Spark Science Podcast

Mars Rover with Melissa Rice

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Welcome to Spark Science. I’m your host, Regina Barber Degraaf. Our tagline is Exploring Stories of Human Curiosity, but I think today I’m going to have an extra tagline, and that’s Dismantling the Scientist Stereotype. And I’m going to do that with my good friend, Dr. Melissa Rice.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Hi! Thank you, Gina.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: And we’re going to talk about something that I’m super interested in, and that’s basically the day in the life of a Mars mission member, or, how would you say, JPL mission member?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Mars Rover team member.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Tell our listeners just a little bit about what you do at Western, and what you do for NASA.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Sure. I’m an assistant professor at Western. I’m in the geology department and the astronomy and−physics and astronomy department. And I’ve been here for five years now. So I teach in both departments, planetary geology, specifically the geology of Mars, is my specialty. I teach classes on those subjects. I teach introductory classes as well. And I’m also funded, in part, by NASA to work on the Curiosity Rover mission as well as the upcoming Mars 2020 Rover mission, and that mission, as its name suggests, is going to launch in the year 2020. So we are somewhat frantically preparing for that mission right now.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: How do people actually do that work, and what is the camaraderie like? You had told me that there was a sociologist that studied people working on the Mars Rovers for almost a decade and she wrote a book about it.

Dr. Melissa Rice: That’s right. Yeah, Janet Vertesi is her name. She was a graduate student at Cornell University when I was a graduate student as well. I was in the astronomy department and she was studying us, the group of scientists who were operating the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers at the time. And she was specifically interested in how we communicate with each other in order to operate the spacecraft, but also how we communicate about this robot specifically, and how we anthropomorphize the robot in order to make it easier to communicate with each other about what we want the robot to do.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right. And the book is called Seeing Like a Robot, I believe.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Seeing Like a Rover, I think.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Seeing Like a Rover. And so she actually interviewed you specifically too, or were you just kind of around when she was watching you, like observing your movements?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, both. She had one-on-one interviews with lots of the scientists there and spent a lot of time just observing and recording the activities we were doing. What Janet come across in her research in observing us and how we actually talk about the rovers was that more often than referring to it as a “she,” as this vehicle that has some kind of gender and personality that’s separate from us−

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right, like the S.S. Minnow or something.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Right. More often than referring to it as “Opportunity” or “she” we refer to the rover as “we,” as if this rover is our collective avatar, and it’s not−and the rover’s actions aren’t independent of the rover, or they’re not tied to an individual here on Earth, but the rover is this result of a collective effort on Earth.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So you actually are part of the team that decides on where Curiosity goes and actually where Opportunity went, right? You were also on that team.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, one of the many voices on the telecon line making suggestions for where the rover should go.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: And I remember being in your office once and you had a VR headset, and you let myself and my young daughter put it on, and we instantly felt like we were being transported to Mars.

Dr. Melissa Rice: This is something that came online recently on the Curiosity mission. Microsoft is developing an AR headset, augmented reality, which means that you’re not−the rest of your sensory input isn’t totally blocked out. You can see through it, but you see a Mars landscape overprinted on what you normally see with your eyes.

So Microsoft had been building these AR headsets, and they partnered with the jet propulsion laboratory to create software specifically for the Rover team to use so that we could immerse ourselves and essentially see what the rover sees. It puts our field of view at the same height as the rover above the surface, and so when I’m standing up wearing this headset, I see the Mars terrain in 360 degrees around me, and if I walk forward, I walk through the terrain. And if there’s something interesting on the surface that I want to see up close, I have to get on my hands and knees and lean down in order to zoom in on that surface feature. So it’s really like walking around on Mars.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So, in Janet’s book, in her presentation−I watched her presentation before this−she says that a lot of the researchers would actually move

around in their chairs like they were the rover−

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah!

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Or they would, they would put yellow post-it notes on their foreheads because there was something about this yellow box that they would use to direct the rover. Can you tell me more about yellow post-it notes? Do you know anything about that?

Dr. Melissa Rice: You know, I don’t know about the yellow post-it notes. I came into the mission two years after the rovers had already been operating, so there were already a lot of traditions that had come and go [laughter] by the time I got involved.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: The yellow post-it notes.

Dr. Melissa Rice: But the moving around in the chairs−Janet wrote a great article where she describes how the scientists did the rover dance.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes!

Dr. Melissa Rice: And the rover dance is essentially trying to move our bodies as if we were the rover. On Opportunity (and Spirit, which was an identical twin), the dimensions of the rover’s arm were very similar to a human arm.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Hmm.

Dr. Melissa Rice: And there was a shoulder joint and an elbow joint and a wrist joint, and even a hand with five fingers that were five different instruments on the end of the rover’s arm. And so it made a lot of sense to do this one-armed rover dance when we wanted to mime the rover reaching out and doing a microscopic image [laughter] of this rock, and then reaching over to this other rock and using a different instrument on itー

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yeah.

Dr. Melissa Rice: There were ways that we could mime that with our own arms that sometimes were more effective than just verbal communication.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right. She did talk about that, how people would say stuff like, “I am the rover,” like that was a very common saying. I really like what you said, that there was a shoulder joint and an elbow joint, because she also talked about two separate instances where she interviewed a female scientist, like an older female scientist and a younger male scientist, and they both said that they had, like, surgery or an injury on their arm the same week that the rover they were working on had a similar injury [laughter], and they were like, “It’s linked. It’s linked somehow.” And they were like [laughter] definitely — they were like “We’re connected.” And even though we’re all scientists and that makes−as somebody outside you’re like, “That’s crazy; why would

they even think that?” but she talks about being so immersed in being the rover that it made sense to them.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, yeah. And I think as these AR technologies and eventually VR technologies come online, that’s only going to be more so.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: I wish that Janet was able to do a comparative study [laughing] of Spirit and Opportunity with the Curiosity Rover. Curiosity is a much larger Rover. The previous rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were about the size of a golf cart. They were about as tall as I am, five and a half feet tall. But, Curiosity is much bigger. It’s much wider. It’s much taller. It’s ten feet tall. Its arm is 7 feet long. It’s much less human dimensions. The other thing about Curiosity is that it’s much harder to anthropomorphize.

If you look at the top of Spirit and Opportunity, they have a long neck, a mast, and then a bar with the two cameras. So it really looks like there are two eyes on the top of that rover. Curiosity, if you look at its long neck, its mast on the top, there’s a big box and a single offset cyclops eye. That’s where the Pancam laser is. It’s also a laser that shoots little holes in rocks and emits a plasma and then there’s a telescope that looks at the chemical signatures, the emission spectrum from that plasma and it can tell us very accurately what the chemical composition of the rock is. But, it makes the rover look like it has this one large offset cyclops eye instead of the two cute eyes of Spirit and Opportunity.

I wrote an article after the Spirit mission ended about trying to understand for myself why I felt so emotionally attached to the Spirit Rover and why it was — it was heartbreaking. It wasn’t just sad. It wasn’t just an objective loss of science that I was mourning. But I felt like a pet had died.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: As I was remembering some articles I had read in college, there was a great article by Stephen Jay Gould about Mickey Mouse.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I know him from the Simpsons.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yes! [Laughing.] Most of our scientific legends we know from the Simpsons.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes.

Dr. Melissa Rice: But, the article was about the evolution of Mickey Mouse. Look at the very first Mickey Mouse cartoons. He’s very mouse like, almost rat like. Long nose, beady little eyes. But, over the course of the years, Mickey Mouse has been

getting cuter. The Mickey Mouse that I grew up with in the mid-80s had pretty large eyes and a much more flattened nose. So, Stephen Jay Gould used that as an example of what makes things cute, what makes us find things cute. Essentially cute things are things that resemble human babies. There’s an evolutionary reason why we should find things that look like human babies cute and want to protect them.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: So, basically, Spirit and Opportunity were super cute rovers. You can do some quantitative measurements of their faces, meaning the size of their head compared to the two Pancam eyes. They are not as cute as Mickey Mouse, but they’re in that realm.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: That’s subjective.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So, we’re gonna take a quick break and I’m gonna come back to what you were saying about feeling like you had lost a pet or a loved one after Spirit was no more. So, we’re gonna come back and talk about that.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Okay.

[Music playing.]

Interviewer: Can you think of a robot that you would feel sad if it died?

Speaker: Yes, Disney’s WALL-E and Eva.

Speaker: No.

Speaker: Well, I like Siri, so that’s — I mean, I just think of that as a robot.

Speaker: Maybe the Roomba.

Speaker: That one robot that was created that looks exactly like Scarlett Johansson in Japan.

Speaker: The Mars Rover that already died I think, but that would make me sad.

Speaker: WALL-E. I would definitely cry. If I saw a movie where WALL-E died, I would cry. That would be traumatic.

Speaker: There’s like Sophie, who like is slowly gaining sentience, and so I think it would be really cruel if they were like, “Oh, she’s getting too smart; we need to kill her.”

Speaker: No, you can just build another one. Don’t be ridiculous.

Interviewer: Would you go to its funeral? What would you wear?

Speaker: If we were talking about WALL-E, I think green, definitely, because he really liked plants. He really liked little buds.

Speaker: I would definitely wear sequins because I think that is fun.

Speaker: Something metallic, like a nice metallic blackish silver dress.

Speaker: Umm, probably a suit. That’s what you wear for funerals, but it’s a robot funeral. So, like, would you wear like a metallic tie or something like that? You know, throw it together. Honor them in.

Speaker: Just like some nice regular funeral attire.

Speaker: If someone was having a robot’s funeral, that could be like the first time that ever happens, so I would definitely be there — if I was invited.

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Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So, welcome back. We’re actually going to talk about a robot’s funeral we put on together, Melissa and I, for the Cassini mission. It was a wonderful time. We wore all black with those hats with the veils over our faces. What do you remember from that night?

Dr. Melissa Rice: I remember that we had a casket, an empty casket.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: We did, yes.

Dr. Melissa Rice: It was a prop from some Halloween store.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right, in September.

Dr. Melissa Rice: In September. Yeah, they were getting ready already.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yeah.

Dr. Melissa Rice: We had a bunch of flowers. We had white calla lilies.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes. We put them down.

Dr. Melissa Rice: We put them down on the casket. We had eulogies.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes we did.

Dr. Melissa Rice: We had eulogies from ourselves, from Spark Science guest, Casey Drier.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes, and we actually have that show on sparksciencenow.com if anyone wants to listen to it.

Dr. Melissa Rice: [Laughing.] We had George Dyson as well telling stories of his father, Freeman Dyson who had some early ideas for missions to Saturn.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yes. I kind of bring up this robot’s funeral because you were talking about this feeling of remorse after a mission is over. Even if it is successful, there’s still this kind of, I don’t know, sadness, grief.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah. There was a period of mourning afterwards. And it wasn’t because the rover hadn’t finished its job. I guess rover’s job of exploring Mars is never actually finished. But, keep in mind that the Spirit and Opportunity missions which were launched in 2003, they were the first robot geologists on Mars. They were designed to last 90 days. Spirit’s mission ended after 7 years and actually, just last month, Opportunity’s mission officially ended after 15 years of exploring the surface. Spirit was really the heart-wrenching loss in my professional career.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I think in Janet’s book she talks about that, this kind of feeling of loss. Because if all these researchers feel that they are the rover, that’s almost a mortality issue that they’re facing [laughing]. But you do have this other mission. I kind of want to go into that. You’re talking about the Mars 2020 mission. So, what exactly on that physical rover are you working on?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, so I talked about the laser beam, the new rover, the 2020 rover is going to have that same large cyclops eye that’s going to be the — they’re calling it the SuperCam instrument with the laser and other instrumentation incorporated into that. Underneath that are two smaller eyes. On Curiosity, those were called the Mastcams.

On Mars 2020, we’re calling them Mastcam-Z. That’s because they’re going to be almost exactly like Mastcam, except the Z is for zoom. So they’re going to be able to zoom in and zoom out. What that means is that we’re going to get stereo images from both eyes, which means we can make our images into 3D and we can do that zoomed in at really high resolution. Things far, far away that the rover isn’t going to be able to actually traverse to and we’ll be able to make stereo images in these beautiful wide-angle views and 360 degree panoramas as well.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So we want to get back to how the researchers are talking to each other and making like decisions. How does everything on the rover work? I remember reading that it’s like a flattened hierarchy. There’s one PI who runs — who decides what’s going to happen on the mission. You’re working on the camera,

somebody else is working on the construction of the whole outer body, maybe somebody else is working on some other instruments. Can you tell me more about that and how you all talk to each other? Or, do you even have to?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, that’s a great question.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Thank you.

Dr. Melissa Rice: [Laughing] There are so many people involved in the mission at this stage for Mars 2020, which is still being assembled. There are 400 scientists, more or less, involved in the development and early planning stages for this mission. Then, there’s an entire separate engineering team that I don’t even have an estimate of how many people are involved on that side of the development of this stage.

What I can tell you is my experience inside the camera team. We have about 20 of us who are science co-investigators for the camera mission, which means we’re giving the input into the specific aspects of the design that are going to give us the science products that we want to be able to learn what we want to learn about Mars. So, we communicate that with the engineers who are building the cameras and they just finished the assembly and initial testing of the cameras.

And last week, a few of my students and I went down to San Diego, Malin Space Science Systems is where the cameras are being built. We got to help take calibration images and do a bunch of tests to help us understand how the cameras perform so that we can calibrate our images when the Rover is taking pictures on Mars.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Janet talked about that kind of tension, and not like animosity tension, between engineers and scientists. Scientists really want to get a lot of information and some engineers just don’t want the Rover to fall over or get hurt or anything like that [laughing.] There’s this tension of like how much science can we do with actually keeping the physical integrity of the rover — keep it going as long as we can.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, I think it’s the scientist’s job to push the engineers to their limits. [laughing] It’s the engineer’s job to push back against the scientists and preserve the health of the space craft. About half of humanity’s attempts to land a space craft on Mars and make that space craft work have failed. The only space agency who has successfully landed a space craft and had it execute its full mission on the surface of Mars has been the US.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yeah.

Dr. Melissa Rice: The European Space Agency with the Beagle lander contributed by the UK Space Agency — that has failed. The former Soviet Union attempted about half a dozen Mars landings, each one of which turned out to be what we call in the space agency a hard landing, as opposed to a soft landing where all the space craft is intact,

and it’s able to work and execute its full mission. A hard landing is a nice way of saying crash. There was a series of NASA failures at Mars as well right before Spirit and Opportunity.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Okay.

Dr. Melissa Rice: So, there was the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, both of which failed —

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: To orbit.

Dr. Melissa Rice: And slowed down our Mars exploration program for a couple of decades.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Alright, we’re gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we’re gonna talk about the future Mars missions and we’re gonna talk about pop culture.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Great.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Interviewer: If you were on Mars, what would you see or feel?

Speaker: Probably really lonely and hot.

Speaker: And wouldn’t I just die because there’s no oxygen.

Speaker: I’d see rocks probably and not feel very good.

Speaker: Expect to feel death almost immediately as one does on a planet that you can’t breathe on.

Speaker: Probably just be fascinated to be on another planet, honestly.

Speaker: Probably be dying. It’s too hot dude, or is it too cold? There’s definitely no water and that’s important for life, so not going to Mars.

Speaker: Kind of like Arizona.

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Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Welcome back to Spark Science. I’m here talking with friend of the show, six or seven timer on Spark Science, Dr. Melissa Rice. We’re gonna talk about future missions to Mars.

Dr. Melissa Rice: It’s really the first in a series of missions. My, I guess, next desire for Mars is to do steps 2 and step 3.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: That’s very practical.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: — of the 2020 mission. [Laughing.] Yeah, so 2020 mission is different because it’s the first mission going to Mars that is not going to Mars to do science and Mars and then die at Mars. This is the first mission that’s going to Mars to do science at Mars and to prepare to bring pieces of Mars back to earth.

The 2020 mission can’t do the whole thing of bringing samples back from Mars to Earth in one go. So, it’s the first in a three step process. What’s gonna happen, 2020 is gonna drive around, it’s going to identify the most interesting rocks on the surface, the rocks that have the best potential for maybe having some evidence of past Mars life. The rocks that can tell us the most about all of Mars’s history. It’s going to collect those rocks, put them into sample tubes about this big, drill little rock cores, put them into the tubes, seal them up, and then leave them on the surface.

Now, what happens then is up in the air. Ideally, there would be another mission following up five to ten years later that would send a smaller rover, we call it a fetch rover, to go pick up those sample tubes and bring them back to a launch vehicle and launch them. We don’t think that step 2 is enough to get all the way back to Earth though. Probably can’t carry enough fuel in that launch vehicle to go to Mars and launch all the way back to Earth.

The concept right now is that step 2 is launching those rocks into orbit around Mars. Step 3 is a rendezvous mission that goes from Earth into orbit around Mars, rendezvous with those samples and then picks them up and then brings them back to Earth. The whole thing might take 20 to 30 years and it’s only the first part, the collection of those sample tubes, that has been funded and that we’re building.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So, you’re hoping.

Dr. Melissa Rice: We’re hoping. We’ve spent a lot of work, the past three years or so debating about where we should land on Mars to collect these rocks.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Has that been decided yet?

Dr. Melissa Rice: It has.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Ooh! This is the scoop.

Dr. Melissa Rice: There was a big workshop in October — yeah, breaking news. [laughing] Big workshop in October. Scientists came to debate three landing sites that were on the table.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I remember you talking about this and it was like heated.

Dr. Melissa Rice: It was. One of the landing sites was Spirit’s landing site.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: There’s sentiment there.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Exactly! Gusev crater not only could the 2020 rover have revisited sites where Spirit hadn’t been, finished the next step of Spirit’s mission that Spirit never got to accomplish, but the 2020 rover could have also taken pictures of Spirit, you know, maybe a duel rover selfie.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Open casket.

Dr. Melissa Rice: There was some emotion involved in there. [Laughing.] Right, exactly. A possible resurrection of Spirit in a way. The other two sites, one was Jezero crater, which was a crater with a river, a dry riverbed now, but a river that had in the past been flowing into this crater, filling it up with water. The crater was a lake and there was a beautiful preserved delta at the spot where the river was entering the lake. Deltas are exciting places to go send a rover to explore and collect rocks that we would want to have back here on Earth because deltas are an excellent way to preserve organic material. So, that was one of the favorite sites.

Another favorite site was called Northeast Syrtis, not far from Jezero crater, but kind of up in the plains beyond the crater. In that area, there was some of the oldest rocks on the planet. A stratigraphy, so a layered sequence of rocks of different compositions that could record what Mars’s history was like about 4 billion years ago. The winner was Jezero, so that’s where we’re going.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Was that the one you were hoping for? [laughing]

Dr. Melissa Rice: You know, I didn’t have a horse in this race. I was hoping for any of them, actually. I thought we had gotten to a point where we would have a really exciting, but a really different mission at any of those sites. The site that I had been personally invested in, in that I was an advocate and a presenter about this site, was a site called Eberswalde crater, which was very similar to Jezero in that it was a crater that had a big river flowing into it, Crater Lake, and another delta there. So, the fact that we’re going to Jezero now and we’re going to explore a delta on Mars makes me really excited.

Something else I’m really excited about for the mission is that going to Jezero crater gives us an option. After finishing up our exploration at that site to drive up and out of the crater. Not all the way to the other site, Northeast Syrtis, but part of the way there so that we can do some of the same kind of exploration of the same kinds of rocks. On the team, we’re calling this the mega mission scenario where we basically get two for one. That’s gonna depend on the rover outliving its warranty a bit, but we have a good track record for that for Opportunity living 15 years.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I was gonna say, I feel like you’re used to this extra credit and now you’re expecting it.

Dr. Melissa Rice: You know, we’re in a very heady time in Mars exploration right now where I was — I cut my teeth on the rover missions that lasted 7 and 15 years. They were supposed to last 90 days. Curiosity’s nominal mission, 2 years and we’re now — what are we, in year 7 of that mission. So, we’re at a time where we’re used to everything working as it should and working much longer than it should. But not long before that, we had the spectacular failures at Mars, so we always need to remind ourselves that what we call the sniper on the hill is out there. [Laughing] These are space craft on Mars. That nothing is routine, nothing is safe, nothing is guaranteed, and if anything goes wrong that we have no way to send a repair man up.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I want to bring us all back to pop culture now. Was one of those landing sites actually in the movie, The Martian?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Oh, none of the landing sites that our rovers have been to was in the movie, The Martian. Technically, that’s not true. The very first rover to go to Mars was called Sojourner. Sojourner went with a big landing platform called Mars Pathfinder. Sojourner was more of a remote controlled car than an actual standalone roving robot space craft. Sojourner was about the size of a microwave.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Less human.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Less human, yeah, it was more rover-like. It was kind of a dog. It had a little antenna that looked like a tail. It had an instrument that was circular that kinda looked like a pig snout. It would drive up and put that on rocks and it would look kinda like a little pig sniffing rocks. That’s what I thought when I saw the first images from it when I was in high school.

So, Pathfinder was the lander. Sojourner was the little microwave-sized robot with six wheels that would rove off of the lander and drive around and sniff some rocks, but it never got that far because it couldn’t do anything on its own. It needed to talk to the mothership, Pathfinder. But in the movie, The Martian, Mark Watley, the Matt Damon character.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Yeah, Matt Damon. You can just say Matt Damon.

Dr. Melissa Rice: In The Martian, he goes to the Pathfinder site and the space craft is covered with sand that’s blown in in the last 50 years, or however long has gone by. And he digs it out and he finds the Pathfinder rover and he uses that to communicate with the scientists back at NASA on Earth.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Completely realistic, right?

Dr. Melissa Rice: [Laughing.] Yes. There are less realistic aspects of the movie, The Martian, so I don’t take too much beef with communicating through Pathfinder.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So, what other aspects of media do you like to actually point people to, to say like, this is accurate Mars versus this is not accurate Mars, but maybe still entertaining?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Oh, do you mean for people who want to learn more about the missions?

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Or just know anything about Mars?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Know anything about Mars — well we were talking about the movie The Martian and I think if you want to know what it would be like to be on the surface of Mars, walking around, what the landscapes would be like, I think that movie is the most visually and experientially accurate of any representation of Mars I’ve seen in film.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: So that’s an answer to our question to our correspondents. If you watch the movie, The Martian, that’s pretty much what you’ll see.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Pretty much. It depends exactly where you are on Mars. If you go to the polar caps, you’ll see these spectacular layers of carbon dioxide, ice. If you go to some of the volcanic sites, you’ll see these gently sloping enormous volcanoes on the horizon. If you go to Valles Marineris, you’ll see a canyon system that’s like the Grand Canyon, but as wide as the entire United States. There are some places you can go and see really alien, dramatic landscapes, but most of the surface probably looks something like you see in The Martian. You see some eroded rock formations. It looks kinda like the American southwest with a brownish-reddish-orange filter over everything.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: One thing they got wrong in the movie, The Martian —

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: I remember this.

Dr. Melissa Rice: That I’ve probably told you and our Spark Science listeners before is that the colors in the sunset were off and that really disappointed me because I think the most exciting thing to see on the surface of Mars, period, will be a sunrise and a sunset.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Cuz you’ve actually seen it.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Through the eyes of the rovers. [Laughing.]

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: Right, cuz you’re the rover.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, and I’m there dancing like the rover does, doing the robot dance. But, what a sunset and a sunrise looks like is it’s a faint blue color. The rest of the time the sky on Mars is kind of a reddish color. So, I think those are the times, at sunrise and sunset, when an astronaut is going to be able to get a glimpse of something that feels very Earth-like in the sky, but then as the sky rises, that blue color will fade away and the sky will return to its normal reddish Mars haze.

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: That is beautiful. I would love to see that. I hope for our watchers we can have an image of what that actually looks like. I want to thank you for coming to sit down with us in our fifth season. I just love talking to you.

Dr. Melissa Rice: I love being here. Thank you Gina.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber Degraaf: A big thank you to Dr. Melissa Rice for being on our show yet again and taking the time to talk to us in person.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Spark Science is sponsored by WWU and created in partnership with KMRE. Spark Science is recorded on location and in Bellingham, Washington at Western Washington University. The producers are Suzanne Blais, Regina Barber Degraaf, and Robert Clark. Student editors are Julia Thorpe, Andra Nordin, and Zerach Coakley. Additional editing is done by WWU video services.

If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page or Tweet us at SparkScienceNow. Thanks for joining us and if you want to listen to past episodes, visit SparkScienceNow.com.

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