Mars 101,
I'm not going to assume you all now
what Mars is like.
So, Mars is a little bit smaller
than the Earth.
It's about half the size.
But, because the Earth
is predominantly ocean,
in terms of surface area,
there's about as much land to walk
around on, on Earth,
as there is on Mars,
there's as much exploring to do there
as there is here.
It's about 50% further away from
the sun than we are,
so that means it gets about half
as much solar energy as we do.
Its year is twice is long,
so, we go round the sun
in just over 365 days,
it takes Mars 690 or so.
And a Mars day is similar to
an Earth day but slightly longer,
so if you're operating a spacecraft
on Mars time,
you have this 40 minute
or so break every single day.
So, if you're operating on Mars time,
you might have a meeting at 12 o'clock
Mars time today,
tomorrow, that meeting's going to be
at 12.40,
then it'll be at 1.20,
then it'll be at 2 o'clock.
Two weeks later,
that meeting's in the middle of the night,
and two weeks later,
it's back where you started again.
And if you're operating two spacecraft
on Mars
and you transition from one to the other,
you get Martian jetlag,
it can really,
really screw with your mind.
A lot of people think Mars,
they think red, they think it's hot.
It's a commonly held misconception,
especially in schoolkids,
for some reason. It's not.
Average temperature on Earth
is about 10 or 20 degrees centigrade.
On Mars, an average temperature
is about -80 degrees centigrade.
On a particularly balmy,
summer, equatorial day,
Mars may get to perhaps
15 or 20 degrees Celsius.
Most night times, especially at the poles,
-140 degrees centigrade.
It is a cold and very nearly airless place.
There is an atmosphere on Mars,
but it's predominantly carbon dioxide and
it's very, very thin.
Now, there is a place on Earth you can
go to that's pretty much like this,
that maybe -50 degrees centigrade
and about 10 millibars of pressure.
If you can beg,
steal or borrow a U2 spy plane,
fly it up to about 100,000 feet
and open the window,
and two things will happen.
One, you will fly out of the window
and so will everything else within
the cockpit but, two,
the temperature outside
is about -150 degrees centigrade,
and the air pressure at 100,000 feet
is about 6 millibars.
This is what Mars was for tens
of thousands of years.
Mars is a planet,
planet means 'wanderer,'
this is what the ancients called the stars
that appeared to move.
Mars, when it's close to the Earth,
is one of the brightest things
in the night sky.
Here you can see the
Orion constellation.
And this is all we saw of Mars
for thousands and thousands of years,
until the advent of the telescope.
Now, next year is the
International Year of Astronomy,
which is actually scheduled to record
the 400th anniversary of the discovery
– sorry,
the invention of the telescope.
And until we had a telescope, until
we pointed these telescopes at Mars,
all we had was just this red dot that
seemed to move across the sky.
Telescopic views,
particularly in the 19th century,
turned Mars from just being this
little red star into being a place
that people could study,
it turned into a little world.
And this is your average telescopic view
over a whole evening of what Mars
is like.
And, to date,
with an average sized telescope,
you're unfortunately not going to get a
view much better than t hat.
The observatory just down
the road here, looking at Mars,
you're going to see something
about this good.
Late 19th century,
an Italian astronomer,
called Giovanni Schiaparelli
studied Mars,
and he was looking at Mars
at about this sort of quality,
and he drew a map.
And you may not be able to see the
legend here,
but he has described these white areas,
which are the kind of beige areas here,
as being land, and the dark area
as being perhaps water.
It's written here,
it's actually to the German,
'wasse,' which means water.
He was so wrong, but it was
his best stab at what he could see.
He wrote down that he thought he saw
things called 'canali.'
Now, he was talking about channels,
natural channels.
An American astronomer called
Percival Lowell,
a couple of years later,
read Schiaparelli's work,
spent a fortune on building an enormous
telescope to go and look for 'caneli,'
thinking they were canals.
And Percival Lowell wrote at great
length on kind of the demise
of this complex Martian civilisation that
was becoming barren and dried out
and they were spending all their efforts
building these vast canals
to transport water
around the surface of Mars.
But this really,
until we actually went to Mars,
was all we had,
very, very rudimentary maps
and a few little pieces of information.
Unfortunately,
our first speaker had to cancel on us,
but he was going to be talking about
the Faulkes telescopes.
And the Faulkes telescopes
are pretty epic,
research-sized telescopes.
That's a picture taken with one of them,
of Mars, it's pretty small,
they're not good telescopes
for looking at planets,
but this is sort of your average big
telescope view of Mars from Earth.
So, it took until the Space Age,
until we really get a decent look at
what this place was about.
Going to Mars is damned hard.
It's a very, very long way away.
At the very closest,
the Earth and Mars are perhaps
30 or 40 million kilometres apart,
but you can't just point a rocket,
travel 30 million kilometres and be there.
The best effort you can get is to fling
a spacecraft with a fairly hefty rocket
and spend between six and twelve
months cruising all the way out to Mars.
You spend all the time just drifting
through space.
As a result, you actually end up
travelling perhaps
400 or 500 million kilometres.
That's like going to the moon
and back 500 times.
It's kind of 10,000 laps
around the Earth.
Once you get there,
you've got another challenge.
As well as travelling this far,
getting off the ground,
travelling through space, you've got
to be accurate when you get there.
Here's a picture of Mars,
and, to scale, roughly speaking,
a tiny 10 kilometre target.
This is the sort of size accuracy you've
got to have
if you're going to successfully
land on Mars
or you're going to successfully
enter orbit around Mars.
You've got to hit a target about
10 kilometres across,
after flying 400 million kilometres.
To give you a sense of scale, that's like
standing here in Milton Keynes
and hitting one of these
that sat on the top of that.
It's a targeting challenge no other.
And I can tell you that recent spacecraft
are hitting this target here not with an
accuracy of 10 kilometres,
but the most recent actually hit
an accuracy of 800 metres,
so, less than a tenth of that.
We've been exploring Mars
for about 48 years,
and the Russians tried first.
This is the Mars versus Earth scorecard
and, to begin with,
it makes pretty horrific reading.
Failure, failure, failure,
failure, failure, failure.
It gets better towards the end.
One notable case, unfortunately,
was a spacecraft that was built –
was conceived,
built and started its journey to space,
technically, from here in Milton Keynes,
Beagle 2.
Beagle 2 was unfortunately the only
failure this century.
From 1960 to 1999,
if you launched a mission to Mars,
three-quarters chance it was going
to blow up,
crash, miss, fail completely.
One completely horrific situation,
Russia, in the 1970s, 1973,
in a period of about three weeks,
they launched four spacecraft to Mars.
Two of them completely missed,
one that went into orbit
and died nine days later,
and one of them crashed
whilst trying to land,
that was just one year's effort.
NASA has done much,
much better.
It had one failure early on,
some pretty good results here.
These are the first landers on Mars.
It had a failure here.
And had a horrific time in 1999,
but is doing much,
much better more recently.
So, kind of, the modern success rate
is more like 85%,
with Beagle 2 being the only blot
on our copybook.
But the Viking Landers back in the
1970s were hugely expensive.
They spent the equivalent,
in modern money,
of something approaching $4.3 billion,
to put two spacecraft onto the surface
of Mars and take pictures like these.
And NASA wanted to go back to Mars
in the 1990s.
After the 1970s,
after the results of this barren terrain,
they went along looking for biology,
and they came up kind of blank.
And so Mars wasn't sexy anymore.
It was fascinating back in the 60s
and the 70s,
they got this far and they thought,
"what's the point?
There's nothing really exciting here."
15 years later,
the scientists had had a chance to
digest all the information
collected in that period,
and found Mars actually, geologically,
was a fascinating place,
so they wanted to go back.
They wanted to go back with lots
of spacecraft
and land on Mars perhaps
a dozen times.
And so, to do that,
they wanted to find a new,
cheaper way of landing on Mars.
But landing on Mars is really,
really hard.
Mars has got an atmosphere,
and it's not very thick,
but it's thick enough that you have
to take a heat shield with you.
You've got to take a heat shield the
same way you need a heat shield
to land on the Earth.
And you're going to go from
Mach 25 to about Mach 2,
you're going to decelerate at about 12G,
have temperatures on the outside of
about 3,000 degrees centigrade whilst,
a few inches away, inside,
it's room temperature.
Once you've done this,
with the fiery re-entry,
you can deploy a parachute.
A supersonic parachute
is not a simple thing to design,
NASA is the only people to successfully
do it, to date.
For a sense of scale,
here is your generic NASA engineer,
these things are absolutely enormous.
But even with an enormous parachute
and not something particularly heavy
on the other end,
you'll still be doing 200 miles an hour.
And I'm not going to crash my laptop
into the ground at 200 miles an hour,
you're not going to crash a $400 million
spacecraft into the ground
at 200 miles an hour,
so you try and protect it.
You wrap it in airbags,
it's like the airbags in your car
but much, much more expensive.
And just to take the edge off that 200
mile an hour impact,
take along some rockets, as well,
very dumb, simple, solid rockets,
that would fire at the last minute,
take away some of that speed.
So that you combine all of these into
one complex Mars Pathfinder mission,
you get a bill for about $280 million.
Now, this was before NASA took
into account full-cost accounting,
and you can add about 50% on that
in terms of unaccounted overtime.
Mars Pathfinder
was a beautiful success.
It was the first Internet phenomenon.
In fact, Mars Pathfinder,
in the summer of 1997,
brought the entire French Internet
network to its knees.
Too many French people were
looking at pictures like this,
the whole thing crashed.
This is a place called Ares Vallis.
From orbit, it looks like an old floodplain.
You can see craters that have
tails behind them
where water has flooded through
in the ancient Martian past.
But the most important thing Mars
Pathfinder did was not these pictures,
it was proving this new landing system
would work,
and it did, quite obviously.
It was also the first time that a vehicle
was sent to another planet.
The Russians had sent rovers
to the moon,
and you can sit in your office and drive
a rover on the moon with a joystick,
just about.
This is Sojourner, this is the first robot
to drive around on another planet.
Here it is in a photograph before
it was launched.
When you go to Mars, you can't sit
at your desk and use a joystick.
If you did sit there,
you push the joystick forward,
and it's going to take four, five,
maybe as much as 20 minutes
for that signal to get to Mars.
You'd be holding the joystick forward
for 20 minutes,
by the time that your signal gets there,
you've got 20 minutes driving forwards
or going there.
It starts driving forwards and it starts
sending you back pictures.
So, 40 minutes after you first hit
that joystick,
you get the first semblance
of an image and it's moved.
You see a massive canyon,
you let go of the joystick, too late,
20 minutes ago,
you drove over the edge.
So, you can't sit at a desk
and drive a rover.
What you have to do,
is do some programming.
You have to be intelligent, you have
to put intelligence inside this little rover.
And on the massive scale of objects,
this is a microwave-sized rover.
And you have to command a whole
sequence for one day in advance.
You put some intelligence in the rover
and using the intelligence
of the engineers,
they'll actually write a sequence to tell
the rover what to do in one day.
And Sojourner drove out from this
lander called Mars Pathfinder,
Mars Pathfinder had cameras, so it
could see Sojourner see its little thing.
And here you can see,
it's trundling its way around Mars.
It's nothing if not cute,
to be honest.
There it is,
putting a little wheelie.
It had a science instrument on the back
called an Alpha Particle X-ray
Spectrometer.
It didn't do a great deal of science,
it was a technology demonstrator.
And what it proved was that we could
do roving on another planet,
we knew how to do this stuff.
We knew how to do the six-wheel drive,
four-wheel steering,
Rocker-Bogie suspension system.
And it worked beautifully.
They even had little cameras on board,
it had black and white cameras
on the front,
and a crummy little colour camera
on the back,
a colour camera that's way,
way worse
than any of your mobile phones
have got.
They really are pretty rudimentary,
you can see the horizon
and a bit of a rock here.
Here you can see a rock that, actually,
it's deployed it's little instrument onto.
The black and white picture in the front
are a little bit better,
here you can see the empty lander
and, from a little bit closer,
you can see the empty lander
and its camera mast sticking up
at a bit of an angle there.
So, the Mars Pathfinder,
a beautiful success.
NASA decided, "right,
we're getting Mars right,
let's go every single time we can.
You can launch to Mars
every 26 months,
so let's go every single time.
And, every single time,
let's send an orbiter and the lander."
So, 1999,
we're going to send the Mars Climate
Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander.
Mars Climate Orbiter
was an operational failure.
What that means that is the people
on the ground screwed up.
They crashed it into Mars,
it's that simple.
Instead of hitting that window
of 10 kilometres
just outside Mars
to go into orbit,
they ploughed straight
into the atmosphere
and the spacecraft burned up.
The root cause
was a managerial problem.
People weren't talking to each other
well enough.
The people who built it weren't the same
people who were operating it,
and weren't the same people who were
receiving data from it.
People didn't talk to one another,
and various complex
engineering reasons,
it diverged from where
they thought it was,
and by the time they realised,
there was nothing they could do about it.
Mars Polar Lander, well,
we didn't really know why that failed,
at the time.
It took some months to figure out why it
had started its entry
and we never heard from it again.
In some respects,
quite reminiscent of Beagle 2,
but kind of in advance,
as it were.
Some months later,
the root cause was found,
and it was a programming error,
but a programming error that, again,
found its root cause in the same kind
of reasons.
The big picture was they were trying to
do all of this far too cheap,
they tried to do this whole lot
for less than they spent
on that one Mars Pathfinder.
This left them with a problem.
They'd spent a couple
of hundred million dollars here,
absolutely zit to show for it.
2001, they were planning a very nearly
identical orbiter,
with a laser pointer that's died –
sorry, Jonty,
I've killed your laser now –
and a lander that was
very nearly identical.
Now, we knew why we'd crashed
the Orbiter, we drove it into Mars,
that's a pretty fundamental thing
to be able to fix.
The lander, it didn't really know
why it had failed
at the point at which they had to make
a decision, do we cancel it or not?
And they decided to cancel the lander.
The guy who was designing
instruments for this,
a gentleman called Steve Squires,
who's actually given a lecture here,
he was six weeks away from delivering
a calibrated payload
to be put on top of this vehicle
to go to a place on Mars,
when it was cancelled.
He'd actually submitted proposal
for instruments from Mars Pathfinder
and Polar Lander and was successful
with this mission,
his third try,
and it gets cancelled six weeks
before delivering his instruments.
This is a challenge for 2003 because
where do you go from here?
You've got a landing system
that worked back in 1997 –
and NASA have been wanting to send
a big rover to Mars
for years and years and years.
They had ideas - this is a test rover
on the Earth called Fido,
they had others called Rocky 4,
Rocky 5, Rocky 7,
lots of different designs for rovers.
And they had the instruments.
They had instruments
from that cancelled lander.
And so what the scientists that the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory did
is crash all of these into one another,
put these instruments
on a rover a bit like that and hide
it inside this landing system,
and come out with the
Mars Exploration Rover.
And with that you get a price tag
of about $440 million.
This competed,
as a proposal,
against a very large orbiter that was due
to launch in the same 2003 timeframe.
And the decision was delayed.
People were waiting to find out,
are they going to fly a new, cool rover?
Are they going to fly a big,
safe orbiter?
The decision was delayed
because this proposal
had gone to NASA headquarters,
and this chap,
who was the NASA administrator
at the time, has said,
"I don’t want to fly one,
can you build two?"
And the engineers had about 90
minutes to go away
and figure out how much
a second one was going to cost.
And at the time, it's going to be
about buy one, get one half price.
By the time they launched,
engineering problems with parachutes
and airbags and onboard systems,
that $665 million budget actually was
completely roasted
and turned to a budget of about $820
million by the time they launched.
That's for two vehicles which,
actually,
is not too far off being twice
what they thought.
This is the vehicle they built.
They called them Spirit and Opportunity.
I can't tell you which this is, they are
identical in just about every single way.
If you unbolt the things
and found some serial numbers,
you might find some differences,
but that's about it.
These vehicles are covered in cameras.
They have navigation cameras,
some at the top here,
and some wide-angled googly-eyed
cameras at the bottom here.
They've got beautiful
panoramic cameras
that take these amazing colour pictures
that you can view on the Web.
And there's a microscope
on the end of the arm.
And there's another camera,
that's actually bolted to the lander,
that brings the whole thing
to the ground,
and that takes pictures
on the way down.
There's also a thermal emissions
spectrometer.
This is a kind of a spectrometer
that can identify minerals at a distance.
So, this is the thing actually
landing on Mars.
This was from a movie called
Roving Mars,
and is a reconstruction of the
landing of Spirit
from actual data reconstructed
after the event.
So, we've got our fiery re-entry
from Mach 25 down to about Mach 2,
screaming through
the atmosphere towards this,
which is a large impact crater.
Throw out your supersonic parachute,
falling through the sky at 250, 220,
maybe 200 miles an hour,
falling towards the surface.
All this happens very,
very quickly,
it's six minutes of absolute terror and the
engineers are completely hands-off,
they have no control over this
entire procedure.
Get rid of your heat shield,
you don’t need it anymore.
And then the lander,
with its undeployed airbags,
is repelled down a large rope.
And so now you've got the parachute,
the back shell with its little motors,
and the lander.
About 5 seconds before you hit,
you inflate the airbags,
the radar locks onto the ground,
and when it thinks it's just about to hit,
you fire the rockets
and you bring the whole lot to a dead
stop about 5 metres above the ground,
after a journey of about
450 million kilometres.
And then this thing bounces,
and it bounces high,
it bounces very hard,
and it bounces for as much as a minute.
It bounced about a dozen times,
and about four storeys high.
But, eventually, you roll out –
this looks ridiculous but it's actually,
because of the low Martian gravity,
what it would actually look like.
And this is imagery reconstructed
from the lander itself,
showing what the event might
have looked like.
You come to a standstill,
you deflate the airbags,
you open up the lander
and you deploy the rover from inside.
So, where did they send them?
Well, they sent Spirit here.
This is Gusev Crater,
it's a crater of about 100 kilometres,
but what's remarkable about
it is that it's a crater
with a great big river flowing into it,
so, suggesting that this was once a very,
very large lake.
They opened their eyes, and these
were the first pictures they took.
They're expecting to see sediments.
You get a big lake, you get sediments
forming in the bottom.
And if you can find these sediments
in situ, if you can find bedrock,
or in the walls of a crater or original
pieces of sediment,
you can read this sediment
as a record of geological history,
you can understand
what went on in this place,
long ago in the past,
when it's conjected
the place was much,
much wetter than it is today.
They arrived at Gusev Crater,
and every single rock they could find
wasn't a piece of sediment,
it was just a piece of lava.
This was a rock called Adirondack,
it was the first rock they went to look at.
They put all their instruments onto it
and it just turned out to be an ordinary
piece of basalt,
nothing exceptional at all.
This was a major blow, because they
went here looking for one thing,
and that thing just was not there.
They left their empty lander there.
Here you can see the bits of airbag
left over.
And the rover itself was actually
all tucked up inside this tiny little
base petal here,
and drove off from here.
The good thing about a rover is,
if you don’t like where you are,
you can move,
and so they did.
And, in fact,
here you can see the rim of a crater,
which is this crater here,
and here you can see the beginning
of some hills
that they called the Colombia Hills,
named after the lost crew of the
Colombia Shuttle,
which was lost only a few months
before this thing took off.
And they decided they were going to go
to this crater, which they did,
from where they landed,
and hoping to find sediments
in the walls of this crater.
No cigar, nothing there at all.
And this vehicle's designed to last about
90 days and drive about 600 metres.
90 days was about here,
and they thought, "what the hell?
Foot to the floor."
And they tried to make out for these hills
down here,
two and a half kilometres away,
which is what they did.
And after 154 days,
they crossed over
from the terrain on the floor on the floor
of this crater to the hills,
and everything changed in the space
of a single metre.
By the time they got to the hills,
the front right wheel was beginning
to act a little bit arthritic,
it was pulling a bit more current than
the other motors,
and they were nervous
about using it too much.
So, they ended climbing the beginning
of these hills backwards,
using five-wheel drive,
saving that motor
for when they really,
really needed to use it.
But after a lot of struggle,
you can see they're churning up the
ground a huge amount here,
having climbed all the way up from the
foot of these hills –
the lander is way off in the distance
here somewhere –
they eventually made it onto
kind of the escarpment
of this range of hills called the
Columbia Hills,
this is an area called West Spur.
And to give you an idea what sort
of angle they're driving at,
look at what angle these frames
are at to give you a flat horizon.
The rover's kind of off at an angle
like this.
But the rocks here were completely
different to the ones out on the plains.
You can see, just down here,
they actually used the instruments
on the arm to drill a little hole.
And these rocks
were not just ordinary lava,
these rocks were formed in the
presence of water,
they had a mineral called jarosite,
that forms, almost always,
in the presence of water,
suggesting there was water in this place.
Once they'd got to the very beginning
of the Colombia Hills just here,
they decided they wanted to get to
the absolute summit because,
you know,
you can't go to hills without climbing
to the top and having a look around.
And you can see here,
here's the pattern of them driving
backwards with five-wheel drive.
They would drag that one wheel
time after time,
and then just drive it a little bit to clear
the lump of a trench they'd dug,
then drive it a little bit,
start dragging it.
But, over time,
purely by driving backwards,
they redistributed the lubricant
in that wheel,
and essentially kind of saved itself,
it became much,
much better
and they began
to be able to use it again,
and they really,
really needed it to climb this hill.
By this point,
about 300 days into a 90 day mission,
Spirit was looking pretty dirty,
pretty filthy.
Dust falls out of the Martian atmosphere
all the time
and if you hang around long enough
you're going to get caked in it.
This is what Spirit was like,
and it was getting to a point
where it was very,
very low on power,
so low that much more of it and it would
actually have to turn off and die.
Pure good fortune,
this happened.
In the hills of the Colombia Hills,
just the morphology of the terrain,
lucky gust of winds,
blew almost all that dust clean off
the solar panels.
At about the same time,
they had their cameras looking off
across the plains and they saw these.
These are dust devils, these are
baby tornadoes on the surface of Mars.
Here's some more of them.
These images are about
20 seconds apart.
They have taken hundreds of movie
sequences like this
and have observed thousands
and thousands of dust devils.
These are a lunchtime phenomenon,
they're a summer phenomenon.
And they don’t think that one of these
actually cleaned
the dust off the solar panels but kind
of generally the fast winds associated
with conditions like this
are what have kept the solar panels
clean and kept the vehicles alive.
They got to the summit
of what they called Husband Hill,
they named the biggest hill in the range
from the Commander of Colombia,
called Rick Husband.
This is a view all the way across
the summit.
To give you a sense of scale,
in terms of resolution,
to show this picture in full resolution,
you need three Imax screens,
they run at about
10 million bucks apiece,
so I don't recommend it.
You can print these are 300 dpi
at 60 inches across
and still be needing more paper,
they're absolutely enormous images.
Here you can see where they've arrived
and they've crested on the summit,
in fact, using a programme called
Midnight Mars Browser,
which is a free programme written
by some enthusiasts,
you can actually see the drives that they
took on the summit of Husband Hill.
If you're wondering what this
funky little feature here is,
there's kind of a green streak
and a red streak,
and you may even be able to see
a blue streak, as well.
When they take colour pictures
on the surface of Mars,
they don’t have a colour camera,
it's a black and white camera,
but they use filters in front of it,
because you can get much, much
clearer pictures if you do it that way.
And in between taking the red picture,
the green picture and the blue picture,
that you then put back together again
to get the colour,
a dust devil sailed past, and so
the dust devil was here in one filter,
and here in the next filter,
and here in the last filter,
so you've got these
funny colour patches.
They look a look off towards the south,
after they looked
at the top of Husband Hill,
and saw this strange feature here,
it's about 100 metres across
and much, much brighter
than the terrain around it.
They called it Home Plate,
because being Americans,
they loved baseball.
And over the next couple
of hundred sols,
they drove off the summit of Husband
Hill and all to way to this feature here.
But, at this point,
they had huge amounts of power
while they were on the summit of the hill
during their second Martian summer,
but summer very,
very quickly turns to winter,
and dust very quickly accreted
onto the solar panels,
and it was a sprint to get from here,
quickly look at Home Plate,
and the plan was,
try to get up here to the next hill along,
so they could spent the winter
sunbathing on the north facing slopes
of this next hill along.
Before they did, 
they did some astronomy.
You might not be able to figure out
what that is, here's another one.
And here's the other one.
Mars has got two moons,
but they are very, very small.
Phobos and Deimos.
They're kind of Anglesey,
Isle of Wight sized lumps of rock.
Phobos is much, much closer,
and here –
that's Phobos crossing the surface
of the sun,
and here's Deimos,
much, much smaller.
It's already gone.
For amateur astronomers amongst
the audience,
a Deimos transit actually looks a bit like
a Venus transit
but it's much, much quicker.
They tried to get to this hill,
the next hill along,
to get some sunbathing
for the next winter,
and just before they got there,
in kind of a sandy patch of ground,
that front right wheel came back
and failed completely.
They'd had an extra couple of years
out of it on this 90 day mission,
eventually it gave up the ghost,
and you can see it churned up huge
amounts of soil.
And this was a pain,
because they couldn't get to the hill
that they wanted to get to,
they had to retreat back to a safer place.
But, at the same time,
they'd now got this kind of non-optional
trenching tool,
wherever they drive,
they drag a trench through the ground.
And, by chance,
they dragged up these enormous
amounts of sulphate deposits.
These are Epsom salts,
just underneath the Martian soil.
And I'm getting to a point in the story
for Spirit whereby the story is ahead
of the scientific understanding,
but the conjecture is that Home Plate
itself is actually a volcanic feature,
and that these sulphates here are
as a result of water or water vapour
interacting with that volcanic activity.
They retreated to a place called
Low Ridge Haven,
a slight slope they could park
for their winter.
Look, you can see the mess they made,
over here.
And after about a year camping here
for the winter,
they got moving again
and headed back towards Home Plate,
and they did more trenching,
accidentally,
and dug up vast quantities of silica.
And the form of silica they found here,
we're talking 85% by weight silica
in these soil deposits,
that's an almost sure-fire indicator
of water on volcanic action.
This stuff is very, very indicative
of water in and around this feature,
hot springs,
that sort of stuff,
think, kind of,
Yellowstone National Park,
pretty extraordinary geology.
That's where Spirit was
on its winter haven.
This was from a camera, in fact,
that picture Jonty showed of that crater,
is taken by a camera called High Rise.
Now if High Rise was in orbit around
the Earth,
its pictures would be classified.
Google recently sponsored the launch
of an orbital mission to the Earth
that's taking pictures at about
40 centimetres per pixel.
So, your average pixel
is about this ground.
US defence law dictates
they must down-sample that
to 50 centimetres per pixel
before they can release it
to the wider public.
The US military is not happy with people
having pictures of the Pentagon,
the White House, or, you know,
Edwards Air Force Base,
at 40 centimetres per pixel.
This camera takes pictures at
25 centimetres per pixel,
twice as high as the US military would
allow you to see of the Earth.
And it's not just looked at Spirit once –
it's looked at Spirit –
there is the actual rover,
and it moved a little bit,
it moved a little bit more,
then it moved again.
Just onto the edge of Home Plate, a
local dust storm completely obscures it.
It reappears here,
drive down to here,
all the way round to here,
and that is where is today.
And, in fact,
Spirit has been sat on the same place,
on Home Plate,
for a couple of hundred sols.
That little spec is Spirit itself.
Yesterday, quite literally,
after hankering out
for the entire third Martian winter,
barely surviving on the power
it was able to generate,
Spirit drove for the first time
yesterday morning,
after about 200 days.
This is the view from the
north of Home Plate.
It's taken the whole winter,
200 days or so,
to build up a panorama.
It's not all come down yet,
it has been all taken,
but it's not been all down-linked
to the Earth yet,
of the whole 360 degrees in every filter,
and very, very low compression.
To give you an idea
of what that move is like,
this is from the front of the rover,
the front wheels are here,
at a big angle.
And just that little move there,
from there to there,
give a bit of a reference,
see a little rock there,
it's moved from there to there.
Moved about this far.
That's the first move for about 200 days,
just hankering down,
trying to survive winter, sunbathing,
facing north.
What this also is, is very,
very good news,
because it means Spirit,
with that front right wheel
that's actually broken,
it will be able to climb back onto
Home Plate.
They weren't sure, after getting off the
edge of Home Plate
to get this solar power,
whether they would be able
to climb back up,
and whether or not they'd have to scoot
all the way around.
And that first little drive shows that
actually they'd be able to drive back
onto the top of Home Plate and explore
two features just south of Home Plate
that look like lumpy versions
of Home Plate,
perhaps different types
of volcanic geology.
To give you an idea, this image
was taken at 2.15 this morning.
This image was taken actually
the day before,
and shows Spirit just looking out across
the edge of Home Plate.
Look at the angle on the horizon there,
it's about 32 degrees.
That's that angle Spirit
has had to sunbathe,
the sun being lower in the north
during its winter.
And this small drive has taken a few
degrees off that,
it's a little bit flatter,
but still trying to get as much solar
power as they can.
It is very, very low on power,
but it has survived its
third Martian winter.
And, with limited mobility,
they're going to head off back across
Home Plate
and look at interesting geology
to the south.
Meanwhile,
on the other side of the planet,
Opportunity was sent,
the twin rover of Spirit,
and it was sent to what is probably
the only remarkable feature
in this entire map,
which is this funky little patch here.
This is a map made by another
spacecraft of minerals,
and in particular,
one mineral called hematite.
Some of you may have seen
hematite jewellery.
It's an iron-bearing mineral that's
predominantly formed in water,
not always formed in water,
but usually formed in the presence
of water, here on Earth.
And with one tiny little patch of it
on the whole of the planet,
they thought that might be
an interesting place to go.
This was the landing ellipse just here,
this is the safest part of that hematite
they could find.
Same landing system,
same launch,
on a similar rocket.
Here's the actual trajectory,
reconstructed after the event,
of Opportunity,
coming in on its parachute,
firing its rockets
and bouncing across the surface.
These three pictures here are the three
pictures taken by the spacecraft
on the way down.
This little dark spot here
is actually the shadow of the parachute
while it's coming down.
And it bounced and it rolled
and it bounced and it rolled,
and it rolled straight into
a 20 metre wide crater.
Tiger Woods on his best day
cannot do this.
They budgeted five trajectory
correction manoeuvres
between the Earth and Mars,
little chances to nudge the trajectory
just a tiny amount.
They only actually needed
three of those,
which means they came in at two
under par,
and that's why this is called
Eagle Crater.
All the craters around Meridiani Plain,
where this is,
are actually all named after vessels
of exploration
and the Eagle is, of course,
the spacecraft
that first landed people on the moon.
They opened their eyes
and this is what they saw.
Bearing in mind,
we're looking for bedrock,
we're looking for rock in situ,
everything that Bonneville Crater
was a failure,
everything that they couldn't find
with Spirit,
they found right in front of their eyes.
The very first image sent back
by Opportunity
covered this bed rock right here.
This looks like pretty hefty stuff,
you know, pretty small rover.
The first images,
they had to give a name for this feature,
they called it the Great Wall.
Once they got their images down
and they can do stereo imaging
and figure out what the terrain
is actually like.
Great big rover,
tiny little outcrop.
This stuff's tiny,
it's about this much.
If you're wondering what this little
bunny-shaped feature is down here,
that's actually a piece
of discarded airbag,
it's a piece of ripped airbag material,
but they were able to watch over
a few days,
and they ended up being blown,
hiding underneath the lander.
They got out their mini
Thermal Emissions Spectrometer
and they went hunting for this hematite.
And this is where they found it.
This is red beam, lots of hematite,
blue beam, none at all,
overlaid on an image that they took.
And in some places there's very,
very little,
and in some places there's
absolutely loads.
The places where there were very,
very little
is the same places where
the airbags bounced into the soil.
And so they took some pictures much,
much closer of the ground
and zoomed right in with their
microscope,
you can see there is soil,
and the soil's got little balls on it,
little round ball-bearing size lumps
of rock.
They went up to the rocks over here,
and imaged these rocks really up close,
and you can see incredibly fine layering
and these little balls
pouring out of the rock,
like blueberries in a muffin.
They nicknamed them blueberries,
not that they're blue,
but they're more blue than
anything else around them.
They took the instrument arm,
went up to this rock.
I apologise,
there are graphs in my talk, too.
This graph's a bit of a mess
but all it really is,
is to remind me to tell you that the
difference between the soil
and the rock is that the rock has got vast
quantities of bromine and sulphur,
both elements that are often found in
rocks that have been deposited by water.
Another horrible graph.
This one is indicative of jarosite, vast
quantities of jarosite within this rock.
This rock is essentially sandstone.
It's laid down in water.
Then they got their microscope
and looked at the morphology.
This is the mineral,
what's the stuff made of,
now what does it look like?
This is a patch of Mars about this big,
and it looks like someone's baked a cake
and then pulled out loads
of 2p pieces out of it,
little pieces missing.
These are called crystal form growths,
of vugs.
It's where crystals formed within the
rock when it was formed,
water has then come through
and dissolved those little crystals
back out again,
leaving echoes of where
they once were.
And another piece of the rock,
they actually mosaic –
they wallpapered it with tiny little
microscope images.
And they could see the layering,
but between the layers,
little smiley features.
You get these where you have
running water.
You can imagine little ripples
on a fairly calm beach,
these are a fossilised version of that.
So, not only were these rocks formed
in the presence of water,
they were probably laid down
in running water.
The last puzzle was,
what exactly where these little balls.
Unfortunately,
the balls themselves are too small to be
in the field of the instruments.
So, they too two spectra.
They took one from a patch of rock,
that they called Empty,
and one right on top of the berries,
and this six-pointed feature came out
from their spectrometers.
The berries are the hematite, and they're
kind of the third piece of the clue.
They're hematite concretions,
the conjecture being,
these rocks formed in the presence
of running water,
and then were soaked once again,
and like a pearl forming in an oyster,
this hematite has concreted out of when
they were re-soaked
and formed these little round berries.
You can find them on the Earth,
they tend to be bigger on the Earth.
Go to the Natural History Museum,
you can actually see hematite
concretions about this size.
So, three pieces of evidence,
the case for water on Mars,
signed, sealed, delivered.
They made a complete mess of
Eagle Crater,
driven all the way around it,
left their empty lander behind.
A full resolution with this image,
you can actually see the little rat holes
they drilled into these rocks.
So, mission accomplished,
on a 90 day mission,
and it's only sol 48,
job done.
What do you do next?
Well, this is one very,
very small crater,
how about going to a bigger one.
This is another image by High Rise, the
amazing high resolution camera in orbit,
you can actually see the lander sat
in the tiny Eagle Crater there.
This is its parachute and the back shell,
discarded down here.
And so they set out
and drove across what is absolutely
stunning rover driving terrain.
And they drove about 800 metres
to the east, towards this.
This is Endurance Crater.
This isn't Victoria Crater,
this isn't the big one,
this is medium-sized.
This is about 200 metres across,
this is what it looks like when you arrive.
About 200 metres across,
perhaps 15 metres deep.
And if you remember the picture
of the rover
sat on top of a tiny little outcrop
at Eagle Crater,
this is actually a cliff.
And it's a cliff,
there's a massive printout of that cliff
outside with anaglyph glasses if you
want to see it in stereo.
The rover is about that big.
Tiny, tiny little rover on top of
an enormous cliff.
This is a place where, if you're stupid,
you can kill a rover very,
very easily.
But this is the picture they took,
right from the foot of that cliff.
It took them a year,
but they got all the way there.
And not only did this confirm the story of
water they'd seen back at Eagle Crater,
but it added thousands, millions,
maybe hundreds of millions of years
to the story of water on Mars.
Much of this rock was actually laid down
as sand dunes and then turns into rock,
but it's all been made wet
at some point that followed
So, Eagle Crater done,
Endurance Crater done,
about 360 sols into a mission,
where do you go next?
You get bold once again.
Here you can just see –
that's Eagle Crater,
that's Endurance Crater –
let's go for another big drive.
For a 600 metre specified vehicle,
they decided to travel about
seven and a half kilometres due south,
to the crater that Jonty showed you,
Victoria Crater.
On the way there, they stopped off
at a few interesting sights,
one of them being this.
A sure sign of intelligent life on Mars.
Unfortunately,
it's our intelligent life on Mars.
This is where the discarded heat shield
smacked into the ground,
make a little crater,
broke into two pieces
and turned inside out.
The heat shield was actually pushed
away from the back shell
of the lander by six large springs,
each the size of kind of like a beer can,
that sort of thing.
And amateurs went hunting for them.
We found them all,
no one's stolen any of them,
all six are still there.
This is actually the inside
of the heat shield,
it's belly-flopped
and turned itself inside out.
And, to give you a sense of scale,
you could probably just hunker down
and hide underneath it.
You can see there's a rock
just on the far side,
it's the only rock for hundreds of metres.
It's not a rock at all,
it's actually an iron meteorite.
If you are looking for meteorites,
Meridiani plain was a great place to go.
The tickets are quite pricey.
Steve Squires,
the Chief Scientist,
said that its clear you 
should get moving,
as this a place where large heavy metal
objects fall from the sky.
They headed south,
and they headed south very, very
quickly, they put their foot to the floor.
This was the picture taken at the end
of the record drive,
and it's a record that still stands to date.
In one day they drove just a fraction
over 219 metres.
Of those 219 metres, 110 were driven
backwards and without intelligence,
they just put it into reverse
and gunned it.
The following 119 metres,
the rover did them itself.
They just said, "you've got this much
time in the sequence,
keep driving south
as intelligently as you can.
Look for hazards, drive a bit more,
look for hazards, drive a bit more."
So, the first hour it covered half
the distance,
it took four hours to cover
the remaining distance,
but this, to date,
stands as a Martian land speed record.
And, in fact,
the gentleman who wrote that sequence
recently came to visit the UK,
I met some colleagues of his
in Coventry.
And that is the
Mars Land Speed Record.
I thought I'd give him some inspiration
and so I took him to see this.
This gentleman is called Andy Mishkin,
he worked on the Sojourner mission.
This is his wife, Sharon,
who actually worked on Sojourner
and the Mars Exploration Rovers.
And this is Scott Maxwell, who holds
the Martian Land Speed Record.
He's got competition,
because the car we're sat in front of
has done 763 miles an hour,
and you may have just seen
in the news,
the guys who built this are actually going
to try and beat their own record,
so extraordinary.
Of course,
driving this recklessly on Mars
is eventually going to cause you trouble,
and it did.
I don’t know how well you can see this,
but these are the rear wheels,
and they are buried up to the hubcaps
and beyond in a sand dune.
Here's a picture round the front.
They were completely stuck.
Here's a colour picture taken of the
same area.
Just got slightly stuck into a sand dune
and then they spent
– the rover thought,
"nothing in front of me, keep driving,
nothing in front of me,
keep driving," for about 80 metres,
and in that distance covered only
a few metres.
These are two movies that cover about
eleven days of driving.
In those days,
they commanded about 50 metres
of wheel motion,
and those 50 metres of wheel motion
gave them about 28 centimetres
of progress.
This was terrifying.
Eventually it gets better,
and eventually,
after about two months of trying,
they got back out again.
It turns out, if you do get stuck
in a Martian sand dune,
the way to get out is to stick it
into reverse and gun it.
They didn't know
but they had to find out,
and this is how you do it.
After two years of driving,
they made it to this Victoria Crater
that Jonty showed you.
And, in fact,
this was where the rover was when that
colour image he showed you was taken.
And they decided that they wanted
to go in
but they didn't know where the best
place to go in was.
So, they spent a year exploring
the northern rim of Victoria Crater,
all the way along the northern rim here.
Whilst it was doing it,
High Rise is still flying overhead,
and took this picture.
You can actually see the rover's tracks
along the northern rim.
You can see they explored
between these –
they called these capes
and they called these bays,
from cape to bay,
from cape to bay,
all the way around.
And just here, they said, "right,
we've seen enough of Victoria Crater,
we'll go into it now,"
and they started driving back again.
Just here,
here are the sort of views you get.
This is again using that programme
called Midnight Mars Browser,
written by an amateur enthusiast.
It can re-project pictures back
into 3-D space,
and you get a picture like this.
This was called the 'drunken sailor walk,'
because the rover has nothing
to reference.
If you're on smooth terrain with perfect
wheel tracks,
there's nothing for the cameras
to reference
to figure out how far it's moving.
They added intelligence to the rover
to stop things
like that dune incident happening again.
There isn't an actual way of detecting
wheel slip,
what you can do is say,
"right, I've just commanded a drive
of one metre,
how far have I actually driven?"
by comparing pictures before and after.
But on terrain like this,
you've got nothing to compare with.
So, we put a little wiggle into all the
driving so that the camera would be able
to lock on to these little drunken sailor
walking steps.
This was the turning point of the eastern
side of the Victoria Crater.
Literally and metaphorically,
they actually used some of this new
intelligence they'd uplinked to the rover,
and told it to get from here to here
whilst avoiding this.
It did so quite happily, and they headed
back to where they wanted to go in.
And then Mother Nature intervened.
These are pictures of the sun as seen
by Opportunity over a couple of months.
These was a global
dust storm so bad
that the sun was completely obscured
from view.
For a solar powered vehicle,
this is a bad thing.
Colour pictures of the horizon, that's
your average fairly dusty day on Mars,
it got murkier and murkier
and murkier and murkier,
to a point where –
another graph,
I apologise – this is how much power
the rover was getting.
And you can see a general pattern.
Landed roughly in autumn,
it drops during winter,
it becomes high again during summer,
drops during winter.
About to become high again
during summer,
the dust storm happens and, boom.
They were very,
very close to losing the rover,
very, very close,
but it just made it through.
Drove into Victoria Crater
and took pictures like this,
showing more of this layered outcrop
and these enormous cliff faces.
The science from this isn't yet
kind of determined,
but it's going to be good when they
figure out exactly
what they've been looking at.
This is a mosaic taken only a few
months ago.
Here's a route they took into Victoria
Crater and then back out again.
And they've since left.
This was the movie
they took on the way out again.
You can see it's taken over a number
of days but,
in each of those days, you can see the
shadows moving across the ground.
So, what next,
they've travelled seven
and a half kilometres,
they've got twelve kilometres
on the clock.
Heading south toward Victoria Crater,
and they're done,
where are you going to go next?
Well,
you can't accuse them of being safe.
This particularly low resolution picture
is low resolution because it needs to be.
That is the seven and a half kilometres
they covered from Eagle
and Endurance all the way to Victoria,
and their plan is to do this.
And try and get to this little thing here.
This is called Endeavour Crater,
it's about 20 kilometres across.
It's about 15 kilometres away,
but it's the right direction to go,
The terrain gets more interesting as you
go this way, you're going uphill,
so there's newer rocks
as you go that way.
They may or may not make it.
The rover is more intelligent
than it's ever been,
the programmers are more experienced
than they've ever been,
but you've got to give them a round of
applause for trying, if nothing else.
I'm out of time,
so I'm going to leave it there.
I'll be very happy to take your questions.
Stunned silence.
Go on then.
Obviously,
this latest problem with the dust thing
took a while to recover from, did it?
Yeah, you're talking about that global
dust storm?
Yeah, that stole most of the
last Martian summer.
Opportunity got lucky,
most of that dust didn't end up falling out
from the dust storm
onto the solar panels.
But it took about two months.
They were actually poised –
they had a press conference, to say,
"we're going to into the crater,
we know where we're going to go in,
and we're going to go in next week."
Next week happened,
the dust storm happened,
they didn't go in,
in fact,
they stayed in exactly the same spot
for about two months,
waiting for it to clear.
Because I was interested in,
before you said about that problem,
how the eye-in-the-sky,
as it were,
could see the rover had been.
I assume that the dust was continuous.
That image, actually,
the image with those tracks,
is actually about a few weeks before
that dust storm occurred.
If you look at the – there's a black
and white print up on the board outside,
it's actually the distance from Eagle
Crater to Endurance Crater,
you can see no signs of the tracks at all,
they've been blown away.
The fresher the tracks are,
you've got more chance of seeing them.
Once they're more than a few
months old, they go away.
So, it's literally waiting for the wind to
blow the dust off the –
It's finger's crossed.
- panels every time.
- It is fingers crossed.
Maybe Mother Nature will help  you,
maybe it won't.
Yes, all the broken rock
that's on the surface of Mars there,
I mean, it's all irregular,
it's not worn smooth.
Where's all that broken rock
come from?
It's scattered everywhere.
What's caused that?
Geologists tend to call it 'gardening.'
It's impacts.
Mars has been without major erosional
forces for some time.
There is wind,
and there is some scouring.
If you look at the cliffs in Victoria Crater,
you can see where scouring has
occurred against the layering.
But all this rock lying all over the place,
especially in Gusev Crater,
there's loads of rock lying on the ground,
it's all ejecta from impacts.
Now, if it's not ejecta from impacts,
it's ejecta from impacts caused
by ejecta from other impacts,
secondary impact craters.
Thank you.
Is it possible to date the various rocks
that you find?
Unfortunately,
not yet.
Engineers haven't figured out a way
to put the sort of instrumentation you
need to date rocks,
which currently fills a pretty large
laboratory,
into a spacecraft where you've got about
this much room.
You can have relative age, you can say
this rock is younger than this rock,
but you can't say this rock is X billion
years old.
What we can do is date areas on Mars
based on how many craters they have.
A younger place will have fewer craters,
an older place will have more craters.
But there's no direct way of measuring
the actual age of any one rock, yet.
It's going to take more engineering
to figure out how to fit,
kind of, the carbon dating,
all those sorts of techniques,
or radon dating or xenon dating,
into a very, very small box.
You've got to fit a room into a shoebox,
and they're not got there yet.
Hello. Maybe a speculative question,
what's happened to the water?
There's no evidence of hydrated rocks
from what you've seen,
but there's evidence of water action
on volcanic rock formation in the past.
No evidence of reflective poles,
so there aren't glaciers around,
so far as we can tell.
Could the water be below the surface
or has it disappeared?
They have found the water.
A mission I didn't have time
to tell you about,
called Phoenix,
which landed this May
and is still working to date,
has actually found ice.
And there's epic quantities of ice just
under the surface
in the north polar region,
and the same is true, probably,
of the south polar region.
A lot of it would have been lost to space,
a lot of it would have frozen deep
underground.
There are actually some hydrated
minerals there,
some of the rock formations have
actually measured a compound
with H2O in it,
there's actually lots of water bound up
in the rocks,
to the point where they see a water band
within the thermal emissions spectra.
But most of it is probably as ice,
subterranean.
If you could put any mission to Mars
that you wanted,
within a reasonable budget,
go anywhere,
what would you choose to do?
Well, the next big mission to Mars
is called MSL,
the Mars Science Lab.
And it's got budget issues,
really big budget issues,
like $1.9 billion budget issues.
It's not the size of kind of like a small
golf cart like these guys,
it's the size of a Mini,
as in a new Mini,
the big BMW Mini,
a huge thing.
This thing weighs about three quarters
of a ton and, to be honest,
it's pretty much my ideal Mars mission,
because it doesn't have to rely on
favours from Mother Nature
to keep the solar panels clean,
it has a large radioactive power supply
on the back
that will supply it with X watts every day
for several years.
Now, the landing site selection process
for that is ongoing,
and I have my favourite landing site.
It's one called Galle Crater.
It's a crater about the same sort of size
as Gusev Crater,
but it has a huge central peak
in which we can already see layered
outcrops of rock,
and there's a canyon that runs through
the middle of this thing.
And the option being presented to the
mission selection board, as it were,
is to land between the central peak
and the edge of Galle Crater,
and drive through this canyon with huge
kind of outcrops of eroded,
exposed rocks on the side,
and I'd pay to watch that.
You said earlier that if there
was no sunlight left,
it would entirely die,
did they not have the capacity for it
to restart itself when sunlight returns?
Yeah, the batteries have to be kept
comparatively warm.
They are superb batteries.
The batteries on Mars Pathfinder
back in 1997,
died after about 90 cycles.
The batteries on the two rovers have
lasted about 1700 cycles
and are still going pretty strong.
The problem is,
if you don’t have enough energy
to charge the batteries enough to use
the heaters to keep the batteries warm,
you end up freezing the batteries.
Once the batteries are frozen,
you can't charge them anymore,
so even with clean solar panels,
you're at kind of a lost point.
Now, that's why the best way
to go to Mars
is spend a lot of money to build a bigger
rover that doesn't need them.
The Phoenix mission at the North Pole
right now is in the north polar autumn,
and it's north of the equivalent Arctic
Circle on Mars.
So, in about five months,
the sun will set
at the Phoenix landing site and will not
be seen again for several months.
And, in fact,
Phoenix will probably become buried
in carbon dioxide frost,
to a certain extent.
The engineers know that this is almost
certainly going to kill the vehicle but,
they're not going to take the gamble
of assuming it won't,
so, onboard there is software whereby
if it wakes up in the Spring,
it will try a Lazarus mode,
to try and charge its batteries
and try and work again,
and the rovers have similar software.
If things go horrifically bad, keep trying
until we tell you to do something else,
but once you get to a point where you
don’t have enough energy
to keep the rover alive
on a day-to-day basis,
it's unlikely you'll get it back
at any point in the future.
In view of the enormous success of the
remote control rovers,
does there seem much purpose in
spending hundreds of times
more money to send a manned
mission to Mars,
with imminent danger
to the people who go there?
I can give no greater advocate than
Steve Squires,
who is the principle investigator for the
two rovers.
He is a huge fan of robotic missions.
And when the engineers
and the scientists
who drive Spirit and Opportunity
were practising,
they had a rover like Fido,
the old test rover,
out in the desert somewhere
in America.
And they had some technical problems
and so the geologist just kind of said,
"right, fix the robo,
we'll go and do some geology."
And they walked around
and they did some geology.
But Steve Squires didn't,
he sat back and he watched,
and he had a stopwatch
and he had a notepad.
And he wrote down how long it took
geologists to do stuff.
And it takes Spirit and Opportunity
about a day to do something it takes
a man about 30 seconds.
Now, yeah,
sending a man to Mars is a hugely
expensive proposition,
but there is kind of a caveat to that,
is that you can't spend money in space.
It all gets down here,
on engineers and scientists and,
you know,
it's good money to spend in that way.
But the closing words
in kind of a pseudo-biological book
he wrote about these two rovers
are that the thing he wants to see most
of all is boot prints in his wheel tracks.
So, huge expensive,
and so was Apollo,
and we learned a huge amount
from that, as well.
Firstly, can we thank Doug again
for a superb talk,
I really enjoyed that.
Thank you.
