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Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Welcome to season 7 of Spark Science. We’re here with you today to continue exploring stories of human curiosity. I’m your host, Regina Barber DeGraaf. I’m an astrophysicist that teaches physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. I’m gonna be honest with you, I am pleasantly surprised that we’re still going strong and we’re doing so because of students, staff, and faculty here at Western Washington University who help make these audio and video episodes for you all, our amazing listeners.

For those of you who are long-time listeners, you can probably guess who our guest is today in our season premier. She’s a science communication powerhouse, she calls herself The Martian, but I call her the Steve Martin of Spark Science. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Melissa Rice. In this episode, we predict a perfect landing of Perseverance, and spoiler alert: we were actually right. We talk about the baby helicopter it’s carrying, and we also talk about the next 3 months of Dr. Rice’s life, which is going to be controlled by something called “Mars Time.” We hope you enjoy our interview with NASA scientist Dr. Melissa Rice.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: This is the first interview of season 7, and we have back our platinum member, our number 1 VP, Dr. Melissa Rice. Welcome! Thank you for being here!

Dr. Melissa Rice: Thanks for having me, again!

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Again!

Dr. Melissa Rice: It’s the highlight of my year to come speak with you for Spark Science!

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I’m talking to you days before Perseverance’s landing. Just real quick, I know you’ve been on the show a million times, but we can give our listeners just a real quick overview of what do you do, when it relates to Mars, and how did you get there?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, so for this mission specifically, I’m part of the team that designed and built, and next week will start operating, the cameras on the rover. Actually, the rover has 23 different cameras, but I’m part of the science cameras. It’s an instrument called Mastcam-Z, the 2 cameras at the top of the rover’s head. These cameras are going to take pictures in beautiful color, and also in many colors into the infrared, the near-infrared wavelengths that the human eye can’t see, and we will use those to do a technique called imaging spectroscopy that allows us to interpret what the rocks are made of. That technique, imaging spectroscopy, that’s my specialty. That’s a technique that I’ve used on the previous Mars rover missions, Curiosity, and then Spirit and Opportunity before that. It’s through that kind of niche expertise working with these rover missions that I’ve developed that I got in the lucky position to be part of this new Mastcam-Z team for Perseverance.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I mean you’re part of this big group that decides where it’s gonna go, too. There’s like this big voting contest?

Dr. Melissa Rice: [Laughing.] It was kind of a contest, and it wasn’t like there was a group of people who got to the side. It was a totally public process, so anyone in the world, theoretically if they wanted to, could have shown up and made a pitch for their (x, y, x) coordinates on Mars that they wanted to go to. And then everyone who showed up got to vote, and there was a series of these meetings and discussions, and each time they would whittle it down to fewer and fewer sites until at the very end everything but 3 sites on Mars had been voted off the island. Ultimately, NASA makes the final decision, but it’s a community process to narrow everything down to just the handful of sites that get decided between. So yeah, I brought small armies of students to those meetings so that they could take part and vote and ask questions about the sites, and I was advocating for a site early in the process that made it into the top 8, but then it got eliminated in the last round and didn’t make it into that final 3.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I love it when you talk about your role in each Mars mission, and my favorite stories are the ones where you talk about once the rover actually lands and everything’s successful, you go on these Mars shifts. Your life changes once the rover lands.

Dr. Melissa Rice: The reason why everything changes and why I am not accepting any meetings for 3 months after the rover lands is because I’m gonna be living on the Martian clock, and Mars is very Earthlike in a lot of ways. Its day is close to 24 hours, but it’s a little different, just different enough to end up being really annoying. So its day is 24 hours and about 40 minutes, so there’s an extra 40 minutes to Mars’s day, and that’s just because Mars is rotating on its axis every so slightly more slowly than the Earth is. So what that means is that we can operate the rover on a schedule that’s very similar to an Earth day, but it’s 40 minutes off from the Earth day.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Right, and that adds up.

Dr. Melissa Rice: And that adds up, yeah. So every day, my starting time in my workday, my alarm clock, is going to go off on average 40 minutes later than the day before. As you march through the clock, 40 minutes at a time, day after day, after about one month you’ve cycled all the way around the clock, worked through the night shift, and then cycled back into a regular Earth schedule. So basically it’s going to be 2 weeks at a time that are kind of Earthlike, and then I shift out of that into 2 weeks that are a legitimate painful nightshift. And it’s not that bad to work the night shift, a lot of people do it for most of their careers, but the real tricky thing about Mars time is that we never get to adjust to it, so it’s like going on to the night shift and then immediately going back to the day shift, and then switching back to the night shift, and going back and forth like that for the first 3 months of the mission.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I mean it’s like being on a trip, where you’re going from one time zone to the next, every single day for 2 weeks.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Exactly. Exactly. So what do they say when you’re jet lagged?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: A day an hour.

Dr. Melissa Rice: For an hour’s time difference, give yourself a day for every hour of the time difference to adjust to the jet lag. Well, we shift forward 40 minutes a day, every single day, so we’re constantly in that game of catchup.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Yeah.

Dr. Melissa Rice: And one of the reasons why they stop this whole Mars time business after 3 months is because people get so tired that they start making stupid decisions. Their brains are so tired that they’re behaving as if they’re legally drunk, and that is not what you want for a bunch of people operating a multi-billion dollar spacecraft on Mars. Yeah, that and the other reasons why they cut Mars time off is because after about 90 days, marriages start to break down. It’s really hard when you are working on a Mars schedule when your spouse and your kids are getting up and going to work, going to school, or dialing into school and dialing into work.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Living on 2 different planets in one household can put a strain on your family.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: So, I remember you telling me stories of– I mean it’s not just you who are on these night shifts or Mars time, it’s a whole bunch of people. So, you were telling me when you lived in California that there would be people who are also on this shift. Is there some comradery?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, you know for curiosity, the 400 scientists who work on the mission, they all descended on the jet propulsion laboratory right before landing and got short term apartments around Los Angeles. So, there were all of these people living on this weird schedule, but kind of doing it together, so we’d have after work barbeques at 5am in somebody’s back yard. My birthday was a week into Mars time, and we threw a birthday party at 7am at the end of the shift. So, having that community and being able to explore a place like Los Angeles that has a real 24-hour life cycle was really neat the first time around. And that was originally the plan for what we would do with Perseverance. But with COVID, the entire team is going to remain remote, so I will be here in Bellingham, Washington and I will be the only person in Bellingham living and working on this strange schedule. That’s gonna be even harder than usual, not having a community of people who I can reliably go get lunch with at 3am.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Right. Yeah, and there’s really not a night life here in Bellingham, so . . .

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This is Spark Science, and we’re talking with Dr. Melissa Rice about why we, as humans, send robots to Mars.

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I do appreciate, though, and again I’m bringing it back to the community because I appreciate you wrote an op-ed for Seattle Times, and in it you talked about really justifying spending money on something like this during times that are so dire and so intense in our society right now, and I really liked your reasoning. You were saying that one, this gives, like you said, 400 scientists are working on this. Not only the scientists, but their students, and helping educate their students, and there’s a lot of good that’s coming out of that. But also, I liked how you actually broke down the money. Do you talk about this in your teams, the rover teams, do you talk about the benefits of your mission?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah. I think everyone who works on the mission and receives government funding to be part of the mission needs to reckon with that question of what is the benefit of this, because I’m not just satisfying my own curiosity here and going to play Mars scientist to satisfy my own itch. This is work that taxpayers are paying me to do for them. So, I think everyone has or should be thinking really carefully about how is this work that I’m doing, working with a robot on Mars, how is that a service to the people who are paying for the mission?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Mhmm.

Dr. Melissa Rice: And I know that the Mastcam-Z team that I’m part of for the cameras is taking that really seriously. We’ve talked a lot about how to give the public the best of what these cameras are doing as soon. As soon as the images hit the ground, they’re going to be made available on a public website. We’re going to curate a public website that’s going to have all of these spectacular color-image panoramic images. We’re going to be posting nearly live commentary on the image as they’re received. So, every day there’ll be some outreach content from the scientists giving a quick take at what’s in the images, and there’s a real clear sense, at least among the Mastcam-Z scientists, that we’re not doing this for us and our obscure specialties and curiosities, but we’re doing this for all of humanity, even beyond the US taxpayers that are paying for my involvement. This is a record that we’re creating for all of humanity about what we’re learning about Mars. And hopefully, that record is going to help people for centuries to come as we try and understand more about the solar system and our place in it.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: And I would say giving hope to people during dire times is worth so much. I just keep on thinking of this idea of that money going to fund students, as well. We’re giving students the opportunity to work on this groundbreaking science, this awe-inspiring science. We’re paying them to do it, they don’t even have to pay to do it. I just think that’s really good.

Dr. Melissa Rice: The money that I get from NASA to support my involvement and my research group’s involvement in the mission, most of that money goes to pay student stipends, their living stipends, it pays their tuition, it pays their fees, and it allows them to study what they wanna study, which is space science and geology, and not to have to worry about the financial pressures of going to school to do that.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Right.

Dr. Melissa Rice: They don’t have to make a choice between working in town to pay their rent while trying to study for school. They don’t have to make those choices, and so it allows students to really focus and sets them up really well to go into a whole wide variety of industries.

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Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: We’re talking with our favorite Martian, Dr. Melissa Rice, about the perfect landing for Mars Perseverance.

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Perseverance has landed. Walk us through your perfect day, your perfect landing, and what that day is gonna look like. What it looked like, let’s say.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Oh Gina, it was the perfect day. It was unseasonably warm in Bellingham. It was sunny, and 50 degrees. A pod of orcas jumping in the bay. Bald eagles swarming the trees, tipping their wings to Perseverance.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: [laughing] Yeah!

Dr. Melissa Rice: On this perfect day, even though I was so excited and nervous for the mission, I managed to sleep until 10am. That’s my goal, because on this perfect day I knew that I had to work until about 4am that morning.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: What a day!

Dr. Melissa Rice: It was perfect that I was able to sleep late to prepare for this, and then to tune in to NASA’s live coverage and commentary of the landing, which started at about 11:15am.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I heard there was no glitches at all, like none.

Dr. Melissa Rice: No glitches at all, not even with the virtual commentary and the remote interviews, and everyone’s internet connections. And on the real excitement began 7 minutes before landing, which is called the 7 minutes of terror.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: That got a lot of media coverage.

Dr. Melissa Rice: That did, yeah. On the science team, we were all watching this from our living rooms, distributed around the world, waiting for that first sign that touchdown was complete. We wanted to hear “tango delta nominal,” touchdown nominal. That’s kind of the code we knew to listen for. Once we heard that the signal was received, that touchdown was nominal, then shortly thereafter, we got word that a first image had been downlinked from the rover. That’s what the scientists were really excited to see for the first time.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Because you want to make sure that everything is working once you land.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Exactly, and we want to make sure that the surface of Mars is in contact with the wheels. We saw that, in the first image. It’s an image of the wheel in contact with the surface. We wanted to make sure that the wheel is intact and not flattened from a harsh landing, that the horizon looks flat, that we’re not tilted at some weird angle with one of the wheels up on a pointy rock. So there’s a lot that we can tell from that first image, and as a geologist, we all scrutinize that first image for whatever we can learn about whatever little pebbles happen to be in that first patch of ground we take a picture of. When Curiosity landed, we were all in a room together in a basement conference room at JPL, and somebody had a big projector with that first image, and then all the scientists just ran up to that screen projecting the image and were trying to do quantitative analyses of the roundness of the pebbles and trying to do statistical analyses of the distribution of grain sizes that we could see in that image. And after that, I had a couple of hours to celebrate, a couple hours to touch base with friends and team members all over the world, and then my workday started. So, the rover lands, it is awake for just a couple of hours after it lands, and then it goes to sleep. It sends all its data to Earth and it goes to sleep. Sun sets on Mars. When it’s nighttime on Mars, that’s when the scientists here on Earth wake up and start making the plan for what the rover’s going to do on its next day when it wakes up. So yeah, my first day working for Perseverance started at about 5pm and went to about 3 or 4am.

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Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: This is Spark Science, and we’re talking to NASA scientist Dr. Rice about a helicopter flying on Mars.

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We can go back into the past, for our listeners, back into our current time while we’re recording this. I wanna talk about what we’ve already talked about in a previous episode: why perseverance– the few things that are very new. There are 2 things that we talked about in a previous episode. It’s gonna drill into the Mars, and we’re actually going to be able to, in the future, collect those rock samples. The other thing you wrote in your op-ed was that there’s gonna be a helicopter now on Mars, which is crazy. There’s this baby helicopter that’s gonna go around– it’s very light, it’s very small, and in your op-ed you said it has to be extremely light because there’s barely any atmosphere. It took me a second to realize why that has to be. For our listeners, can you explain why it has to be extremely light in a very then atmosphere of Mars?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, so in order to get lift, which is what allows birds and airplanes on Earth to fly, you have to have wings, and those wings have to be a certain size in order to get off the ground, and there has to be a certain ratio of your wing surface area to the total mass that you’re trying to fly. It’s a very precise, aeronautical science. If you look at those equations for lift, one of the important variables is the atmospheric density. How many air molecules are there to provide a force against those wings? On Mars, we have 100 times less air, less density, in the Martian atmosphere than we do on Earth. So that means that we have to have much bigger wings and much less mass in order to get the same effects of flying. So this little helicopter, it’s about the size of a baseball or an apple, for a Washington-state-centric analogy. Imagine an apple with 2 big blades that are 4 feet across, so longer than yardsticks. Those are the sizes of the helicopter blades. So, this little helicopter with its big wings, right now it’s attached to the rover, but in the first month of the rover’s mission it’s going to drop the helicopter onto the ground.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: It’s just gonna like plop?

Dr. Melissa Rice: It’s just gonna plop! It’s gonna kind of give birth to the helicopter.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Wow!

Dr. Melissa Rice: And then the rover has to drive away, because we don’t want those wings, those blades, to start spinning up and smack into the rover. We have to drive the rover away to a safe distance, and then perseverance is just gonna sit and watch its baby fly! And the helicopter is going to fly at least 5 times in a period of 30 days, and Perseverance is gonna stand by and it’s gonna take movies of the helicopter in flight. That’s gonna be awesome.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Just like any good parent, taking movies of their baby over and over again.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Exactly. Making its first steps! The helicopter has cameras as well, so it’s going to be using Perseverance as a relay to send those pictures that it takes back to earth. We’re gonna get glimpses of the whole landing area from that aerial point of view, and that’s gonna be super helpful, because we need all the data we can get to plan for where Perseverance is going to drive next and what’s gonna be the big picture path for the mission.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I remember the first time I met you, and you were talking about why you study Mars and this question is that like “I want to know if there was ever life on Mars.” “I want to know if there is life on Mars.” In your op-ed, you talk about how every single mission has kind of added a little bit extra to this idea of water being on Mars. With perseverance, now it’s going to be basically extracting rock from Mars, and we as humans are gonna be able to see those– physically grab those rocks, because a future mission is going to get them and bring them back to earth. What are you, as a Mars scientist, as a geophysicist, as somebody who really wants to know more about life on Mars and what happened and what is happening, what would you like to see in those rocks? What are you hoping that we’ll find?

Dr. Melissa Rice: I hope that one of these rocks that perseverance selects to put in this sample cache of rocks that are eventually gonna come back to Earth, I hope one of them contains an unambiguous biosignature. A biosignature is just a fancy term for proof of life. What we really want to get in order to say that yes, this rock preserves the evidence of life, is not just one, but multiple types of biosignatures. And that’s really what we need to have a definitive biosignature detection. And we would want to have multiple laboratories with multiple instruments on Earth verify that those multiple biosignatures are present. And so, it’s a really high bar to imagine the point where we say yes, absolutely, that rock preserves evidence of ancient life on Mars. A biosignature can come in many forms, because Mars only had a small period of time in its past when we think it had the conditions that would have allowed life to arise and evolve. We think that if there was life on Mars, it would be primitive, compared to the way that life has flourished on Earth. If we wanted to see any direct evidence of fossils in the rocks, they would be teeny, tiny little microfossils. Or, maybe they would be something about the rock itself that tells us that that rock formed in the presence of life.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: We’re getting towards the end of our interview here, and I wanna ask the last question I ask you every single time about pop culture. So in the future, what in your opinion should be the next Mars kind of film, book, or television show, or what are you watching now that makes you think of that– how Mars is going to portrayed in media in the future?

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah, well I’ll express a hope that sci-fi shows and movies about Mars and about space exploration in general kind of move away from this dark, mopey, very serious– taking itself so seriously kind of a tone, and can start just being fun again. I’m always struck in these shows about astronauts going to Mars or exploring new parts of the solar system that they’re always so dour and serious the whole time. They’re always so depressed, almost, to be doing this work on another planet.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: Yeah, like, “Oh poor us!”

Dr. Melissa Rice: Yeah! I want some sci-fi astronaut to be excited that they’re getting to go to Mars, that they’re seeing the surface of a planet through their own eyes for the first time. I am hard-pressed to think of a sci-fi show with space exploration that’s come out in the past 5-10 years that really has that kind of sense of wonder and excitement.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I absolutely agree. I’m thinking of 2 series, like Picard and Expanse, and they’re both very dark. They’re very, very dark. But then it makes me think, when you said the excitement, it makes me think of Galaxy Quest, and just think of this ridiculous movie where there’s this child in the movie, just excited to be even associated with any sort of space thing.

Dr. Melissa Rice: Right, right. And it didn’t take itself that seriously. And at the same time, it was kind of a love letter to that geek culture and making fun of it at the same time. That’s what I’d like to see more of.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaf: I absolutely agree. There should be Galaxy Quests, like some sort are reboot of that. I agree.

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I’d like to thank my friend and colleague Dr. Melissa Rice for taking the time right before the intense Mars landing to talk to us. If you’d like to learn more about the Perseverance rover and Mars, check out mars.nasa.gov. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE and Western Washington University. Today’s episode was recorded in Bellingham, Washington in my house, on my computer, during the great pandemic that’s still going on in March 2021. Our producers are Suzanne Blais and myself, Regina Barber DeGraaf. Our audio engineer for today’s episode is Zerach Coakley. If you missed any of the show, go to our website, sparksciencenow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook @sparksciencenow. Thank you for listening to Spark Science.