We do that by getting on the ground, orbit. Orbiters acquire remote data, put all that together. Right now, for instance, we have enough measurements of the weather in specific locations that we have created a global circulation model of Mars.
We've been thinking about it since the 1970s, this notion of not only going to Mars and doing in situ science with instruments that are carried on some thing-- orbiter, rover, lander-- but actually bringing samples back, and of wide variety of ways of doing that. I mean, if you defocus your eyes on what you're trying to accomplish, and you just say, listen, I want to get a bag of rocks back from Mars,
already already gone to Mars through robotic means right now India has an Orbiter on Mars uh Europe has a new Orbiter that just started operations uh NASA the US have several uh China is going to be launching a a Rover to Mars in 2020 um other countries have definitely
couldn't quite tell so what was needed was a mission like elros and we are co- manifested with the uh uh lunar reconnaissance Orbiter mission that actually went in uh landed with Vigor as we like to say uh with an impactor that went into a polar region crater kicked up the soil that was there whatever is
And the three finalists are Shepard, Grissom, and John Glenn. Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth.
We were working with partners at Venus. We had several orbiters there. We were at the moon, orbiting the moon.
That's everywhere, right? Now the most common version of the story is it was a Lander going to Mars, which is correct-- which it was an orbiter. It wasn't a Lander.
But all those things are good. Now with the Orbiter, which will be a much more capable spacecraft and a much wider variety of payloads, onboard instruments,
And this satellite has actually provided the most accurate gravity measurements ever flown in space. It has de-orbited in the meanwhile. It was launched in 2009.
Some of them are looking at the atmosphere around Mars. All of our orbiters also do secondary jobs that include relaying communications from the rover. So if the rover had to talk directly back to Earth, that's a very challenging communication link.
So what you want to find-- what you want to do is you want to land in the foothills. So these reconnaissance orbiter are kind of trying to find the foothills where you have a nice, safe place to land, but cool stuff very nearby is the idea. And so we've been flying these things in this context since 2001, a variety of orbiters.
You execute the orange stuff. You can fly the orbiter and the lander mission in either order.
You execute the orange stuff. Here is the orbiter system that would collect the sample.
You mentioned the comet itself is about four kilometers in diameter or some equivalent of that. And then the orbiter was orbiting at a distance like 10 kilometers on average? It depends. During the highest activity, we'd have to be closer to 30 kilometers, 30 to 50 kilometers.
That's the sample that's going to allow us to calculate the fraction of stars in our galaxy that host small, potentially habitable planets. -A distant star is orbited by two planets.
really like their own version of NASA they were putting together every aspect of a human expedition to Mars I mean the new Orbiter the Mars reconnaissance Orbiter to take even more detailed pictures and I said well I looked at him and I said well you guys probably have
I gather what it's about is they sent basically miners to space. And then we still have the orbiter that was still orbiting around or flying around the comet at the time and doing its own work.
We've been wondering about that for a long time. We have five Landers and Orbiters at Mars today. And this one's from Maven.
Because we know where the spacecraft is now. I know more about Lunar Orbiter than anybody at NASA.
It takes a lot of fuel to fly low over the moon. I'll talk about the orbiter and the science instruments. We pioneered a lot of firsts on this mission.
So on the left you can see four different configurations of this design. You can see a three stack orbiter at the top. You can see a mini stack and medium sized stack lander.
There's something called this Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter.
Brown University and and working on the the Viking Mission at JPL people right up to today and the two Rovers that are still on Mars exploring um and the orbiters that have arrived at Mars taking fantastic pictures these are people for whom Mars is a lifetime passion and so therefore a passion for
And the same thing happens with orbiters. The Jet Propulsion Lab guy said, "We have orbiters around Mars already. They were used to map the surface of Mars
Then, it orbited there for years before Earth began to cool and shrink, dividing the synestia into two separate bodies with nearly identical isotopes.
UAE-- they're going to be launching a Mars orbiter.
And there's also overnight passes by the orbiters.
So you do get more data returned from the orbiter because it can communicate faster.
But all those things are good. And so we're working very hard to see an orbiter fly there and follow up.
we can build machines that are-- I saw the Cassini orbiter, Saturn orbiter on the floor of its factory
engineers and I know a lot of you are Engineers Mars is hard and then you know it's really hard when you slam into it at 200 miles an hour but they lost this Orbiter and just even today this morning one of the one of the orbiters around Mars actually got
at 200 miles an hour but they lost this Orbiter and just even today this morning one of the one of the orbiters around Mars actually got some new uh images and it definitely uh splattered software failure
he was planning photography for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, among other things.
And it sends its data through a UHF connection up to the orbiter, which receives the data and then relays it onto Earth.
But all those things are good. And one of the things we would definitely want to do with this orbiter Alan is talking about if we go back is map the gravity field
That was discovered by Cassini, an orbiter in the Saturn system that NASA and the Europeans sent together in 2003,
We've started, and we've been flying a set, of rovers and-- we call-- fixed landers that stay in one place, and then, a series of orbiters that perform a variety of functions. They all have scientific instruments that are looking down at Mars and asking questions about the geology, or trying to do laser altimetry
So if the rover had to talk directly back to Earth, that's a very challenging communication link. It's a lot easier for the rover to squirt information up to an orbiter, which then can transmit the information back to Earth, something that we call comm relay-- communication relay function. And also, these orbiters, many of the recent ones are equipped with cameras that look down.
You execute the orange stuff. So what we do is, with the orbiter, we chase it down, and we close in on it, and we actually finally rendezvous with it.
which was written down by Iron Age peasants who didn't know the earth orbited the sun, and still the same-- just as boring and untrue.
is uh a global vision how many countries are really going to go to Mars you'd be surprised how many countries have already already gone to Mars through robotic means right now India has an Orbiter on Mars uh Europe has a new Orbiter that just started operations uh NASA the US have several uh China is
and T Robotics and that's moving along in a separate wavelength and we'll see I think it's going to be a major player no matter what but there is a lot of discussion about having an Orbiter with people in it around Mars actually assemble uh the site that eventually humans will go to before they get there
Now then, the Lander itself, the intended velocity is one to a fraction of a meter per second. And then when the spacecraft landed, when the orbiter landed, again, we're talking trying to get it around it less than a meter per second. You're talking like a walking pace, which is very, very unusual for space flight.
It's really hard to get to. And we've been doing this for 50 years with Landers and Orbiters. But again, now, we perhaps know the evidence of maybe how Mars lost its atmosphere because we think 3.5 billion years ago, Mars was wet, wonderful,
So we started talking the NASA, and fortunately, we know people like Dr. John Grunsfeld, who's the Associate Administrator for Science. And if you read the thing-- they're looking at shutting down the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. They're looking at shutting down Cassini and rovers on Mars.
When the design team was doing that they realized, hey, these are common modules that can crossover between landers and orbiters. So I actually don't have to design a lander and then separately design an orbiter. I can have one set of modules that can actually do both.
And if you were in the right place in the galaxy such that this alignment happened every time Venus orbited the sun, you'd see a repeated pattern of dips.
Let me bring that up. That's so good. So the Mars-- it was the Mars climate orbiter. And when it was launched in, oh, goodness, over a decade ago and sent to Mars, there was a famous understanding that there were-- the general understanding
And then in the afternoon, there are overflights by two Mars orbiters, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
I'll touch on that peripherally at the end of the presentation. But most of my talk is about doing this with rovers, and orbiters, and so forth. So talk a little bit about the context for exploration.