Ep 007: Nina Lanza
…begin transmission
Caitlin McShea: Hi, Nina. How are you doing?
Nina Lanza: I'm great. Caitlin. I'm so happy to be here.
CM: I'm so glad that you decided to join us, especially knowing how busy you've been.
NL: It's been a little bit crazy. I think I might be maxing out on my bandwidth, but it's always good to test your limits.
CM: For our audience, would you take a moment to explain why it is that you're so hard to schedule?
NL: Well, I work on an instrument that is currently flying to Mars as part of the perseverance NASA Mars Rover, which will arrive on February 18th. So that's really soon too now when we're talking. Needless to say, it's kind of pandemonium over here. We also have another instrument that's currently on Mars on the Curiosity Rover. So we can't forget about our first child as our second child is about to be born.
CM: That's right. First child might be a bit jealous, but second child has a little more to offer perhaps.
NL: I would say that it's different equally awesome, different things that they offer, but certainly our baby needs some attention right now just because the landing is a scary and dangerous time.
CM: You hope the stork is gentle
NL: Place our Rover babies on the surface of Mars, very gently,
CM: I should say for our audience, you and I go back a couple of years because we brought you to Interplanetary every chance we could until a pandemic prevented the festival. And this was because you have a great insights on things like our space future is one because of a voluntary stint into Antarctica, which still blows my mind. And two, because of the work that you do with the Rover on Mars, which was the ChemCam. But now that the Perseverance Rover has another cam on, I think it's called super cam. It's like the big, bad brother. Can you explain what the differences are? What kind of tools you're delivering to Mars this time and what that might grant you as a laser scientist who's curious about the geology of the surface of Mars?
NL: Can I start with saying what ChemCam is? ChemCam, which is currently on the Curiosity Rover on Mars right now is actually the head of the Rover. So if you look at sort of the, the Rover on the top of the mask is a head with the Cyclops eye. For those of you who are watching the video, you can actually see this behind Caitlin. This is the ChemCam instrument. And so what this instrument is, it's the name Chem came in short for chemistry and camera.
So as you might imagine, we take pictures and we also get chemistry. So the chemistry is obtained by a technique called laser induced breakdown, spectroscopy, or limbs. And what this does is real. It is a laser that shoots at a rock up to 23 feet away from the Rover. And it vaporizes it just a little piece of rock is vaporized. And so this makes a bright light, and we can look at that light back on the Rover, which we can also see in this video.
And we can figure out what the chemical elements making up that rock are without ever touching the rock. So that's the laser component of Chemcam and that's the chemistry, but we can also take an image of the place where we got that chemistry. And so that gives us the geologic context for that material so we can actually say, "Hey, we shot this little bright tone grain," and it's different composition from the dark tone matrix, for example. So this really provides us some context. So we have this beautiful imager, we have this chemistry information. We can also use our spectrometers, what's catching the light, any passive modes. So we can just use the light of the sun as it falls on the surface of Mars. And we can look at the reflected light and we can figure out something about the mineralogy. So mineralogy is sort of how elements are arranged. Geologists need two things to identify materials. We need chemistry, the elements, and we need mineralogy, how they're arranged. And so ChemCam has a mineralogical capability, but it's not something that was designed for it. So it's something we've kind of learned how to use, but it's not really the thing that we do the best.
The best thing that we do is chemistry. So that's ChemCam and it's a great instrument and it's still going but when we built SuperCam, we decided to add some super capabilities. And so we kept the libs laser that rock vaporizing laser to get chemistry. But because mineralogy is such a critical part of our interpretation of the geology, we added another laser-based technique called Raman Spectroscopy. So Raman uses a green laser, doesn't vaporize the rocks, but we kind of vibrate the bonds so we can figure out mineralogy. So we can zap with the libs laser for chemistry, and then zap with the ramen laser to get mineralogy. And so we can do both measurements in the same place, which is incredible. I'm really excited about that. And so along with the Raman capability, we can also use the green laser to get what's called time resolved luminescence. It's just another technique where we can understand trace elements within the mineralogy, within the crystal matrices.
So that can help us understand more about the origin and the formation environments of materials on Mars. We also decided that our imaging capability was really helpful. We weren't sure if it was going to be helpful, but it turns out it's been really critical for interpreting our data. So we added color to our remote micro images. We can take color closeup images and put all this mineralogical and chemistry data together. We've also expanded the range of our passive spectroscopy. So we can use again the light of the sun and a broader wavelength range to get more information about mineralogy as well.
Along with all that we've also added need a microphone. So we can hear the sounds of Mars, but it's not just hearing the sounds of Mars. The main reason we added it was to hear the sounds of our laser analyses, because our rock vaporizing laser makes it's not quite a Pew Pew, but it makes a snapping sound. And actually, if we listen to the sound of that snapping, we can understand things about the rock material properties. So we can listen to the sound of the rocks to be able to better understand their compositions as well. So that's all, I suppose, not quite in a nutshell, but that's Supercam in a summary.
CM: Yeah. That's okay. I don't need the nutshell. We're very excited about all of these capabilities and we want to learn about them in detail. I'm curious about the snap sound, one because I'm not quite sure I understand, except for like in an echolocation type perspective, what you can gain information only from the sound. But also I think that there being a sound produced might be very romantic for individuals like me, who don't practice science, but absolutely love space. The idea of like tuning in and listening into the actual sound of the surface of these rocks could be really, really cool.
NL: We're not using it to do echolocation. We're using it actually to understand material properties. And so the way you can think about this is two things. One, the libs analysis produces a shockwave. That's where the sound is coming from. So you're expanding plasma out so quickly it's moving faster than the speed of sound. It just creates this really sharp wave front. And that's what a shock wave is. So it's usually we think of that in terms of an explosion. This is like a little tiny explosion, really, really small.
And so that's why it sounds like a snap to us, but also on Mars, the atmosphere is a totally different composition than it is on earth. So sound behaves differently on Mars than it does on earth. One of the things I'm doing is I'm doing a lot of experiments. In fact, right now, during this week in the worst timing ever, I'm doing some laboratory experiments to better understand how sound propagates in the Mars atmosphere by filling up giant Mars chamber with Mars gas, and then putting some microphones in there and making sounds to try to understand how sound propagates differently, but that's something that we've never done on Mars.
So we'll be able to understand by listening to the way that sound travels known sounds, we can understand better just the properties of the atmosphere. But what I want to do is study rocks. And so the rock aspect of this is that we're not entirely sure why this happens, but the nature of the shockwave changes as you change materials. And this may also be because every time you shoot that laser, you're digging a little deeper into that rock. You're digging a little hole.
And so the way that the plasma can expand changes, and then plus how much material is being ablated. There's a lot of things that go into that. And so it turns out that if you listen to this shot by shot sequence, we post the laser at three hertz. If you listen to how the sound changes over those shots, you can see differences, and that pattern of differences provides to you information about how hard the rock is, how deep you've penetrated and whether or not you've penetrated through a small layer, like a rock coating.
But I mean like more broadly. So that's just nerdy details. But I think it's super exciting to add another sense to our understanding of the Mars and surface. We have images we're going to get video and now we'll have this audio and that will make it much more visceral. I feel like the reason I got into Mars research to start with these beautiful images where I felt like I could see myself there and adding sound to that, it's just going to make that more viscerally connectable.
CM: Absolutely that's very poetic. It would be nice perhaps if there was a hand or a nose as we like with each new Rover, as we get closer and closer, we develop more sense she had experience with it, which would be great. I mean, honestly, can I ask given that you have this kind of proxy with your Mars chamber and you're testing out what sounds come through with the microphones? Does it sound bananas compared to what we would expect from the same kind of lasers shooting up the surface of the earth?
NL: It doesn't sound entirely different. It's not the same if I would say it's in the uncanny valley of sounds where it's like almost right, but it's not quite right. So there's several things that you'll notice first sounds are way quieter in the Martian atmosphere. It should just be a lot closer to something to hear it. And that's just because the atmosphere is less dense, it takes more energy to actually make the same wave front. So things are quiet in a weird way, but because the atmosphere is also entirely native carbon dioxide pretty much sound doesn't propagate through carbon dioxide in the same way as it does through the earth atmospheric mix.
And so lower sounds are actually louder than higher pitch sounds. If you were to imagine speaking without a helmet on the surface of Mars, a terrible idea, but if you were to do that, our voices naturally are modulating to go up and down. The higher pitched parts of my voice would be quieter than the lower pitch parts. And I think that would be really like bizarre sounding. And so I think we'll notice that in, you know, when we're listening to familiar sounds on Mars, like the sound of wind, the sound of the Rover wheels crunching on the surface.
I think those sounds are going to sound strange to us, but it'll be hard for us to quite put our finger on it because it's almost the same. It's just that sound is propagating a little differently. I'm excited for that.
CM: I think that's kind of the space experience. It's something that's just like a little off, just something a little strange and that unfamiliarity not necessarily being a scary thing, but kind of a wonderful thing to embrace. You ship this off, everybody's shipped this off this summer or summer of 2020.
NL: So we launched on July 30th. So we can do the math we'll land on February 18th. So that's actually a pretty fast trip, right? That's like not even seven months, that's a pretty, pretty fast clip. I think so before that though, of course, we had to send our instrument to be integrated onto the Rover at the jet propulsion laboratory. And then JPL then had to ship the entire assembled Rover to Florida where it was integrated into its launch vehicle.
And then we can launch. And so it's actually a really long process that takes a lot of people, a very high priority for NASA. We can only launch tomorrow is every 26 months to be at our closest approach. If you want to launch an off nominal time, it's going to cost you in terms of fuel and mass. And so that's why we only launch every approximately two years. So we really didn't want to miss this launch window, but of course, Covid, it's still a huge issue right now and was a huge issue in July.
And so it was very challenging to be able to keep working and do it safely while all meeting these really hard deadlines. Mars waits for no one. So you either make that launch deadline or you don't. And so as a scientist, once that instrument left our, our building, there's nothing I could do to contribute. So I was really, I'm just so impressed and proud of our NASA colleagues for actually getting this packaged up and launched safely.
It's really an incredible accomplishment.
CM:
Where you present for the launch?
NL:
I wasn't. None of us were, there were very few people who were allowed to go to the launch because of of health and safety reasons.
CM: I understand, but I was under the impression that, Covid aside, you were planning to be there.
NL: I was absolutely going to be there. So that launched around five 30 in the morning, New Mexico time. So had my launch shirt on, I was the only person up in my house. I'm like drinking my tea. It was very weird because I was present for the Curiosity launch and it was such a wonderful event to share with hundreds of people. We were at Kennedy Space Center. We were all just sitting there at the closest public viewing space.
And it was really wonderful, but I have to be grateful for the fact that we launched. It sucks that I wasn't there, but I was not critical to that launch. So I was, I was cheering it on.
CM: But you're part of the ride. A bit of your spirit is actually about to descend upon Mars.
NL: My name is engraved on the inside of our instrument. So my name is soon to be on Mars.
CM: That's pretty cool. That's really awesome. So then I guess in reverse, it took about six-ish, seven months for this machine to get, well, it's not there yet, but keep our fingers crossed two days for a successful. How often are you getting this, these data read backs? How, how quickly does the signal reach you? And how often are you kind of examining the specimens that you're so excited to examine?
NL: So how quickly we get downlink is a product of several things, one of course is where earth and Mars are in relation to each other. So maybe I'll explain how we get data, because then you'll understand what the limitations are. So the Rover typically do not speak directly to earth because that would require direct line of sight between the Mars Rover, and Earth. So we actually use a series of relays. So first we have several orbiting spacecraft around Mars that when they make a pass over the Rover communicates, they send data up and down to each other.
And so then once those orbiting spacecraft are within line of sight of the earth, they will communicate with one of three telescopes, is that as part of the deep space network. So we have these three big telescopes. So anywhere you are in the world, you can actually communicate with this network because of the way they're arranged. So then the deep space network then sends those data to the jet propulsion laboratory in California. And then from there, we have some automatic scripts that then preprocess our data and send them to us in Los Alamos.
So that's the journey. And so then of course, when we're doing Uplink, which is sending commands to the rovers, we do that all in reverse. We send it to JPL, JPL sends it to the deep space network, and so on and so forth. Now we can't communicate with Mars when we're in conjunctions. That means that when earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, we don't have the technology to talk through the sun, unfortunately. So we're working on it. But for now what happens is we uplink all a series of commands to the Rover can execute by herself.
And then we also just take a break. So it's usually about one month and that's when everyone catches up on sleep and takes vacation or just catches up on data. So when we thought our typical cadence, for example, for curiosity, now that we've been operating for eight plus years, the way this works is we no longer live on Mars time, but for perseverance, we'll start by living on Mars time. So we'll try to start at the same time on Mars every day.
And that means starting 38 minutes later on earth, because the martian day is 24 hours and 38 minutes long. So you just keep falling forward and you start sometimes in the day, sometimes at night, it's pretty confusing, I think, as a terrestrial being tied to the diurnal cycle of this planet. So we'll be doing that with perseverance, but so the way that it would work is that you essentially come in for whatever your time of your shift is. And you look at the downlink data. So we know when the downlinks are going to occur, because we know when the orbiting spacecraft are going to do their passes.
We know we can predict, and we know how much data volume we're going to get. So we come down, we say, okay, what was our downlink? What happened yesterday? Is there anything that's really critical that we address? And if so, awesome, if not, then we say, what is our strategic plan that we're trying to do? We're trying to do an analysis here and then start driving by this day or something. So we know what our constraints are. So we have these beautiful images that we take in our workspace around the Rover. And then we, as a team decide, let's shoot that rock. Or let's do this analysis.
There are some analyses that take more strategic planning, but SuperCam and ChemCam are ones that can be used tactically. So we can just be like, "Hey, you guys want to shoot that rock. Yeah, let's do it." And then we can program it up and then uplink that for the Rover to do the next day. So we don't work in real time because even at our closest approach, there's a seven minute delay between signals from earth and Mars. So the Rover has to be somewhat autonomous, which is great. So, so what happens is we work and we send the Rover plan.
The Rover's like, "thank you. I'm going to do that. You guys go to sleep, I'm going to do your plan." And if we make a mistake, the Rover can be like, "Hey, you guys messed this up." So I failed out this series of commands because they were stupid. And I moved to the next one, or get the downlink from the Rover to figure out if our plan worked. And so it's sort of happening on a daily cycle. Even if, sometimes we get downlink a little bit more rapidly, that's the cadence that we tend to work on. And honestly, that's kind of enough because it's already exhausting enough to let them live on Mars. So we don't need to be joysticking this. It's pretty rapid turnaround time.
But I would say that for perseverance, we have a lot of checkout activities that we need to do after landing to ensure the health of our instruments rate. And just to make sure everything's working also like the mask is folded down, so we have to pop the mast up because the Rover's all folded up from being in this little pod for the last six months. So we have to gradually unfurl and make sure everything's working. So that's going to be the first, I would say 30 sols probably. It's gonna be checkouts, but we'll get some data as part of those checkouts.
So by Sol, that's the martian day.
CM: So in terms of the strategic plan, how is it if you have the power, how do you and your team determined which rocks you want to blow up? What do you, what motivates your decision? What are you looking for?
NL: That's a great question. For example, if we're doing a campaign, we're like, "okay, we saw in orbital data that this area is really rich in clay minerals." So we want to be able to do the following types of analyses and numbers. That's a strategic plan where we say, well, let's do two drills and make sure we get compositional data, every some number of meters. But then day to day, how do you implement that?
People like me who look at the pictures, dial in and say, "Hey, you guys, I think this rock looks awesome and and this is why we should devote Rover resources." Now, sometimes those decisions are made for slightly arbitrary reasons because we don't have any information. For example, one time I was like, "I think we should shoot this rock because it's a really weird triangle. I don't get it. It's weird. I think we should shoot it. You guys." And, you know, there was no other compelling thing that we had to do.
And let me tell you that triangle rock was awesome. And I wrote an entire paper on it in 2016. Picking a rock for arbitrary reasons is not necessarily a bad thing when all the rocks are on Mars because you can learn something from everything. You have discussions with your colleagues all over the world and you have to just convince them that this is the right thing to do. And it's tricky, but you can do it. I've argued successfully for analyzing some rocks over others. And I have failed sometimes too, which is fine.
But again, I think you can't lose because everything's on Mars. So we wanted something, everything.
CM: Did you determine something from the makeup of that triangular rock that dictated its triangular structure?
NL: I think the reason it was triangular was completely random. It was resistant to erosion. It was a fracture filled. It was like a vein in a rock that had been eroded out of the rock because it was softer than the vein material. And it would just look to angular. Rocks are weird. There's all kinds of weird shape rocks out there. So it was just really, really angular because of its erosional resistance. But what was so exciting about that rock is actually, it was really rich in an element called manganese and manganese is, well, I love this element.
I could go on forever, but manganese is a really important element for understanding environmental conditions. And it's very closely associated with life on earth. To find this a huge concentration of manganese on Mars was extremely unexpected and challenging to explain. And it really, I think, changed our understanding of what kind of water forming, what aqueous environments are possible on Mars because you don't get manganese deposition except in really specific situations on Earth.
And so to put that into some context rates, so manganese requires really strongly oxidizing conditions to form minerals. And so we didn't see a lot of magnets. There's a ton of water on earth. But before the rise of cyanobacteria and the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, we did not see the formation of these minerals. So manganese minerals and the terrestrial rock record are an incredibly important marker of this huge change in redox environment. So to find something like that on Mars is pretty exciting.
And I don't know if we totally understand how it formed. We know that the environment had to have been much more oxidizing at that time than it is today.
CM: And so does that suggest that there was life but night might not any longer be life or post oxidation? So if manganese exists, but we don't find a lot of oxygen needed space or we haven't yet found a lot of water or we post life on Mars or are you more hopeful that we might be in the middle of something? We just don't understand?
NL: I think we definitely don't understand. There's so much we don't understand here. Even though the possibility of past life on Mars, that that's an option that is raised by these observations. That is a really huge statement that requires bigger proof. We don't have that proof. So while it remains an important avenue of exploration it may not be that right. What it tells me at the very least though, that there had to have been a lot of water. There had to have been strongly oxidizing conditions somehow.
And it had to have persisted over a long period of time. So the Lake area in Gale crater, which is the curiosity's landing site, that was a place that would have been habitable by terrestrial standards. Now, was it inhabited? I don't know. And maybe the manganese is telling us that. So another avenue of research that I am exploring is trying to understand what kind of biosignatures are preserved and manganese minerals that are formed by microbes, because if we could find mineralogical or chemical signatures that we could detect with our Rover instruments, that would really help us find select samples that are of interest for trying to untangle this question.
Was there life on Mars at one point in time? And that's one of the main goals, the perseverance Rover is to find evidence of biosignatures and then to bring some of those biosignatures back, we're going to cash samples for a future return to earth and a different mission. But that's a really important question to ask. So I'm hoping that we'll, we'll find more manganese in the new landing site, Jezero Crater, and then maybe we can bring some of that back to earth for analysis in our terrestrial laboratories.
CM: Would that be a manned mission that returns the cash?
NL: Crude mission, because ladies would like to go as well.
CM: Thank you. That was a much needed correction. A crude mission would be the ones that capture these cash.
NL: So in fact, this would still be a robotic mission. So as we are planning to send people to Mars in the future, this sample return mission is actually going to happen sooner than that. So right now it's not funded. So it's sort of up near nothing's real until there's money. But the idea would be that we would start launching the vehicles that would bring back these samples sometime in the mid 2020s with a goal of returning samples in the early 2030s. That sounds far, but that's not that far, you know, it's within the next 10 years.
So I feel like that's going to just fly by. So it's actually something that's going to happen in our lifetimes. So, and that is gonna change everything. I think about Mars rocks, because right now we only have data that we've gathered from remote sensing instruments on the surface. And meteorites that just fell on to earth. So we don't know where those Martian meteorites came from. We know that they're from Mars for a lot of reasons, but we only have about 150 Mars rocks to have studied in our laboratories.
And while our rovers are amazing, they still can't do all the analysis that we would do with a rock that we have here on earth, because on earth we have every possible technique. We can make measurements and then redo those measurements. There's so many things that we do to understand materials that we just can't do remotely. So that's why the sample return mission is going to be hugely paradigm shifting from our science.
CM: You can't really make the measurements on Mars reproducible if you're destroying the samples in order to glean information drive.
NL: Away and you never go back. My little triangle rock, which is named Steven, Little Steven. We shot Steven up quite a bit, had a lot of measurements, but then we drove away and we are literally never going back. And also we'll probably never find it again because it's the size of a U.S. penny. It's a tiny little rock. Normally you would just step on a rock like that and just ignore it if you were hiking on Mars. That is just the downside of these missions where you once you leave a sample, it's gone and that's it.
You have the data that you have and you have to figure it out or not.
CM: You only get one shot. One laser shot.
NL: There was one rock that was so cool right at the beginning of the mission. And we just didn't look at the data fast enough. And they were like, Oh, there's like, that was the first high manganese that we saw. It was just like totally a drive by shooting. Right. We're just like, "Oh, shoot that rock and keep going." And then like, I was like, "Oh my God, can we go back?" And they're like, "no, we're not going back." So the rock caribou will always be a mystery. We'll have the pictures, we'll have some chemistry, but that's it.
CM: Well, it's just funny to me too, that the way that you, more or less decide when you're not already working on a more strategic mission. Let's say the way that you decide what you're going to shoot up is like destroying your favorites like that. Thing's really cute and interesting. Let's get rid of it. Let's totally obliterate it so that we can learn about it. It's bittersweet.
NL: I always say that if we found extant life on Mars, we would definitely kill it. I mean, it's not going to survive being vaporized by our laser, but I will tell you what it's made out of.
CM: For what it's worth. But you're so right. We'll try not to kill you. If you're all identical, we just need to kill one of you one, right? Just one people do actually laboratory libs
NL: On individual microbes. They don't typically do it at like a distance of 23 feet. Cause that would be crazy. Usually it's like up close, but you can't actually do some. You can find out information about living microbes as you zap them, but that's not really what we're designed to do at all. And so, and I think the chances of extant microbes, just to be fair, on the surface of Mars is very low. It just because the surface environment is incredibly hostile to life. As we understand it's not so much the dryness or the cold.
It's actually the radiation environment. Mars doesn't have a protective magnetic field. And so the surface radiation environment is a lot harsher and that's the thing that tends to get life forms. That's what destroys our elemental building blocks. We have to repair our DNA to be able to continue to function. And so that's the tricky thing that being said. Of course, I think there are microbes that live on earth. That would probably be fine on the surface of Mars. Life is very tenacious,
CM: And there are a lot of extremophile examples we have here on earth, but of course we are pretty fragile and we're spoiled. And we like our creature comforts. Can I switch to a more speculative question? I suspect based on what you've already seen or what you hope to see from the chem cam and the SuperCam, do you expect that there's a possibility to Terraform Mars for human life? Or do you think it's domes? Do you think it's closed environments?
NL: That's a good question. First of all, let's assume like infinite resources.
CM: Right. It doesn't exist if there's not money, as you already said.
NL: The first thing is I think we need to, before we even talk about terraforming, I think we really need to figure out if there is, or was, indigenous Marsh in life. We do not want to go there and just cover up traces with our own life, even if we can. I just think that is a really critical, almost philosophical question is life elsewhere? And Mars has all the raw ingredients. So I think before we ever do anything, we really need to be sure there are not martians.
And it's a hard question to prove the absence of something. But I don't think that we've really explored all the options. We barely literally scratched the surface. I would hesitate to advocate for terraforming Mars or making any attempt prior to that. So that being said, let's say we say, "Life did not arise on Mars as far as we can tell." And we haven't seen any evidence for that. There's a lot of, there are a lot of potential technological issues that will make it hard to maintain the cushy kind of atmosphere that we're used to here on earth.
It would just require us to like constantly be renewing the atmosphere because Mars is a smaller planet, has lower gravity. So it can't hold on to some of these lighter elements as easily. And it doesn't have that magnetic field. And so incoming radiation will destroy a lot of your molecules that you want in your atmosphere and you'll lose it to space. So it's something that it's a constant battle. You're going to have to constantly be making huge volumes. I haven't done the calculation,. It's not that it's impossible, but it's a big thing.
The thing that you can't get away from is that the radiation environment is really hard to deal with. It's hard to deal with shielding. We will greatly increase our chances of getting cancer if we want to live on the surface of Mars. And so I think what's more likely than even terraforming or domes is that we're going to live underground for the most part for when we need to do things or want to go on a sightseeing tour. Most of what we're going to do from our living space would be subterranean because that's the only place where we could really deal with the surface radiation environment.
And so people have suggested there's ready-made caverns,. We know that there are caves on Mars. We know that there are lava tubes. And so those are ready-made little habitats for us if we wanted to start. So I would say we put our solar panels up, put our infrastructure that's loud or something that needs to be at the surface, put that up there. And then the rest of our stuff, we're just going to be underground.
CM: I'm not the most adventurous exploratory person myself, so I'm not sure that I would volunteer, even if I am alive to do the subterranean thing, would you've done the kind of scary, extreme lifestyle. Would you do the subterranean Marsh and lifestyle?
NL: Wow, that's a great question. So I mean, I think conceptually, yes. I feel like I really love Earth also. And there's a lot of people and things that I love about Earth and I think it would be hard for me to say goodbye to all of that permanently. That being said, I would certainly volunteer for a long duration mission to Mars, given a reasonable chance of return with an actual return date.
The opportunity to walk along the Rovers traverse. That would be the greatest gift. I remember that outcrop. I kinda feel like I'm looking space in a little holes. I mean, to have the opportunity to be in another world would be outstanding. I just, I think I don't want to just as I didn't, I don't want to move to Antarctica permanently. It's a beautiful wild place, but it just wants to kill me.
And so does Mars at the end of the day. So I think I would want to return. There are people I think who don't feel that way. Maybe they will be the first actual Martians. I love planet and everything that it gives me so much, so I don't want to leave it forever.
CM: Yeah. I definitely think Earth rules, but you're braver than I to even like get off surface to enter into anything that's not terra. It is exciting to me, but you see you're a brave person and you have the experience and the metal you've already proven it in Antarctica. So if I may given that, we're talking about the possibility of living on another planet, I'm going to shift to the science fiction element of this podcast. And I'm going to ask you the alien crash site question. Although our conversation yesterday, I have a suspicion, I might know what you want to find, but you tell us. At the risk of great injury, imprisonment and even death, what object would you hope to discover in an alien crash site and why?
NL: So at the risk of breaking the rules, I'm going to list two things that I want to look for.
CM: You're a true stalker. You have no care for the law. You're going in the zone. You're getting as much as you can. All right. Let's go.
NL: I am a subject matter expert. I don't know why they would keep me out of this.
CM: That's right. You probably work for the Institute. That's doing all the examining, which means that you get all the equipment that keeps you safe. .
NL: Well, we don't know what the hazards are like. Well, so the first thing that I'd want to know is this a crude or unscrewed alien craft? If they sent themselves, then I think actually finding biological matter would be hugely fascinating just to be like, what would another life form that did not develop on earth look like, and how similar or different is it from terrestrial life? That's incredibly important, but then regardless, so let's say it was an unproved craft.
It was just one of their scouting missions I actually would try to find there either software or firmware. I want to understand, what is that craft trying to accomplish? Because that gives you an insight into the intelligence behind it. What is the motivation? And then how do they think about that? A computer is fine, but it's just a piece of hardware. You can't do anything with it's the instructions that I think would be so critical.
Maybe there's no onboard computer with like a centralized LS or something like that, which is the case, you know, they would have something like firmware for whatever their, I assume electronic like devices are. But I that's, if we did not have an opportunity to study their physical bodies, I want to know, I want to get into their minds because obviously these are creatures that had intentions and they had goals. And I want to know what those are. And I think the best way to do that is to study the instructions of their craft. So I would agree. I'm going to try to get both of those things.
CM: So when we spoke yesterday and you said, "how seriously do we mean object?" I was like, "Oh, she wants a specimen. She wants a genome." So now let's talk about the actual interpretation of whatever this software firmware might be. How would you even begin to go about trying to interpret what they're up to? You have a sentence. I think you essentially caused an alien crash site when perseverance lands. It's like an earth alien crash with this like very sophisticated hardware. It's like covered in tools. So you have a sentence. How would you go about trying to evaluate what's going on?
NL: I'll just preface this by saying that this is not my area of expertise and I would absolutely bring in people who are better at this. Cause I'm a rock jock. I studied rock and I don't try to figure out what a mysterious entity is thinking. There are jobs that entail trying to understand the functionality of unknown hardware. There are people who do that on earth. What would you do with a human artifact to try to figure that out? You can apply all of those same tools to an alien artifact.
To understand, first of all, you can look very basically at how what happens when you do this, when you give this input, that input. What happens you can look at that the hardware level and you can see what it starts doing and where you start moving your information. I think you start at a fundamental level and then try to piece together that story of what in aggregate do these instructions mean. But again, I am not the expert for this particular project. There are experts that exist who are not me.
And I would probably be like, "Hey, Hey, figure this out."
CM: It's not a bad idea to build like a perfectly equipped team to evaluate this. I'm not sure if the perfect person is something like a computer scientist or something like an archeologist. But I do imagine that if there's a physical object that you are taking out of the zone, you could employ your skill set to figure out I don't know something about the context from which it came. And maybe that might inform a little bit of what's going on.
NL: Once we start talking about actual aliens, I joke that I'm the subject matter expert. But actually I'm not. I don't know anything about aliens and neither does anyone else. We don't know anything about them. I think that my contribution to this project would be to actually obtain the object and then I would pass it off to people who do this. This is a whole field of study on earth to be able to do, understand unknown hardware. And so those folks tend to be electrical engineers.
And I think where I might dip back in is if there was a connection to an environment that I had some expertise in. Or if the goal of this alien spacecraft was to study the geology of earth, that'd be awesome. I'd be like, "I'm going to come back in, let me help you out." What is of interest to them? And can we infer something about their home environment from the things that they're interested in? If an alien were to like tap into our software and try to understand us from our Rover, they'd be like, "man, these, these creatures are really obsessed with water."
Like what's up obsessed with themselves. It's sort of the nature. I guess I don't know anything about other life, but of course we want to understand the universe in the context as it relates to us. I say it's natural, but I feel like that's very human. It seems to me like an alien. The other aliens might be the same. They start with exploration from a context of how does the world and the universe relate to them and who knows? Maybe they're maybe they're way past that.
And they don't care anymore. Like we had no idea. Right. So we'd have to know what they came here for and why are they going to send more? What is this? This is a one-off? We sent crafts to Mars that have failed. That have crashed. And we spent a lot of time looking for them in orbital data. It'd be where did they go? I don't think we found every single one. We haven't found all of our crash sites. But we tried to find them.
I would say if we found an alien crash site also, I don't think that the chances are low that that's the last that we're ever going to hear. They sent that here for a reason and they'll want to figure out what happened to their hardware. There's some alien scientists nerd who's like, "we got to figure this out. you guys." They're not going to just be like, "Oh, well I guess I failed." Actual crew on there, like NASA would never be "I guess they're dead. Who cares?"
CM: Or if you expect that this thing lands on earth in pursuit of whatever it's in pursuit of, what would it find life forms like obviously living things. So I think they'd be like, "Hmm, let's figure out where that thing went and what we can glean."
NL: And is it still communicating. If you have access to hardware, I just figure if you're going really fast and like grabbing one thing, but you can also figure out is it broadcasting still and radio-frequency or something else? There's all cause we would put in some kind of a transmitter and hopefully one that would be robust to a crash. That's a thing we would do. So we can think in the same ways. I don't think in many ways we have to think about practicalities like we would. Aliens are bound by the same kind of rule. Like they would have the same concerns. I assume that with their craft, I mean, not just with each other,
CM: What precautions do they take to ensure that it has a safe landing in two days, same time.
NL: And how do they do that? They probably have to do it remotely. There has to be some autonomy built in. So those are all questions that I think we can apply from our knowledge of being a spacefaring people. And we can apply that to this alien crash site.
CM: And so what it is for you is your volunteering, your adventurism and your courage to capture the item. You'll go back. You'll just continue to collect the specimens, but you're giving them away to a team that could do the work. And I think that's really bold and necessary because I don't think a lot of people would choose to do that. I think if anyone found it, they'd want to keep it or understand it for themselves, with whatever tools they possessed, but you were generous.
NL: It's a waste to leave something with me. If I don't have the knowledge and the tools to come up with an answer, what good does it do for me to have what is essentially just junk on my mantle? It does nothing for me. It does nothing for our world. I would want to be updated on the status if possible, but even if not, I feel like it does more good not with me than it does keeping something for myself. So when I went to recover meteorites in Antarctica, meteorites, there's no hard and fast rules about meteorites. So if you find one as a private citizen in your backyard, it does belong to you. But I went as a funded by NASA to Antarctica, to search for meteorites. And because it's a publicly funded project, those aren't mine. I go there to do the science, but I don't go there to get souvenirs. And in fact, it's illegal to do that. And everyone's like, "Oh, but you totally, you took like one little one, right?"
But what would be the purpose? It would have to be a secret meterorite. That I could never show anyone or tell anyone about because I had stolen it. And then we would never actually get to do any analysis on it. So then we don't learn anything. It could be anything. It doesn't matter that it's a right. It's nothing out of context. And I just think it would be selfish. And so I did not for the record, take a meteorite because there's just would be pointless to do that. Now that being said, you can purchase meterorites. And so it's not bad to have a meteorite. I do think that it's important. If you have a really special meterorite definitely don't just keep that whole thing on your desk, give a slice of it to some scientists who can actually use it to better, further understanding of our solar system. And that's actually what most of the meteorite collectors, the big ones do because it helps them. Because they can work with scientists who can confirm that these are really important rocks. It increases the value of their collectible, but as the scientist actually get the knowledge, right. And then the collector can actually get the credibility.
CM: I think that this was a gift, but I believe that it was procured through via the proper channels. It's like some giant meteorite lands and then whomever finds it, they break it up and the distribution allows one for the scientific evaluation of it if it's given that way and two for commercial distribution as well.
NL: What is it?
CM: In my office and I think it's like, I think it's named after Goethe are you familiar? It's a Goethite.
NL: It’s a type of an iron oxide. So it is a mineral name. So I don't know, usually some meteorites are typically named after the closest populated area where they fell. So for example, a very famous meteorite, Allende, named after Allende in Mexico. There is a whole family called shergottite named after Shergotty in India. It was a grouping of meteorites that we realized were very similar and finally figured out where from ours.
So the names typically have to do with the location and it's nothing to do with their composition.
CM: So then unfortunately, my desk is at my office, which is closed because a complex system, science researchers aren't essential business. So when I'm next returned, I'll be sure to get the placard because Lucy also gave me all the information and perhaps the gear tight is just, as you say, and not to the composition, not necessarily a nod to where it was found. But again, I don't think that she stole it or kept it from scientists.
NL: I'm sure she did not. You can absolutely buy meteorites. I am no way impugning you or her. I am sure that that was totally fine. I have a meteorite, not from Antarctica.
CM: Well, thank you so much for venturing into this kind of strange interview. I imagine compared to the ones that you're doing across all of your hours in the next few days, but I really appreciate you taking the time to thoroughly think through what you would find if you encountered on our planet, something like what you're creating on Mars.
NL: I love that perspective. Thank you. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to think about this. I love thought experiments like that because I feel like that's where tomorrow's actual projects...We do thought experiments today to prepare for the unknown future. And so I love this. I think this is like super fun and who knows. Why wouldn't we find an alien crash site someday?
CM: I'm not ruling it out. I'm just being maybe a little preemptive.
NL: No, we're going to be ready. This is going to be really important documentation for when that happens.
CM: And when it happens and we're not quite sure what the like physical parameters, what the behavior of the space is, we're going to call you because you're brave enough to run in and do the work I'm ready. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for the next 48 hours for you, for everyone else who has something at stake, but I'm very exciting, very proud of you, very proud of NASA and JPL and everyone involved Los Alamos National Labs. Of course, I'm really excited to see what happens in the next two days. And then again, everything that happens in the next six years or so.
NL: We've got a whole bunch of things for just at the beginning, but yeah, because we just got to make it to the surface. So I feel good. We'll all be watching remotely seven minutes after it happens.
CM: I maybe noticed that you you're doing some panel discussions or something like that at the time of the landing. Should we share that with our audience in case they want to tune in?
NL: So we're not doing it at the landing. I'll be just probably freaking out incoherently. At the evening of landing at 6:00 PM, the Bradbury Science Museum is hosting a live WebEx panel of Los Alamos scientists who are involved in various aspects of the, the super cam mission and actually really the entire Rover. So there'll be from six to seven and you'll be able to ask your questions of us. And of course, by then we'll know where we are and what happened.
So yeah, I assume it will be very joyful WebEx and not a sad one.
CM: I'm fully expecting greatness and success. So I'll link that in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen this airs on the 18th. So tonight at 6:00 PM, you can listen in on this crack, your champagne and enjoy sweet. Well, thank you, Nina. Yeah. Thank you, Kayla. This has been great. Have a great first 30 souls.
NL: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I think it's gonna be great. Yeah, we just, not a lot of sleep, but that's okay. It's worth it.
CM: It's your new baby. All right. Cool. See you later. Bye-bye.