately, i can see that gentleman back there, you left your lights on. [laughter] dr. rayman: you might want to go out and take care of that. so that's the overview of the trajectory. but when you look at a picture like this, it's flat and it's static, and it's easy to forget

the solar system is in motion. the way i think of it is, the solar system has this big beautiful complex choreography. so let's take a look at an animation of what's going on here. we want to get oriented first so that as the animation progresses you can follow it. once again, the standard view, the sun is in the center, blue is the orbit of earth, red is the orbit of the red planet mars. this is the orbit of vesta and this is the orbit of series. and starting out by showing you the locations of these things, where they were in march 2007 so that you can sort of synchronize your watching of it in preparation of the september 2007 launch, and what you'll see is that vesta is going to go all the way around the sun before we get to it and ceres is going to go around almost two full times before we get to it. it's much more complicated than just going to --out to a certain distance from the sun. you have to get to the right

place at the right time. here in september 2007, the spacecraft leaves earth, lights up its ion propulsion system. we're now aiming to fly by mars. remember that occurred while we were coasting. so here, we've flown by mars, turn on the ion propulsion system again. we're aiming for vesta but won't get there until here and ceres is going to go all the way around the sun for another full revolution before we get there. but finally, as we get into 2011, dawn gets to vesta, goes into orbit around it. once again, spends 14 months there, making extensive measurements. in september 2012, fires up the ion engine heading for ceres. it looks like it's not that far away, but that's a long, arduous climb through the asteroid belt, 2 1/2 years to get there. but as we get into early 2015 it did, indeed, go into orbit and that's where the spacecraft is right now and once again that's where it will be effectively forever orbiting the sun with the largest body between mars and jupiter. and it's continuing now its exploration of this strange

alien world. so that's a broad overview of the mission. i can tell you that we have lots of things going on. we're very busy. there's all kinds of things going on all the time. i'm not going to bore you with every imaginable detail with what's happening. instead, i will thank you very much for your attention. i appreciate you letting me tell you about the dawn mission, so thank you very much. [applause] marc: so i'm happy to take questions for a little while. i'll remind you, if you'd like to ask a question, please come up to the microphone. and while people are doing that, i'll just tell if you you're interested in the dawn mission, you can go to our web site, dawn.jpl.nasa.gov. you can see all kinds of cool things about the mission. we release a new picture every

day, sometimes more, but at least every work day, we release a new picture of ceres. we have lots of educational activities there for students and teachers and, of course, we're all students, so there are a lot of neat things to learn. if you enjoy the way i talked about it, i have sort of a blog called the dawn journal and write about the mission in kind of the same way i talk about it here. we also have more frequent status reports and other things as well. so questions? yes. audience: thank you very much. the lecture was fascinating. you spoke a little bit about the formation of jupiter and how that stopped the formation of these protoplanets and i was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how that happened. marc: sure. so first, can somebody verify that the microphone works so everybody can hear? so i won't repeat the question for you. when jupiter formed, it did several things. one of them is that its gravity

tugged and pulled on all this other material that was orbiting the sun and sort of stirred it up. and the consequence of that is when things hit, they wouldn't necessarily come together with these gentle approaches like this and stick together. but rather, they would tend to hit at higher velocities and so stick together and not break apart. in addition, it actually ejected a lot of that material from that region, that is, scattered it to elsewhere in the solar system. and so not only were collisions that occurred less effective in building larger bodies, but there were many fewer collisions. there was much less material to work with. and so what was there didn't get the opportunity to continue growing. did that answer your question? yes, sir? audience: this is a fascinating presentation. thank you. so you stated one of the main mission points was to measure the gravitational field. what kind of challenge is there

between the gravitational field as you understand it when the mission starts and when you actually arrive. how do you account for fluctuations in fuel consumption? marc: you're saying how do we account for the fact that we didn't know the gravitational field when we got there? audience: yeah. marc: that's an insightful question. that's another one of the many unique aspects of the dawn mission, is this is the only mission ever that's gone to a massive solar system body to orbit it, which had not previously been visited by a fly-by spacecraft. so mercury, venus, the earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, these other massive bodies that spacecraft have orbited all have been visited by fly-by spacecraft so we had measurements of the gravitational fields before we got there. dawn did not.

so there were a number of ways that we accounted for it. but thanks to the flexibility of the ion propulsion system, essentially what we would do is, here is our massive body, here's the spacecraft flying in. we would fly toward it and measure the gravitational pull, if you will, as we got in, determine with the extraordinary and exquisite accuracy that interplanetary navigation is able to achieve, measure that gravitational pull, and then update our flight plan, our thrust profile, that is the aiming of the ion engine and the throttle level that we use, update it to account for our improving accuracy in the gravitational field as we got closer and closer. so essentially, you fly in a little, measure the gravity field. fly in a little closer, measure it more accurately. fly in still closer and measure it still more accurately. does that make sense? audience: thank you. marc: yes, sir? audience: hello, and congratulations on this extraordinary accomplishment. marc: thank you. audience: i was wondering as i was looking at those amazing photographs of ceres, that, wow,

it's --the surface of ceres is like a record of a record of every piece of whatever from space that's slammed into it. i was wondering is there --do you think any of the surface of an object like ceres is the result of any kind of internal forces, and is there any way to know that? marc: that's a good question, and i'll start with the short answer, yes. there is good reason to believe --in fact, excellent reason to believe that there are internal geological processes operating on ceres which directly affect the surface. and we can see that in several ways. one of them is that i showed you the cator crater, in a moment you'll see it rotating into view in this picture. it will be the bright thing. i don't know when it will come around. but as i said, that's measured to be only about 80 million

years old. and the bright material there has to be even younger than that. there are current geological processes. but more to the point, you started with the reasonable comment that it's recorded everything that's hit it throughout the --more than 4.5 billion years of the solar system. but, in fact, a number of areas on ceres --you can't see it very well in this picture, which actually are relatively smooth, that is, don't show many craters. and we have mathematical methods that i could describe if you're interested, for predicting how many craters of certain sizes should occur on ceres. and partly as many craters as we see on vesta and there aren't as many large craters there as there should be.

that's a suggestion that, perhaps, there are geological processes over time erase those craters. and so one of the things that planetary geologists are working on now is understanding the nature of these processes. there's other geological evidence as well of the effect of ceres' internal activity much more recently than --occurring much more recently than the 4.5 billion years since it formed. does that make sense? audience: yes, thank you. audience: good evening. just two questions on the design of the spacecraft. first of all, you mentioned, i think, that it had another ion engine. marc: we have three. the star wars pathfighters only have two.

we have three. [laughter] our lasers aren't as powerful as theirs, but you can't have everything. audience: it was a military project. [laughter] is that strictly for redundancy to actually use those to eliminate the need to turn the craft around? marc: that's a good question. before i answer, let me explain to other people what redundancy is, do we have more than one in case one fails. that's what you mean by that term, right? audience: yes. marc: so it turns out there's a mechanism that we understand very well about which twin engines wear out in space, because of use. just like lots of physical devices get consumed by their use. and so given the amount of xenon propellant that we had to expend in order to accomplish the dawn mission, you had to have triad engines.

that is if one wears out too soon, or we didn't have sufficient confidence that we could do it with one. so we carried two in order to have sufficient lifetime. and then the third is for exactly what you raised. so that was an insightful observation. the third is in case one fails. however, as it turns out, all three are still healthy. so we didn't have any problems with the ion engines. and we don't pick them on the basis of what direction we want to thrust, because you can even see in this picture --and i'm going to turn this picture off in a moment only because my computer doesn't like staying on one picture for too long. but --or maybe it will quit for me and embarrass us all when it says, "powerpoint has a problem." but see there's one engine here, one here and one on the back side. so that's not enough to cover all the directions anyway. if you wanted to point an engine

up in this way. so we don't use it for that purpose. if we want to point an ion engine in that direction, we rotate the entire spacecraft and point the ion engine in that direction and go there. audience: thank you, and it seems to be --this is an ambitious size of solar array to have worked and unfold perfectly and everything. did you have a trade-off between thinking and using like a radio isotope power supply? what was your thinking on that? i'll thank you for the answer. marc: i'll wait until after i've answered it, but that's your call. [laughter] for other people's benefits, this radio isotope thing he referred to --in fact, you can see them, for the people in the room, i don't know if you can see the laser pointer here, but this black structure sticking out of the side of voyager here is what's called a radio isotope thermo electric generator. this scale model of the spacecraft here has them, if you

go into the museum, which i think is open this evening. i'm not sure. you can see models of them on the gal leo spacecraft as well. these are devices which contain radio active materials which when they decay produce heat and that heat is used to produce electricity. and it's not a nuclear reactor, but it uses nuclear energy. and we did not consider using them on dawn for several reasons. one is they are very, very expensive and so you only use them if you really have are to. they were well worth the investment for the fabulous return of voyager and cassini here and gallileo and many other missions. but also, they don't produce enough electrical power. devices like that only can produce 100 or a few 100 watts

and the ion engine itself, just to turn on the ion engine takes well over 500 watts just to turn it on. and normally --in fact, we've never actually operated it at that low power level. when we started, we were thrusting with more than 2 kilowatts. so the mass of these devices would completely overwhelm the benefit of the ion propulsion system, because we would have to propel that mass through the solar system. so having these large solar arrays for us was the better trade. but every mission makes its own trades on what the most effective way is to accomplish whatever its objectives are. so i lost track of where that gentleman is but i hope that answered his question. yes, ma'am? audience: hi, thank you so much. i was wondering how we know the asteroid debris on earth came from vesta and why the north part of it is much more densely cratered than the south. marc: so the first part, how do we know that these meteorites --and i forgot to say if you want to come up and take a look at this afterwards, you're welcomed to. how do we know these meteorites came from earth?

there are a number of lines of evidence, but it started with a method that i need to explain to you called infrared reflectant spectrum. let's break that down. infrared, a wavelength of light that we can't see but we know is there, just as there are wavelengths of sound that we can't hear, but your dog can confirm for you that there are wavelengths of sound that we can't hear but that are detectable. so there are wavelengths of light we can't see, infrared. reflectants, that just means the infrared light from the sun bounces off vesta and goes elsewhere just like the visible light does, and the spectrum is where you break up the light into its constituent colors. think of using a prism on white light and you see, quite

literally, all the colors of the rainbow. you break it up into its constituents. we can do that with infrared light as well. it turns out when you do that that the infrared reflection contains sort of the finger print or the signature of the material that reflected it. some infrared wavelengths are reflected very strongly, so it's bright at those infrared wavelengths. some are not reflected very well, so it's dark. and so this produces a distinctive pattern for different materials. and so around 1970, astronomers started using infrared detectors to look at astronomical bodies. they looked at vesta, measured this now infrared reflectant spectrum, and found that it was a wonderful match for this large class of minerals that occurred in these meteorites. for experts, the minerals are called howardites, udites, so the meteorites if you want to get them, they're not that expensive because they're so common. i bought this myself before i even heard of the dawn mission

because i thought it would be cool to own a piece of vesta. they're called heds, howardite, ueuchrite and diodronite. i could tell you other things about it, if you care, i'm giving a long answer, but it wasn't until dawn got there and made much more detailed measurements that we were able to clench the story. the other question you asked, why is the northern hemisphere more cratered than the southern hemisphere, and the reason is because that impact that excavated this material just happened to occur deep in the southern hemisphere near the south pole. so some of that material was thrown out with so much energy that it left the vicinity of vesta and went elsewhere, including to here on earth. but some of it, just like if you had a big impact on earth, some of the stuff would fly up and come down some place else. so it landed elsewhere in the southern hemisphere and erased the craters it already formed there.

it resurfaced it. so you can think of it as the northern hemisphere records 4.5 billion years of stuff falling on it, whereas the southern hemisphere had its record wiped clean, and so it only records 1 billion years. does that make sense? audience: yes. thank you. marc: you're welcome. i apologize for my wordiness. audience: hi, i have a pretty good intuition for a chemical rocket engine. i've watched a lot of videos and heard the audio and seen some live. marc: heard what? audience: heard the audio, heard it live. i don't have a good intuition for what an ion engine is like. marc: nobody does. darth vader, right, because he flies the tie fighters.

audience: sort of what it would sound like, what would happen if i put my hand a foot away from it or stood 10 feet away from it. marc: for all intents and purposes, the ion engine can only work in a vacuum chamber. so in space --somebody can't hear me? okay, so in space, in space nobody can hear you. you can't hear an ion engine in space. it doesn't make a sound. what would it feel like if you put your hand in front of it? there's a lot of energy in these very high-velocity xenon ions, kilowatts. this is a highly-efficient system. so of course it's not perfectly efficient, so not all of the electrical energy goes into that beam, but it is very high energy. and so if putting your hand in the vacuum of space was tolerable, you would not appreciate the effect of these high-energy xenon ions impinging on your skin. it would just --it would be very damaging. it's very energetic. and what was the third --oh,

what if you stood 10 feet away from it? standing 10 feet away from it is no problem because they operate in vacuum chambers and as long as the vacuum chamber is less than 20 feet across, it's easy to be within 10 feet of it but we're in the safety of the laboratory outside. i don't know, does that --maybe you didn't really get it, but the point is, it produces --so the glow in that picture i showed you is the benefit of effective photography. if you look with your eye, you can see it, but it's not exactly blinding. but it just is this gentle glow as these ions exit with a velocity that's so high you can't detect their motion, both because of the velocity and their tiny size. i don't know, does that -- audience: yes, thank you so much. marc: you're welcome. audience: hi. so with the ion engine, how long did it actually take you guys to

make it? and i've got a second question. marc: you mean how long did it take to fabricate it or how long did it take to manufacture it? or how long did it take to make it from earth to our destination? audience: fabricate. marc: like most of the components on the spacecraft, these things take --i'd have to say i don't know exactly how long but around a year or so. most things take six months to a couple of years to make because you have to produce these things to very high --very strict standards, right, because you don't want them to --you want them to operate correctly in space, and they go through extensive testing. and so the total time to --from when you start with the raw materials until you have the ion engine on the spacecraft ready to go is years, because you test the individual engine. then you put it on the

spacecraft and test it on the spacecraft. and then you test the whole spacecraft with the engine on it. does that --we started building the spacecraft in 2005. and didn't even launch it until 2007. does that address your question? audience: yeah. and then also, why did you use xenon as a propellant? marc: okay. so there are a number of reasons for choosing xenon, and i should say that early tests of ion

engines did use other propellant. cesium and mercury were common ones, but xenon has a number of advantages. one is that i mentioned it's one of the so-called noble gases or inert gases so it's not chemically reactive. and so that means that when technicians are loading it onto the spacecraft, there is no risk to their health. they don't have to wear special protective gear in case there's a leak. another benefit of it is there's a mechanism that we understand well by which a little bit of the xenon actually leaks out of the engine at low velocity. and so the spacecraft ends up almost having this sort of cloud of xenon around it. and because xenon is inert, that doesn't present a risk to any of the other spacecraft systems from a chemically reactive compound that could degrade optical surfaces like damage to the camera, say, or the solar arrays or interfere with the electronics, or even affect the temperature of surfaces, because everything on the spacecraft is designed with great care and xenon won't interfere with any of that, and i can say something else but i've already proven

worthy but i can tell you a couple of other things. one is the xenon is very easy to store. we launched with 937 pounds contained in just 71 gallons. so a tank about this big, about a yard across and about that tall. and so we need to be able to store this very effectively because space is at a premium in the spacecraft. audience: okay. thank you. marc: you're welcome. [laughter] audience: hi, thank you for the talk. i was curious as the end of the mission approached, were there any, like, particular last things that you guys wanted to see there? and also, about like the end-of-life plan, like will it just float off into space? marc: i'm not sure i heard you. did you ask whether there were

any particular things we wanted to see near the end of the mission as we were approaching the end of the mission? audience: like does it fall to -- marc: that's actually kind of a fun question. but as it turns out, there weren't. and the reason is because even before the end of the prime mission --so i should take you back. dawn, like all nasa missions, has a well defined set of objectives, because you personally --you and i and all other taxpayers --have made an investment in what nasa does. and so we have to make sure that investment is done responsibly. we don't just build a spacecraft and launch it and tell it to go do good things. we agree that it's worth this investment to accomplish a certain set of objectives. so we had a well defined set of objectives that we wanted to accomplish in the mission. but we surpassed --not just met, but surpassed all of those objectives, i think, by --it was either february or march. i think it was february of this year.

but the end of the prime mission wasn't until june. so by the time the mission ended, we were already just ecstatic with this rich trove of data we were returning. and sure, i mean, the cosmos is endlessly fascinating, and there will always be interesting things to look at, but we were in the very fortunate position of not needing sort of urgently to just see one more thing. certainly, things we would like to see, and that's why it's so wonderful that nasa has chosen to extend the mission to continue its operations, but there was nothing that by the time --by the end of the prime mission we felt we were sort of rushing to see. did i answer that question. audience: yes. marc: and the second question, what's going to happen, it will stay in orbit around ceres. just as the moon stays in orbit around earth and the earth

around the sun. it's a moon of ceres, so we will continue operating it as long as two important things --as long as two important criteria are met. as long as the spacecraft remains healthy and productive. that in itself is two criteria. and the third, as long as nasa continues to choose to invest its precious and limited funding into dawn but in any case, when the spacecraft completes its operational lifetime, and i could explain if people are interested why that will occur, it will just become --the way i like to think of it is, it will become an inert celestial monument to human creativity and ingenuity in orbit around ceres. that is, it's not going to go anywhere else. it will remain in orbit. audience: thank you [laughter] audience: thank you very much. you make our dreams about space true, more than 10 years. marc: if i could interrupt you.

it's not just your dreams. it's all our dreams, right. seriously. it's so cool. audience: yes, it's exciting. and the question is, what are the biggest problems the spacecraft have happened during these 10 years of the mission and how did you solve this problem. marc: did somebody tell you to ask that question? nobody did, i know. audience: i'm just curious. marc: the question is, what was the biggest problem that happened to the spacecraft during the mission and the nice thing is, if you asked anybody associated with the dawn mission, you would get exactly the same answer, because we did have a big problem. i'll jump to the end and tell you, the mission was successful so it's okay. but the spacecraft has devices called reaction wheels. these are disks about this big that are electrically spun and they're like gyroscopes, and there's a phenomenon maybe you

remember from high school physics, some of you, where you take a spinning bicycle wheel and hold it on a shaft like this, the wheel spins like this. looks like nobody went to the same high school i did. [laughter] you sit on a bar stool and as you rotate the wheel, you spin on the stool. this has to do with what experts call conservation of angular momentum. the point is, with these disks, as we change the speed at which they spin, we can turn, rotate the spacecraft. because of the zero gravity frictionless space, there's no other way to turn it. so if you have a wheel like this and you change its speed, the spacecraft will turn around it. so that's how we orient the spacecraft and these other spacecraft as well around the room. not all of them, but many of them are oriented in the same way. so we need three of those

because there are three dimensions. up-down, left-right, front-back, or pitch-rolling, yaw. we need three. for redundancy, we have four. we didn't want the mission to fail just because of some random failure. however, two have failed. and we didn't build the spacecraft to be able to tolerate two failures. and failures like that could be catastrophic for the mission. so one failed in june of 2010. one failed in august 2012. as we were actually in the process of breaking out of orbit from vesta to begin the journey to ceres. and there's really --i mean, there's no especially good reason that the mission should have been successful following that second failure. but one of the things, again, that's so cool about these missions is that we found a way, and one of our mottos is, if it isn't impossible, it isn't worth doing. [laughter]

that's what makes nasa so neat, right? so we found ways to control the spacecraft, to flight the spacecraft in ways we have never truly thought of, never even considered when the spacecraft was on earth or even in its vicinity. and i'll just give yoe aspect of that. it's a much longer story, but i'll mention one of it, because it comes back to one of the earlier questions. that is, we have a very small supply of a conventional rocket propellant called hydrozine. we have about 12 gallons of that on board. it was not meant for the purpose which we were using it. we have these thrusters on the spacecraft, a little thruster here and here. if you squirt some out of this thruster, it makes the spacecraft turn like this. if you squirt some out of this thruster, it makes the spacecraft turn like that. we hadn't intended to fly the spacecraft that way, but that's one of the ways we're doing it.

we didn't have enough of this so-called hydrozene, this chemical, to fly the mission this way so we undertook a very ambitious campaign. this was a huge amount of work by a very dedicated and creative capable team of men and women here at jpl and with our partners at orbital atk, and came up with ways to use this hydrozene much more efficiently than we had ever anticipated. so actually, a year ago, it would not really have occurred to us that we would be in the position right now of being able to undertake an extended mission, because the hydrazine was so tight we didn't think it would last until now, but it did. so there's another wordy answer for you audience: it sounds like this problem with gyroscopes, right, they ask us this in orientation, it's very common for spacecraft. it happened in the international space station.

but what is the root cause for this problem? marc: so the question is it sounds like these devices like gyroscopes, that failures of them are common. is that a fair summary of your question? audience: yeah, i mean, it's a very common problem and why it happens every time with spacecraft. marc: it's a good question but i think it's somewhat of a misperception. there are myriad satellite and spacecraft with these devices that operate just flawlessly essentially endlessly for not just years but decades. told you that was going to happen, so i'll invite the audio visual people to go to something else -- or thank you. [laughter]

oh, they -- truly on most spacecraft, most satellites, they operate flawlessly for years and years and years, and truly, many, many billions of revolutions. the ones that don't operate are the ones that make the news that you've heard about. but really, they generally do work very, very well. there happens to be a number of satellites and spacecraft like dawn that used one particular design, which we all found out too late wasn't reliable for endless years of operation after the rigors of a launch, the temperature changes, the radiation, the forbidding environment of space. and so those have not worked successfully on a number of spacecraft.

but on most satellites, they do, and so it's just sort of a batch of ones. i should point out, here you've got a device that's spinning, right. it's not like an electrical circuit where nothing -- there's no mechanical movement. but this constant motion for years and years and years, without stopping, that's a pretty challenging problem for people to make them so they work reliably. so the truly overwhelming majority do work beautifully. unfortunately, some don't. audience: okay, thank you very much. marc: you're welcome. audience: i'd like to make a comment about -- i want to ask my question. marc: i will say on behalf of the organizers, we don't want to -- audience: did your spacecraft map venus, it worked for 40 years successfully.

the space station used controlled gyros. marc: which are different. audience: way different. changing. but same momentum kind of thing. and they worked successfully, not a problem. now, my question is about the electric propulsion and ion propulsion. how much did jpl work on the development of the ion propulsion being that important, as we see here? and how much industry? i mean, particularly aircraft will develop the ion propulsion, i recall that in the mid-1970s, four young engineers came to jpl to work on electric propulsion, and after a short time, everyone went to do something else. marc: i don't want to interrupt you, but is the question, what is the history of the development of ion propulsion.

audience: that's right. marc: and this term electric propulsion that he's using it one of the other terms for it. and so it goes well back before that. the first recorded thoughts about ion propulsion were by robert godard in 1906, the father of american rocketry. constantine kalkaski , known as the father of cos monautics published a paper on it. a colleague in the 1950s did very important work on ion propulsion. you're making the entirely accurate point that engineers at hughes aircraft and elsewhere did. it was worked on by people in

nasa and private industry from the '50s up to the present. so, i mean, there's a rich history here of many very creative and talented people contributing to the development of it. and if i suggested that jpl was the organization that developed it or thought of it or was the only one that worked on it, i didn't mean to suggest that. i said when i raised the question of how could we travel around the solar system more easily and less expensively it was that we could turn to the ion propulsion that people, brilliant people have been working on for nearly a century. audience: now, was it -- it's very important to travel. why did jpl not follow it exactly exactly, and then with such a purpose. marc: i'd be happy to talk with you about this more elsewhere, but you may have some perhaps incomplete perceptions of jpl's role in the development. jpl is not solely responsible for the development of ion

propulsion. this was a joint nasa industry development, and we've taken advantage of the brilliant work that was done by many people to have the success. but i think rather than get into the details of the technical history, i think there are probably broader questions that would be of interest. but come up afterwards, and we can talk about it. thank you. audience: also, ion propulsion is used for station keeping, all the thing. marc: the terms most people here, they don't know about station keeping but you're right. there are many spacecraft and satellites that use ion thank you. audience: also, ion propulsion propulsion. that's true. i didn't say dawn was the only one. in fact, dawn is not the first interplanetary mission to use ion propulsion. jpl's deep space one was. that's where we learned to fly ion propulsion. i'm glad you're so interested in it and i'd be delighted to talk to you more about it afterwards.

you obviously have some good knowledge of the history. audience: how's it going. jupiter, in one of the first photos you showed of the orbit around the sun, jupiter showed that it goes through these pockets, and i'm wondering why it didn't clear that material. marc: oh, so are you referring to the slide i had that showed all the asteroids -- sorry, the asteroid belt and that both leading jupiter and following it? audience: yeah, like there's three -- marc: that's a good question. it doesn't go through those because those are going around the sun just as jupiter is going around the sun. just so everybody else is following, remember that picture of the asteroid belt, he was observant enough to see that there are these two groups of asteroids sort of ahead of and behind jupiter. and those are called trojan asteroids, and they -- bodies that -- things that orbit the sun, or doesn't have to be

orbiting the sun, but when one body is orbiting another, there turn out to be places in its orbit that are relatively stable for other bodies to orbit. and so both ahead of and behind jupiter are two such places. so asteroids that happen to have sort of wandered through this place kind of get trapped there. for experts, there's a little bit of a simplification. so it's not that jupiter is plowing through them, but they're orbiting the sun with jupiter and they're relatively stable. and there are places that are like that from earth's orbit around the sun and even the moon's orbit around the earth. audience: and they're ecliptical planes? marc: they're close. audience: thank you. marc: sure. so there are people who are --

oh, okay. so we were going to answer questions that came from the web but there's another one first. audience: is there everybody going to be a spacecraft that travels into space that reach re fill dawn? marc: to refill dawn? the question was is there ever going to be another spacecraft to fly into space to refuel it. that's actually a good question. and i guess i could answer that question by asking you a question. when you grow up, would you be willing to make a spacecraft that will travel into space to refuel dawn? [laughter]. [applause] and i hope the answer is yet "yes." so nasa hasn't planned to do that, but we're waiting for smart, creative, energetic, enthusiastic people like you to come up with great missions like that.

but right now, dawn, as i said, is well over a million times farther away than the space station. so that's a pretty long way, even for a robotic that is a spacecraft without astronauts on board to go refuel another one, rather if we were going to send a satellite, a spacecraft out there, instead of carrying fuel, it could carry advanced new instruments and censors, more sophisticated cameras and things like that that we haven't even thought of. nevertheless, it's a great idea, and if you do it and i'm old and retired, send me a -- whatever the future communications method will be -- [laughter] and tell me how dawn is doing, okay? does that answer your question? audience: yes. marc: thank you. [applause] marc: so we've got a couple of questions from people who are watching right now in the live stream and thank you for that.

so i'm not very good at pronouncing some of these things, but i'll spell it. kyanite asks was there ever any plan for dawn to visit a third body in the asteroid belt such as pallas, so pallas is another very large body comparable in size to vesta, although not quite as large, and the answer to that is no. there was never such a plan, but i presume the background for the question is, for those space buffs here who read about these things on the internet, i've been reading for years that dawn has actually done -- the dawn team has done studies of going to this other body pallas. i genuinely don't know what the origin of that rumor is, but i can tell you, kyanite and others, we've never looked at it. i've read it many places. we've never looked at it.

we -- our targets were vesta and ceres from the time we conceived them. we never had any intent to go anywhere else. however, as you may know from reading news recently, just in the last few months, we gave nasa the option of sending the spacecraft to another body for an extended mission possibility. so this extended mission, that is after the completion of the primary mission. so we told nasa that if they would consider extending the mission, we could continue to stay in orbit around ceres or we could go to a different body. nasa considered the scientific merit of remaining in orbit, lingering, continuing to make the detailed observations at ceres or flying to a different body. they considered scientific merit and other considerations and

concluded that the best use of this precious resource that you and i as taxpayers have funded is to continue with ceres to make more measurements of this -- the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. so i hope that answers your question. and the other question i will tell you this is going to be the last one, is from arpotu, who asks are we able to determine the mass or other properties of the object which collided with vesta? i apologize for stumbling over that. so remember the big crater, this 300-mile diameter crater near the south pole of vesta, which is the source of these meteorites, crashed into it around a billion years ago. and it's estimated that that body that crashed into it is around 30 or so miles in diameter. that's pretty big. i mean, if you imagine that

crashing into your backyard, you know, that probably wouldn't be appreciated by you or your neighbors. [laughter] so that's a big thing. it's large compared to the object which crashed into earth and is primarily responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other species 66 million years ago. so that was a big object, a big impact. and that's the estimated size of it. so, once again, thank you very much for coming to jpl and hearing about the mission. [applause] [indistinct chatter] >> news today that donald trump campaign chairman paul manafort has resigned, coming a couple of days after two new persons were ined to the leadership ranks

the trump campaign. again paul manafort resigning today, sending his resignation into donald trump. in, reaction coming including this from the democratic national committee. this statement despite today's latest staff shakeup, don trump still maintains ties to russia and program len elements. let's not forget his own financial interests in the region. fat from the national press secretary. meanwhile donald trump and his running mate, mike pence, are in louisiana. floodg some of the ravaged areas of louisiana and getting a look at the relief and recovery effort there.

>> we knew you would be here. >> mr. trump -- >> mr. trump. >> we lost everything, this makes it all worthwhile. >> we love you. >> mr. trump.

we love you. >> i need to talk to you. here's my business card. >> donald trump in louisiana, seeing some of his supporters there. donald and his running mate mike pence to tour the areas affected toflooding in louisiana review some of the relief and recovery efforts. first trump released his general election campaign ad today and we are going to show the show that to you now, including the hillary clinton ad running. >> inhaler clinton's america the system stays rigged. ofegal immigrants convicted committing crimes get to stay, collecting social security

benefits, skipping the line. our border open, more of the same but worse. donald trump's america is secure, terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. our families safe. change that makes america safe again. >> i'm hillary clinton and i approve this message. produce my tax returns. >> was my -- what is your tax rate? >> none of your business. >> one of the reasons we're not seeing his tax returns is inause he is deeply involved dealing with russian oligarchs. >> there is a bombshell on donald's trump's -- in donald trump's taxes. this week on c-span's newsmaker, the republican political consultant and longtime friend of donald trump talk to -- talks about

what to expect from the presidential debate and issues that could affect the election. at the regular sunday time at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. congress is back in just a couple of weeks. the house and the senate returned to the capital. some of the things they will be taking up, the remaining federal spending bills for fiscal year 2017. also zika prevention and research is on tap. and news today that the local transmission area has been expanded in florida and some members of congress taking to twitter to respond to that.

a large republican hero results the 25th district in florida in the miami area with local transmission area in south florida expanding. democratsical senate consider house bills. and a rather large picture of a mosquito courtesy of the miami herald. meanwhile a democrat from zika atwas attending the doorstep conference. caps thatpresentative resulted of castor speaking of the conference. "i am grateful for all the effort." and leaders in the senate's taking to twitter, with their comments on zika senate majority leader mitch mcconnell of kentucky --

and the minority leader harry reid with this. this saturday at 8 p.m. eastern time, our issue spotlight on the 2016 election and voting rights. three years after a supreme court ruling overturning parts of the voting rights act. parts of the country have struck down a number of state laws, saying they discriminate against specific groups of voters. ours get a preview of program now. this part with hillary clinton, telling her supporters that the voting rights act needs to be restored. hillary: and we have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what is really going on in our country.

because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of or young people from one end of the country to the other because since the supreme court eva's rated each key provision of the voting rights act in 2013, many of the states that previously faced special scrutiny because of a history of havel discrimination proposed and passed does that make it harder than ever to vote. >> issue spotlight, that is tomorrow night at 8 p.m. eastern

time here on c-span. now it is the urban institute and a discussion on the finance policy with current and former administration officials as well as experts and consultants. >> hello everybody. thank you for coming to our evening event. we have an oversubscribed crowd. we are so refer you are here with this panel. my name is faith schwartz, i'm am presenting core logic

tonight. a global provider of insights around property, consumer, and financial information and services. those types of information to inform their insight. tonight is a collaboration we have had with the urban institute for going on for years. we are pleased to be a cosponsor of this event with the urban institute. thank you so much for being here. tonight it will talk about mortgage servicing. i bet you knew much about mortgage servicing seven or eight years ago. high-margin business. financial crisis. fast-forward and we have a lot to talk about it mortgage servicing, including the model, the alignment of interest, the

cost of servicing, origination, access to credit. you will hear from experts across the board in the financial sector in both the public and private sectors. let's introduced briefly each panelist and i laughed then the speak for about 10 minutes. then we will open it up for questions and answers for this group. many of you know these panelist well. thank you for being here. first we have ed marco to my left. he is a senior fellow at the milton institute. he works on housing policy and financial institution regulation. he is best known for his role as acting director of the federal finance housing agency, where he led the goc as a regulator from 2009 to 2014. welcome ed. we have lori marciano. she is the program manager for markets and regulation for the consumer financial protection

bureau. lori was also the director of of the homeownership preservation program and an architect of the affordable program and treasury. she has had many years in the industry. she has done a great job. next we have michael stegman, a fellow at the policy center for finance. he works on housing finance. and michael was a senior policy advisor to the white house. before that senior adviser to the office of the treasury, secretary of the treasury. we are delighted to have michael with us tonight as well. next we have laurie goodman. she needs no introduction in this crowd. codirector of the urban institute housing finance policy center, along with elana mccarter. lori is a voracious researcher and publisher. over 200 articles and journals and of the five books

co-authored and authored. she is well known among policymakers and the public about important issues on housing finance. last we have ragu, senior vice president for housing policy and capital markets at wells fargo. he was also managing the role of regulation inside of wells fargo. dodd frank, qm, atr. he helped start a platform and wells fargo for an online banking platform. welcome. >> thank you, faith. thank you for taking time out to be here. it's really an important topic. important for consumers. for the many participants in this ecosystem of housing finance. what i will do is focus on mortgage servicing compensation.

something that remarkably has not changed in decades as the servicing world itself has undergone profound changes. let me start with why this is an issue. most of my remarks will be in the context of the agency market, the freddie mac market. a lot of it is also generalized for the private market and so forth. for simplicity. since 1980's, servicing compensation has been a minimum servicing fee required by fannie and freddie of 25 basis points. there is broad consensus this 25 basis point minimum servicing fee results in compensation that far exceeds the actual cost of

servicing and performing loans. yet it is less than needed for nonperforming loans. as we are about to see it becomes even more pronounced in that case. i only have one chart. let's turn to it now. thanks a mortgage bankers association. they published this chart a few weeks ago. what this chart shows is the fully loaded servicing costs for both reforming and nonperforming loans. we do this from 2008 to 2015. there are two things that stand out. what is the cost of servicing and performing loans is much less than the cost of servicing a non-performing one. the other is they are growing. they point out two things about this. comparing 2008 to 2015. in 2008, it was eight times more expensive to service a

nonperforming loan. now it is 13 times more. the cost of both of gone up. this in flexibility in servicing left fannie and freddie scrambling to properly beef up operations and make the effort, the direct hands-on effort with consumers who homeowners who are having trouble with the mortgages. clean up with a lot of additional compensation being paid out in the form of compensation they got layered on. that was done in the midst of the crisis. something that ought to be addressed. another critical reason we need to address this issue is mortgage servicing rights. this current compensation system we get treats what is called mortgaging service right. he represents the future cash flow when a loan is sold to fannie or freddie. this future cash flow last as long as the mortgage does, so it

economically acts like an interest-only strip. borrowers prepay and suddenly that loan goes away and there is no compensation coming in any interest rates go in the other direction, the opposite happens. so, an msr is difficult to manage, difficult to hedge, and requires a great deal of capital to hold on your balance sheet. one problem is it lends to financial instability for the holders. the other is because of these characteristics it tends to limit holders to larger, more sophisticated holders. making it smaller for midsized servicers to compete. we should want more participation and compensation that's competition by smaller, midsized players. we should want less systemic risk. i think we should fix this. as regulators, we should be focusing on how the market is working. do they allow for entry and exit? is there liquidity in the market?

the valley of asset or activity transparent or easily assessed? the answer is largely no. let's fix it. what we should be looking for is a model that allows for responsive servicing for homeowners, efficient litigation with appropriate high touch to help troubled homeowners, and sufficient compensation to achieve that outcome. we have to be seeking reduced volatility and increased competition. back in 2011 when i was acting director of fha, we try to tackle this issue. we started a discussion with

market participants about where and how to change marketing compensation. the industry had been engaging in these debates for a long time at the start of 2011 we announced we were going to systematically explore possible new compensation structures. they wanted to engage market participants in the process. we wanted better for consumers and better for fannie and freddie. initially proposed four general approaches to how this might be done. we went to industry conferences and tried to engage with participants in working this out. in september of 2011 be published a more formal proposal. a formal public comment on two general options. one was to reduce the minimum servicing fee in order to reduce the msr, and also create a reserve fund that would be there

to help pay for the higher costs of not performing loan servicing. the other was to go in a different direction and create a fee-for-service structure. the feedback we got in 2011 was, well, we don't have consensus. there was general agreement on a couple of things. there was general agreement to most people the system is not ideal, even if some did not want to change it. moreover, the other set of comments were this isn't really the right time to deal with this. the mortgage market is really fragile. this is 2011. servicers had their hands full trying to keep up with the evolving loan modification programs, what fannie and freddie were doing and so forth. really importantly we didn't

know about -- what the rules are requirements for going to look like going forward. it was hard to reject compensation when you had an evolving set of service requirements. speaking for myself it was always something of was convinced needed to be addressed once the timing was right. frankly i think it is right now to begin re-examining this issue and reconsidering it. i think there are important changes since 2011 to take note of. first, as we are about the year from lori, we have much better ideas about what those servicing rules are. the cfpb has published servicing standards and additions to it. we will hear about that in a moment. these rules provide a pretty detailed prescription about what

is required of servicers with regard to nonperforming loans. we have much better information now. other key changes are we now have an evolving credit. transfer market back in 2011 it was all the fannie and freddie. this was about aligning between the servicer and the interest as fannie and freddie as a creditor. private capital holding a meaningful credit loss exposure. they are an important part of this discussion now. they are the ones in a loss position. how servicing is done, how it is compensating off to tie into credit transfers, including how pricing and crt works. that will be part of the discussion this time around. we have moved on and making progress towards greater low-level disclosures. this means investors, including these credit investors will have better ideas about news is servicing and how things are being done.

we have made a lot of improvement and advancement with regard to warrant. i won't get into the technical part, but the msr serves as protection collateral for fannie and freddie on warrants. as that evolves, the needs change. i think the time is right to re-examine this. i think it can enhance competition in the market. make the market open to more players. i think you can reduce financial risk for a lot of financial institutions. now we have cfp be rules in place and the market is maturing i think it's time to reengage in this discussion. let me say one other thing that is not actually about compensation but i think is connected. another thing that needs to be picked up is to pick up a continued to work on standardizing mortgage servicing data. some of you may recall back in 2010 we started uniform mortgage data program to standardize data. whether it was appraisals, loan arbitration, so forth.

on that agenda was mortgage servicing data. we think about these disclosures and we think about the credit investor, where this is all going, it's important to pick up that difficult challenge of standardizing mortgage servicing data so this would help the market in mortgage servicing be more transparent and easier to price. faith: thank you. we will touch base on some of this in the future. it might be interesting to hear your perspective if the time is right to address servicing compensation. >> thank you and welcome to all of you. on august 4, the bureau published a modest 900 pages for your summer reading enjoyment. [laughter] it are men's the 2013 rule and it includes really quite a lot of clarification a lot of clarifications and cleanups. many things that the mortgage services themselves came to the bureau and asked if we would

correct. it also introduces some new requirements that were extremely important to consumer advocates. things like successors in interest, transfers of servicing, borrowers and bankruptcy. it is effective in multiple portions of the rule in 12 months from publication in the federal register. if that happens this month, it would be august of 2017. the bankruptcy and successes interest portions will be affected in 18 months, which would be february 2018. in what can only be attributed to laurie goodman's sense of humor, i now have nine minutes to describe 900 pages. [laughter]

buchalter seatbelts, here we go. let me talk about some of the changes to servicers specifically at the bureau for the 2013 rules. these are clarifications that services can indeed enter into short-term repayment plans without collecting a complete application documentation for consumers. more flexibility to stop collecting documents for a particular mitigation option when it is evident the borrower is not a candidate for the option. clarification on how servicers select a reasonable deadline for borrowers to send in the rest of the documents for their loss mitigation application. servicers and advocates interestingly enough say can we just you 30 days? we have to have all of these time frames that we have to try to calculate. we said sure, sort of.

yes, you can do 30 days but you have to take certain consumer protection time frames into consideration. clarification on the use of acceleration to address nonmonetary defaults. the current rule doesn't really have a way to foreclose if there is a nonmonetary default. we clarified that. generally services will no longer be required to send periodic statements on the loan. are you going to continue to send periodic statements for years and years and years to a borrower it was annoyed by that practice? obviously that is a no. exemption from the 120 day foreclosure moratorium when a servicer is joining the action of either a senior or a junior lien holder. and finally something as simple as can we please put a low number on the required insurance form? these are not all of the servicer request changes, but

they are sort of indicative of the kind of things that are simple, practical changes that we were able to make. however there are certain aspects of the rules that are more challenging and certainly more important in terms of adding new consumer protections. one of those, which probably engendered the most public comment in the rule was successors in interest. i'm sure you all know this but to be clear it is someone who has acquired an ownership interest in a property but is not on the mortgage so they don't have a direct relationship with the servicer of the loan. they need information in order to protect the asset that they own. the rule basically has three parts for successors in interest. the first is a definition of who a successor is. we have created a definition that is basically consistent with the scope of the sale

protections and barn st. germain. you would also have a successor in interest protection in the servicing rule. that includes individuals that have acquired property by death of a joint tenant, death of a relative of the borrower, transfer of ownership to a spouse or children that would require death, legal divorce or separation, and then moving ownership into a trust where the borrower is the beneficiary of the trust. first is the definition. the next part of the rule basically says it outlines requirements for communicating with potential successors. i raise my hand, i say i'm a successor, what do you do? we had significant feedback from the advocacy community that servicers did not want to talk to successors. people were having a very difficult time communicating. the world outlines very specific requirements for potential successor contact. the servicer is required to promptly respond with a list of the type of documents that

successor would need to prove they are the successor. for example, if i'm recently widowed and i am entitled to the property but not on the note, what would this document be? it would be as simple as a death certificate and a copy of the deed showing me as the owner of the property. one would think that is simple but it has been made apparently fairly complicated. identifying those documents that are most common, providing them timely, and when you receive the documents from the potential successor reviewing them and responding with a decision timely are all key elements of the rule. finally, the rule gives borrower status to confirmed successors, which means the borrower is entitled to all the protections under most of the servicing rules.

they are entitled to get periodic statements. escrow notices, insurance notices. they are entitled to loss mitigation protections under the rule. what does the rule not do? we have a lot of comment as i mentioned on this rule. services were extreme the concerned about their liability and responsibility. it does not create a private right of action for unconfirmed successors. it does not require servicers to proactively go out looking for successors. when they find out someone has died. if a successor contact them, they have an obligation to work with the individual but they don't have to start doing lexis-nexis searches to find them. it does not require servicers to offer any particular loss mitigation option to a successor in interest that has not assumed the loan. they don't have to. however they cannot condition and evaluation for loss mitigation on an assumption.

finally, it does not require servicers to provide periodic statements for any of the other notices required under the rule to more than one individual on the loan. if there still is a remaining borrower, even if you have one or two or three successors, you can continue communicating with your existing borrower. you don't have to send multiple notices to multiple people. borrowers in bankruptcy. basically certain borrowers in bankruptcy who intend to retain homeownership will be entitled to receive a monthly periodic statement, or a coupon book or whatever that has specifically been modified for the bankruptcy. they also must receive written early intervention notices, but they will continue to be exempt from live contact in early intervention. finally the rule is provided sample notices that were extensively consumer tested, specifically for bankruptcy so that servicers don't have to go

out and try to figure out how to create their own periodic statement notice. servicing transfers. the rule says that a transferee servicer must step into the shoes of the transferer so that servicing transfers do not adversely impact consumers. it is really straightforward. the servicer has no say over whether their loan gets transferred and the transferee and the transferer have to figure it out to the consumer is not harmed in this transaction. that said, we do understand the art limited exceptions.

especially when loss mitigation is in play. it is very difficult for a transferee servicer, the new servicer to be able to respond timely because of the timing differential and getting all of this body of information from place to place. we have carved out a couple of specific exceptions. for example, if a loss mitigation application is received by a transfer or servicer within five days of the transfer date, that service or may not have the opportunity to review that and send the five-day knowledge with notice and tell that borrower but they need to complete the application. the transferee will be required to do that but they will have days after the transfer to make that happened. they get extra time. same thing is true in the case of a completed application. if a borrower has submitted an application within a short time

prior to the transfer and the transfer servicer has not had the opportunity to review it and make a decision on the application, the transferee is required to do so. same application. don't ask me for more documents. don't make me re-create everything. look at my application and make a decision. they will have 30 days after the transfer to do that. they should have plenty of time in order to make those things happen. there are a couple of other nuances about appeals and some other things and there are also protections for the borrower because the time frames are being pushed out. essentially that is the transfer of servicing rule. there are a number of changes in the loss mitigation space. many of those changes were driven specifically by servicers themselves. they gave us more flexibility here and there. there are a couple i want to point out.

the first one and probably the most important is the end of the one bite rule. in our current servicing rules all of the protections and loss mitigation only apply to a borrower one time during the entire life of the loan. a borrower has an adverse event and they get a loan modification for example, four years later some other terrible thing happens to them, they don't get any protections of the rule in the current rules. this will change on the new effective date. a borrower will be entitled to the protections of the rule more than once in the life of the loan if the borrower has submitted an application, a complete application, regardless of whether they did or did not get the mod. they reperform under that loan. preperformance could be a permanent modification that brings the loan current. it could be a check from aunt

mary. it doesn't matter. if the borrower manages to reinstate the loan, in the future if they have another adverse event, they can reapply. also there is a new requirement for a written notice of complete application. a borrower submits the documents and there is no requirement to tell them they are done. yes, we have your stuff. under the new rule there will be that requirement. finally the rule defines delinquency with respect to the servicing provisions of reg x and reg z. to begin a pmi. that doesn't mean the can of other definitions of delete quincy. he can't say you are not the liquid until after the 15 day grace period, or don't think my customers are deliquent until after 30 days.

when you send the 36 day notice? when you send the 45 day notice? how do cap 120 days of dili quincy before you can take legal action. those are all based of the new definitions in the rule which is basically the definition everyone is using anyway so it should not be too complicated. lots of other things i can talk about. how did i do? faith: how long did it take you to either read or develop those pages? ms. maggiono: we published in the role of november 2014. faith: michael, we are excited to hear from you and your new role. >> let me just comment on three things. one is the loss mitigation

standards issue now that the crisis era and programs and making housing and homes affordable programs for all expiring. i would like to really support an elaborate on some of ed's comments. and close with floating an idea for a special servicer. with respect to loss mitigation standards, i have always been of the opinion that whoever owns or guarantees or mortgage should not determine what borrowers options are when they become troubled and distressed. i have always supported the

notion of national loss litigation standards. while congress is not opined on that, nor the administration directly, the housing finance reform works through johnson credo. we supported and the senate banking committee majority that voted that bill out of committee really agreed there ought to be national loss mitigation standards and included a provision for joint rulemaking between with the regulator would be, the successors to fannie and freddie and cfpb. at the same time back in 2013, in the annual report of the financial stability oversight council, it too calls for national loss mitigation standards.

as we contemplate the life after the report from treasury and fha, a little more detailed guidance by cfpb they came out in the last few days were certainly all looking forward to the release of the mba 1 mod report and continued engagement around the development of consensus standards. i keep really hoping for the adoption of national standards so that all borrowers are on a level playing field. with respect to compensation reform, again going back to the fsoc report, we recognize the need to align incentives with the escalating costs of servicing nonperforming loans.

and in that report and 2013 called for efforts to implement compensation structures that align incentives of mortgage servicing with those of borrowers and other participants in the mortgage market. we tried but unsuccessfully to actually it into johnson crepo and that joint rulemaking for loss mitigation standards. also compensation reform. i continue to believe that it's very important to move on that issue. ed made the case that we are no longer in a gsc wanted to percent guarantee, but in a world of credit risk transfer where a interests with those who are taking credit risks with mortgage servicing, particularly of nonperforming loans becomes

increasingly important. i just want to point out that in a recent securitization of j.p. morgan chase earlier this year the securitization is the first that has gone to market under what is called the fdic safe harbor rule. the safe harbor rule is about if you meet the requirements of fdic that when into effect in 2010, the collateral would be protected that supports the bonds that are bought by private investors in the event the issuer goes bankrupt. in addition to that safe harbor, the fdic rules require an

alignment of interests in the servicing issue. it requires service to marketation to includethis deao that is out there adopted a -- compensation structure and a fee-for-service structure similar to one of the actions that it spoke about and papert in the 2011 white that is interesting and something we should be interested in an following. instead of that flat 25 basis is a servicing fee that compensation structure in three parts. it establishes a base servicing of $19 performing loans a month for