Hi, welcome to the Dakota Nights
Astronomy Festival, online version for
2020. My name is Brad Nasset.
Thanks for joining me. I am a NASA Solar
System Ambassador Outreach Volunteer, so my goal here is to
show you a little bit about some Mars
missions,
particularly the one that just launched
in July
of 2020. So let's get started.
This graphic shows all of the NASA
science missions.
It's obviously too small to see the
details, but i just wanted to give you
kind of a feel of all the science and
exploration that is going on.
For Mars, between the USA, Russia, and the
European Space
Agency there have been about 46 missions
to Mars so far,
and only 19 of them have been successful;
pretty high failure rate. Mars is a tough
target.
Now if we're going to Mars, I suppose
it'd be nice to go outside and look at
the planet.
Well, just lucky for us, in August of 2020,
throughout this whole summer in fact, we
can see Mars in the night sky.
Just look for the little orangish object
in the East.
It comes up in August somewhere around
midnight.
Mars is brighter than the stars so it's
quite easy to find.
As you can see in the graphic, it takes
the Earth
one year to go around the Sun. Well that
that's the definition of a year.
On Mars, it takes about two years to get
around the Sun.
So, when we are close enough together in
our orbits,
we can launch a spacecraft to Mars. So
NASA just launched this mission on July
30th of 2020.
But if there would have been a problem,
we would have needed to wait for two
more years
to launch.
This is a big rocket. I had the
opportunity one time
to stand in the flame chute on the
launch pad underneath the rocket.
I just can't describe how unbelievably
huge
this is.
NASA has had four successful mars rovers
before this 2020 mission so this will
make it number five.
This first one is just a little guy here
about the size of a microwave oven.
The next two are Spirit and Opportunity.
What machines! These rovers kept going
for years.
Spirit eventually got stuck in the sand,
and during the great worldwide
dust storm on Mars in 2018,
that we could see with amateur
telescopes, by the way,
the Opportunity's solar panels got
covered with the dust
and it lost sun power and it went dead. But
that was after
many years of successful exploration.
These two rovers were twins, about the
size of a small SUV
car.
The fourth rover is named Curiosity, and
it is
still going.
This is Keri. I had a chance to see her
in a small
informal online visit. She's a mars rover
driver.
She gathers all the planning information
from the science teams
then tells the rover how to do it. And
yes,
she is a hardcore geek. Her R2D2 is
fully functional and cost more than
most
cars, and the interesting thing is she
built it herself.
So this is the rover that just went up
in July of
2020. You know space
exploration is a pretty big deal for the
human spirit.
Just look at this: there were 28,000
essays and name entries from United
States
students. The final names were chosen
from votes that came in from 196
countries.
These are the current mission objectives.
You might hear this: the term for signs
of life is biosignatures,
how's that? The rover will put
soil samples in sealed tubes, for
hopefully retrieval and a ride back to
Earth from a future mission.
There they can analyze the soil samples.
There is also a small helicopter that is
going to take a test spin to see if
there is enough
air - which is mostly carbon dioxide by
the way - to see if there is enough
air to fly it.
Now this is a sky cran. This will be the
first test of this one.
It's going to lower the spacecraft down
using artificial intelligence.
The reason for this is that the
communication time lag between Earth and
Mars is too great - I mean it's like up to
10 minutes -
so then people on Earth can't guide it
to a landing, it has to do it by itself.
So what's going to happen is the sky
crane is going to take a video of the
surface of Mars
and look for boulders and flat spots and
fire its retro rockets,
and position the landings so it lands on
a flat surface.
Talk about a tense time for NASA
engineers.
They're going to wait 10 minutes until
they get a message back
saying whether it was successful or not.
Well if it's not they
won't get a message back. Notice in the
picture,
that the wheels are tipped up, so i think
the lander
is going to do a belly flop, in case it
has a little bit of a hard landing so
the wheels don't break.
Then once it's down there ,then the
wheels will put themselves into position.
This orbiter has been there since 2005.
Since completing its science missions,
its whole
function is to provide a communication
relay for all of the Mars
rovers. That also just keeps going and
going and going.
Now this is pretty interesting. NASA has
a deep sky
network of three antenna communication
sites all over the world,
spaced about a third of the way around
the Earth each way so we never lose
communication with spacecraft.
The photo here is from the site in Spain.
All of the antennas are
currently being upgraded for higher
bandwidth,
so in the future we'll be able to even
get videos from other places.
So here's some of the Mars mission team.
So i hope this gave you a little insight
into the Mars missions,
so thank you for joining me.
