That's indeed really great
to see you all here tonight.

And I got us all.

So anything but off the grill
to do technology if his daily

routine personal pleasure believes
are they very special well known

throughout distinguished lecture and
off to the last.

Really you all are to be able to close
the first part of this you start

this is the reason I just.

It's also is your pleasure to meet your
welcome to Georgia Tech faculty stock and

students who it is evening and especially
joyful warm greetings to the members

of the Atlantic community who joined just
here all the same to bend please tell

those that we really do consider you to
be a vital to protect family dearly hope

that you will join us frequently for
events just such as tonight.

Well certainly as it goes through thirteen
years you read nice without acknowledging

the students hard making I mean if you're
going to serve contributions the last

thing here is the basic technology and
of course face up to.

This recognition in spite of the creation
of all the sense of the Space Technology

understood or she started
the good life I want to focus for

her is the center in which the full
spectrum of race related research

activities throughout
the characters are organized and

integrated with the goal of
increasing collaboration and

usability cross this is a very
very scientific policy and

national We believe that a good vibrant
approach to leveraging the calendar

creativity and excludes he is
the Georgia Tech research community as.

Well a local office certainly Fusion I
thought is really the second he has

a three diligent responsibility to share
exciting discoveries in science and

engineering with your community and
United Community as a whole.

Accordingly He did hope.

You're.

Not going off my dear friend Jane
right from the phone to science or

words I.

Would.

Be very happy to welcome you here
to my very own P.C. advisory.

Board for.

Steve like me grew up in
New Jersey it was really not so

bad as a lot of people.

But he also moved on to
Cornell University where

his undergraduate studies are in
geological sciences Steve actually

got this he has a number of exciting
adventures going on to explore our

own problems scuba diving
on really our use and.

Going down the aisle to summer fall
to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean

to actually living on those who are at
the Aquarius Reef Base our work

is where we work with the astronauts so.

It's climbing in order to keep
in the Arctic it was because of.

This you never with planetary science and

with Mars in particular during
an undergraduate project no and

then I'm talking to Carl Sagan who
was a professor of astronomy for

what time was convinced to return
to Cornell for this week's.

EDITION I think I'm going to tell
the story to about how I don't know if

we have a fire or
go from here this really is because I was

somewhat distracted in those days by
a little project called cost for.

A student nevertheless finished
twenty five went off to do you know.

Ames Research Center for
Research just were.

Returning to Cornell to join that
he's now the team's weeks and

down professor of physical sciences
are now worked on issues to your system

the sound system is asteroids and
of course.

I have to thank me for
my own involvement with a number.

He also chairs asses Advisory Council and

has won several major player.

In.
Science and yet it's really not yet

done for being good science and

not wait there's something
in common with inopportune.

Moments you know.

Which has been his main
scientific focus ever since I.

Guess he has been the science and
the State of the scientist or.

Worse before they were born.

Probably or about that but
he also without.

The

stone.

Wall that went better than I thought James
know me know so much about me I think I

got off easy on that one anyway
it's a great pleasure to be here.

So I'm doing my math right today is
thirty three thousand nine hundred and

eighty eight of our ninety
day mission to Mars.

The Opportunity rover is still going
strong and so what I'm going to try to do

in the next hour or so is give me
a sense of both some of the challenges

that we faced in getting the rovers to
Mars and then kind of the scientific

adventure story that we've experienced
since we got there so this is Mars.

The object of our affections
it is a truly terrible place

if you went there you
would absolutely hate it.

Average temperature is about minus
sixty degrees C. it goes down the minus

one hundred night if you took all the
water vapor in the Martian atmosphere and

you can test it out on the planet's
surface you would make a layer of frost

barely one hundred of a millimeter thick
so it is a cold and dry and desolate world

but there are these intriguing don't do
that area there are these intriguing clues

that in the past it was different OK this
is a valley this picture taken more but

there's a valley that was carved
by flowing liquid water and

if you look close in the upper
right you can actually see.

There we go you can actually
see the tiny channel.

Through which the water that carved that
valley flows you can't do this on Mars

today a Mars today it is too cold and too
dry to allow something like this to form.

So this is telling us that in the past
it was different it was warmer

it was wetter it may have
been more earth like.

Now any geologist will tell you that if
you have a Rosen somewhere else you're

going to have deposition and there are
places that you can go on Mars we can find

these wonderful sequences of layered
sedimentary rocks that the great

thing about layered steady mentor Iraq's
is that they can contain in their details

in their structure in their fine scale
texture their chemistry their mineralogy

information about what it was like
on Mars when they were laid down so

if you can go to Mars with the right set
of tools you can find rocks like this you

can read the story written in those rocks
and you can understand more about what

Mars was like in the past
was it warm was it wet or

was it the kind of place that might
have been capable of supporting life so

we built two high tech
robotic geologist to do

exactly that this picture was taken
to Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Twelve years ago this is
the rover Spirit in the form.

To go to Mars opportunity is back there
against the back wall these vehicles

are our surrogates we experience
Mars there are sensors

now the search with the vehicles
look looks like it's a bow this tall

a little wider than you can reach out
with your hands it's got six wheels and

the scientific payload that it
carries comes in two parts one part is

supported by this big fat white stovepipe
looking mast at the top of that

there are some cameras stereo color
high resolution those cameras

per the ones that provide the beautiful
color pictures that you see on the web and

then living down here inside the rover
is an infrared spectrometer and

then we can use that to tell
what minerals are made of.

And what minerals are present
in the rocks from a distance and

the what the way that works this may
have this hollow on the inside and

there are scan mirrors of
the top of the periscope and

those mirrors provide the spectrometer
the same view of the countryside but

the cameras get on the front
of the ickle there's an arm.

A shoulder and elbow and a wrist that has
exactly the same dimensions as my arm

that is purely a coincidence.

And on the end of the arm there for
devices there is a microscope.

So look at the rocks up close to more
spectrometers to tell us in detail what

chemical elements and what minerals are
present and we have a device which we call

the rat or a T. the rock abrasion tool and
this is a diamond tip grinding tool that

can grind away the outer surface of a rock
kind of opening a window into the rocks

interior that we can then see through
to the with the other instruments.

Now the spacecraft that gets the rover to
Mars is built like one of those Russian

doll sets you know where there's a doll
and sided doll inside a doll OK so

the rover shown here folds up in
this heart of flying the intricate

fashion to make a compact.

The package that goes inside the lander
letter is shown here and you can see it's

got these three things thrown of color on
the sides we call these petals because

they're like the petals of a flower and
what the petals do is they fold up around

the rover enclosing it in casing it
protecting it on the way to Mars so

when that's all folded up
the ladder looks like this.

That is contained in turn in another shell
composed of two pieces this thing here is

the heat shield which protects the vehicle
is it the sends very rapidly through

Martian atmosphere this cone shaped thing
on the back we call the back shell and

then there's that kind of blue Frisbee
look a deal on the back end of it that

we call the cruise stage and
the crew stage provides electrical power

propulsion the stuff you
need to get to Mars.

And this is what it looks like when it's
all buttoned up this is the spacecraft for

Spirit all put together in
a thermal vacuum test chamber

at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in California where we built them.

We launched in the summer of two thousand
and three from Cape Canaveral to beautiful

launches on Delta two launch vehicles it
took us about seven months to get to Mars.

Now when you arrive at Mars you hit the
top of the Martian atmosphere going Mach

twenty seven twenty seven times
the speed of sound that heat shield

bleeds off that kinetic energy as you
burn a hole through the Martian sky and

then once you've descended and you've
slowed down to a nicely surely Mach two

we throw out a supersonic parachute and
we learn the hard way that supersonic

parachute Serveti difficult things to
design and build the lander descends

on a long cord and this is what it looks
like is it still screaming down towards

the Martian surface at about two hundred
kilometers an hour you don't drift down

lays Allee on a parachute on Mars
the atmosphere is very very thin.

We had a terrible time with our
parachutes These are pictures

from the test that we did the first
test that we did of the perished.

Design that we thought would land
us on Mars we did this test that

a National Guard gunnery range outside of
Boise Idaho was the place kind of place we

can drop big heavy things from the sky and
they won't kill anybody and we dropped our

test article from a helicopter at
four thousand feet we let it fall

we deployed the parachute Blas And then
it made this perfect beautiful orange or

white bowl and
it just exploded as ripped to ribbons and

parachute after parachute
failed what had happened was.

As our understanding of the rover and
the lander improved

our estimate of its mass went
up the design got bigger and

by the time we did this
test there was no way for

this parachute to land us we were
really in serious trouble so

what we did was we embarked on a crash
program of parachute redesign designing

three different parachutes in parallel
praying that one of them would work

we tested those parachutes in a NASA
wind tunnel and Ames Research Center

this is the first successful
test of the parachute design

that actually landed us on Mars this
first successful test of our parachute

took place eight months before we had
to be on top of the rockets in Florida.

It was horrifying.

We land using airbags.

The airbags are one.

That's an airbag engineer
being consumed by his work.

The air bag.

The air bags are like the air bags in
your car except a lot more expensive and

what they do is they inflate
explosively around the vehicle

about ten seconds before
impact with the surface.

About two seconds before impact we
fire some rocket motors that zeros

out the velocity maybe twenty meters or
so off the ground we drop the airbags

to the surface and they bounce and they
bounce and they bounce and they battle.

And they're old and they were all of
their old and they can bounce and

roll as much as a kilometer before
the vehicle finally comes to rest.

We had a terrible time with our airbag
testing as well OK this is Georgia Tech

there are a lot of engineers here OK
you've had days like this before you.

Look at their faces.

This was terrible we did these
tests at the world's largest

vacuum chamber outside of Sandusky Ohio
and basically just inflate the airbags and

use giant bungee cords to Wakeham down
on to this platform that is studded with

sharp pointy rocks and the bags just
ripped you know gaping holes in the bag

again what happened was
the vehicle had become too heavy.

The only way to solve this problem.

Was to add more layers of more strength
of the bags making them heavier still

which made the parachute problem worse.

We got that to work too this
is a picture from one of our

successful air bag tests and

of course the ultimate test these are air
bag balance marks on the surface of Mars.

They work.

OK Now once you have
landed the pedals open.

Flips the vehicle up right if
it's lying on its side and

then inside looking nothing like
a rover yet is our vehicle.

Now what this thing has to do now at this
point is it's got to do origami in reverse

unfolding itself and
turning it into a rover and.

There are many parts of this
thing that made me nervous but

this part here with all the gears and
motors and springs and hinges and

latches I mean what you're seeing right
here those are the solar arrays those

are the life giving solar cells that must
deploy the first day on Mars or we don't

survive the first night on Mars the camera
mask comes up the antenna goes out and

by the time we get to this configuration
here we're safe we're not ready to go

anywhere but at least we've got power now
there's more that has to happen it's even

worse watch this and says the second
step in there is a jack that lifted.

It's like to jack in your car.

And watch the throne will have to do.

It's been twelve years and I still get
the heebie jeebies when I watch that

if those latches don't watch you're done.

Now we thought that once we got to
the configuration that you saw there with

the lander standing up or excuse me
with the rover standing up on the lander

we're kind of home free OK we cut
the cable and we just go monster truck and

down on the mark on the Martian
surface and we did some tests.

Yeah this is this is a bad day.

It turns all turns out that when you drive
one of these rovers off a lander it can

flip itself upside down that's a bad thing
so we had to come up with a solution to

that to the solution that you actually saw
him with a video clips we invented some

ramps made out of fabric made out of the
same fabric that the airbags are made I

was very tough stuff they stole between
the pedals and then as the pedals.

Open now the fabric ramp
snaps into place and

the rover can drive down the ramp.

OK to drive it once you get on the surface
of Mars you've got to deal with the fact

that the Martian surface can't exactly
paved OK It's rugged there are rocks and

dunes and drafts and things and we had to
come up with a system mechanical engineers

at J.P.L. invented this elegant system
that allows the wheels to conform.

To whatever topography they encounter and
you can see it here statically but

it's better watch it move so
watch this watch the wheels

watch how the suspension system
conforms to the topography and

if we find of corrugated metal
roof on Mars we're all set.

To watch this we're going to
do a little pirouette here.

It's a very very slick system
works extraordinarily well.

OK now driving.

But I wish I had of course as a joystick
right now what I will going to do

is I want to be in my office and all
of the air around us you can't do that.

Even on the night that we landed on Earth
and Mars were pretty close together

as these things go it took ten minutes for
a radio signal traveling at speed of light

to go from Earth to Mars something happens
on Mars ten minutes to find out what it

was that twenty minute round trip time and
then run into Iraq to try to joystick.

What we had to do instead is in
Dow the vehicles with vision.

And intelligence and
the ability to make their own decisions

about what is safe and what is not
each vehicle carries a pair of these

kind of wide angle Google cameras on
the front end on the back end and

they take these fisheye view
images of the surface and

sometimes those images don't even come
down to earth what the rover will do

is it will use the images to look ahead
the terrain in front of it and it will

build up a three dimensional range map
a model of the terrain in front of it so

it knows what the progress he looks like
can assess how big the hazards are and

can decide this thing is small enough I
can drive over it where it's big enough

I have to drive around we could
program different levels of courage or

cowardice into the vehicles depending
on you know how dangerous we think that

terrain is this was a drive that early in

its mission the first part you see here
we commanded explicitly but the rest

of the drive it's on its own we told it
to turn right and then go that way so

it goes that way a little ways in
here finds a scary pollo rocks

those know what to do thinking about it
says I can do this I'll do it backwards.

It does make that B.P. B.P.
sound as is backing up.

Now this very pile of rocks here
thinking about it thinking about it

OK I will go this way you told
me to stop here all done there.

Little bit.

OK The Rat.

The rock abrasion tool this is one of
the most important tools on the rover.

When a Rock sits on a planet's surface for
any period of time it gets exposed to

the elements humidity sunlight
dust wind all of these things

can work to change the outer portion of
the rock it's a process geologist called

weathering and it destroys the evidence it
changes the rock from what it used to be

to something different and or to
understand the origin of rock you've got

to get through that whether it's surface
and down into the fresh rock underneath so

the rat the rock abrasion tool is
a diamond tipped grinding wheels and

these these grind head spin
at three thousand rpm and

we grind into solid rock with these so
the rock is effectively

a power tool it's the world's first
interplanetary power tool and

as with all power tools when used a device
like this you've got to be very careful

because you don't want
to get into a situation.

Where.

Or something like that happens.

I'm sorry that's such a cheap laugh
I thought the wheel coming off was

a nice touch All right let's go to R.C..

So we'll start with the Spirit rover.

We landed spirit in this crater right here

it's called To Save crater it's one
hundred sixty kilometers in diameter it's

about sixteen degrees south latitude
on Mars the reason we chose it was this

there's a great big dry riverbed.

Flowing into that crater now there's no
water in that riverbed Now there has not

been for billions of years but
it's a big hole in the ground with

a dry river flowing into it there
has to have been a lake there.

OK so we went to goose of crater hoping
to find layered sedimentary rocks

laid down billions of years
ago in a Martian Lake.

We landed it we saw this movie.

What I managed to convince myself for

about three days that this is what
a Martian dry lake bed ought to look like.

And we started looking at the rocks.

In the first rock that we looked up
to look at how close was this one

we name it Adirondack is this tall.

And we hit it with everything we had
we looked at it with our cameras our

spectrometers microscope drilled
a hole into a rat looked inside of it.

There's no layers in that that's not
a sedimentary rock it's a piece a lava

it's an Ignace rock and
every other rock for miles and

practically every direction is a piece
of lava to OK Mars fake this out here

I still believe those layered sedimentary
rocks must be down there somewhere OK but

what has happened is since they were
deposited they were buried with.

And we didn't know that till we landed and
this is what we got and

when we first discovered this
it was a bitter disappointment.

Now the rovers were designed to last for
ninety Martian days and to drive

a total of one kilometer over their
lifetimes about two and a half kilometers

to the southeast of our landing site there
was this beautiful range of hills that we

named the Columbia Hills we named him
after the Columbia space shuttle.

And recognizing that every single rock in
this scene was a piece of this same Wabo

what we did once we figured that
out was we sprinted Rover speed.

To the base of the Columbia Hills hoping
to reach there before the mission

was over.

On day one hundred fifty six of our
ninety day mission we reached the base

of this hill we need Husband Hill
it's named after Rick Husband who was

the commander of the Columbia when
I went down and everything changed.

Everything changed.

We began to see minerals
that can only form

in the presence of water we began to see
layering this is a picture right here.

Taken with a microscope and

what you're seeing here is layering
less than a centimeter thick so

now we're seeing layers in the rocks we're
seeing minerals that point to a watery

history all of a sudden things have
gotten very different we climbed.

Over a period of almost six hundred
Martian days doing the first ever

mountaineering on Mars to the summit

of Husband Hill a mountain this
tallest the Statue of Liberty

like any good mountaineer when we
got to the top we took a picture.

Here it is and today.

Eleven years after Spirit is landing it's
where it has landed this is where Spirit

rests we operated spirit for six years and
the rover finally died at that location

having done some absolutely magnificent
science this is one of my favorites.

So about eight hundred days we really
beat this rover up there was climbing

mountains and going over rocks and
we really pounded on a pretty badly and

about eight hundred days into Spirit's
mission the right front wheel failed.

So it would no longer turn and what that
meant was we then had to drag that wheel

whenever we drove we drove Rover backwards
dragging that wheel through the soil and

a rover that used to do one hundred metres
a day now a good good day was ten metres

but the good thing about that dead
wheel was that it dug this marvelous

trench for hundreds of metres
through the Martian soil and

what we learned was if you do that
interesting things can pop up on the floor

of the trench we were driving
through a little valley.

And.

At the end of the drive the soil in the
bottom of the trench popped up as white as

bright snow this caught our attention
we went over with our spectrometers we

measured the compass composition this this
stuff is ninety one percent pure silica

as I O. to this is not quartz this is not.

Beach sand it's a more fluid silica
it's got water mixed in with it is Opal

kind of like the gemstone.

OK so this silica the posit.

That we found in this valley that
we were driving through on Mars

what this does is it tells us that
the environmental conditions here

were like what you get on
earth in hydrothermal systems

where you find Opal deposits on
earth this deposits of Hot Springs.

Funerals that sort of thing so

this is pointing to a low to a set of
conditions at this location on Mars

that would have been habitable the would
have produced conditions suitable for

life so of course what we named
this place was Silicon Valley.

Spirit out at the time in other ways one
of the toughest things about operating

a solar powered vehicle on Mars is to dust
there's dust in the Martian atmosphere and

it will settle out of the atmosphere and
it will coat everything so

this is a picture this is a self-portrait
is a selfie is a rover selfie and

this was taken about.

Three hundred thirty days
into Spirit's mission and

you notice the solar rays are brown.

They're coated with dust now in spirit was
brand new straight off the showroom floor

those solar arrays put about put
out about nine hundred watt hours

of power per Martian day so enough energy
to run one hundred watt light bulbs and

I ours that power went down and down and
down and down and by the time this picture

was taken the solar array output was
about two hundred fifty watt hours and

we think that death is
somewhere around one fifty so

spirit was very close to the end of it and
then one marvelous day this happened.

And Lucky got through it when hit
the vehicle clean the arrays and

overnight the power went back up to eight
hundred fifty watt hours pure dumb luck.

And it was as if this had happened Aereo.

In reality it was probably
more like this check this out.

Dust Devils.

Little Martian many tornadoes and we
think one of these might have just hit us

I'll play this video again is very cool
you can almost see Dorothy and Toto.

Flying through the scene that
was probably what hit us.

OK Check this out.

I was at I was at.

It i heard it's a eclipse very good so
Mars has two moons their names are Phobos

and Deimos this is the moon Phobos passing
directly in front of the Sun This was

the first solar eclipse ever witnessed
from the surface of another planet there's

no science in this at all we
just did it because we could.

And that's a sunset.

On Mars there's this very very fine
reddish dust in the atmosphere extremely

fine grained and red And so what happens
is the sky is pink during the daytime and

it turns blue at sunset
it's the opposite of Earth.

OK let's go an opportunity.

So we chose the landing site for
opportunity not because of its topography

you know hole in the ground no driver bed
we chose it because of its composition.

The picture on the right is data taken
from orbit with an infrared spectrometer

it tells us something about the minerals
that are present the blue stuff.

Is probably boring all lava.

But the red in the yellow in the green
is a mineral called him a tight.

Human Tate's an iron oxide It's
a mineral that is present in rust and

it's a mineral that sometimes
in fact usually but

not always forms as a consequence
of the action of liquid water so

that it was like a chemical beacon visible
from space saying hey come land here.

Now the thing that made me nervous
about the opportunity site

was this it's a I mean it's smooth it's.

This is great for
landing it's great for driving but

I fear that it was so smooth and so flat.

That no where would we find the topography
that we would need to expose bedrock

I need not have worried.

These are three of my favorite
pictures from the whole mission so.

As our Lander was descending towards
the Martian surface he carried a single

camera that looked down.

And that camera had enough time to snap
off just three pictures during the landing

process so those three pictures are shown
here you see an impact crater there and

just the left of the craters
the little black dot

OK that black dot the shadow
of the parachute.

OK And here this is just the same
scene being viewed obliquely the red

curve shows the reconstructed trajectory
that our vehicle went through

as it went through the landing process so
we're coming streaming in from pace

from space on the parachute we're going
like two hundred kilometers an hour OK we

inflate the airbags are far there's rocket
motors we drop the airbags to the surface

the wind that day was
blowing from the south.

So the trajectory bends through the north
bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce and

then reading the green perfectly
it curves to the left and

goes right into a little twenty
meter diameter impact crater.

Tiger Woods on his best day.

Could not have done this again
it was just pure dumb luck.

We opened our eyes and
the first thing we saw was the spectacular

outcrop of layered bedrock
right in front of the rover

now we figured out very very
quickly that we were in a crater.

But we didn't know what Creator we were
in so we didn't know how big it was so

we didn't know how far away
the crater wall was so

we didn't know how large the greater wall
was and then the night that we landed

when we first saw the picture of
the outcrop that you see here the now.

Game that my team gave to this outcrop
that we're going to have to deal with

the name what they named
it was the Great Wall.

That was what they named it.

And we took some stereo pictures and
we did a little bit of trigonometry.

A little tiny out great big row
over the Great Wall was this tall.

OK but its small size was part of
its charm and when we went over and

we made our first measurements on the
first measurements by the way were made on

Iraq right here fact I go back there it is
right there we named it Stone Mountain.

After a place nearby that
you might have heard and.

When we made our measurements of this we
discovered some extraordinary things.

The first thing that we found looking
around was we start looking for

the human type OK We wanted
to know where the human was.

So our inference spectrometers
a great detector and

so we made this map of
where the human tide is and

red is lots of blue is not so there's
lots of human tide out on the plains

outside the crater there's a fair
amount of it on the crater floor.

There's thought in the outcrop in
the bedrock but not as much and

then down on the crater floor
there are these splotches

shown in blue that have
no human side at all.

The splotches are airbag balance marks.

When you bounce in the dirt at this
place on Mars human goes away.

OK what do we do with that.

I've seen this picture before here
the balance marks very smooth soil and

in between where the human eye
is there's lots of gravel so

I think an aha they must be in the gravel.

We drove off the lander and
we look down at the gravel and

we start to notice that the grains
looked awfully round so

we took out a microscope and
we took this picture.

And I will remember as long as
I live where I was standing.

And how I felt and the unrepeatable
words that I said when I saw

this picture the surface of Mars at the
Opportunity landing site is littered with

an uncountable number of
little round things and

they're four five six
millimeters in diameter and

they're absolutely everywhere we had
initially no clue what we're dealing with

now this that Stone Mountain OK and

we drove over to it what we quickly
realized was that the little round things

they did in the outcrop like
blueberries in a muffin.

The blueberries are hard the muffin
a soft the muffin or roads away and

the blueberries fall out and
they're absolutely everywhere.

Now.

By this time we're desperate to know
what the blueberries are made of we have

an instrument on the end of the arm that's
a very good human type attack there and

it's got a field of view that.

Centimeter to have two centimeters across
but if you try to to to look at just one

of these blueberries is a picture taken
with a microscope it's only three

centimeters across your field of view
it's going to be full of a little bit of

blueberry and a whole lot of muffin that's
going to be hard to figure out what you're

dealing with so what we needed was a
gathering of blueberries and we found one

there was a place where there was a little
bowl shaped the pressure in the rock

that a bunch of the blueberries had
rolled into we call it the berry Bowl and

we went over and we stuck our
spectrometer into the berry ball and

what we found was that yes indeed
the blueberries are made almost entirely.

When we came to realise is that these
blueberries are what ya just call

concretions concretions forming in
typically in sedimentary rocks on

Earth that are saturated with liquid water
there's some mineral like human type that

dissolved in the water it
wants to pursue potato out

if finds a little nucleation point and
begins to precipitate and

it starts to grow and it grows and
grows adding layer upon layer.

In the same way it way that
an oyster builds a perv.

What you get of these little hard
to human jewels in the rock and

so what these human type knowledge roles
what these blue birds are telling us

is this is a place where water just
wants absolutely soaked the ground so

the subsurface of Mars.

Now we're also interested in whether or
not the water ever came to the surface if

you've ever looked into the bed of a sandy
stream you've seen this when water flows

overstand it makes ripples and the ripples
propagate downstream in the key here is

that the crest of the ripples are highly
sinew if they're not straight there and

they're seen us on scales of like five or
ten centimeters just little

tiny ripples and we've seen this OK if
you looked into the bed of a sandy stream

Now here's the same thing being simulated
in a computer and watch what's left behind

the layers that you get from these
downstream propagating little ripples and

instead of flat layers you get these
little concave upward sort of Smiley

shapes in the rock that's called
Cross geometry cross Betty and

that Smiley shape at these little scales
is the signature of liquid water as

the agent of transport so here it is from
set of sediments in the Colorado River

in the southwestern United States and
in a few places here it is on Mars

we found a lot of this but we found it
in several different places beautiful

little concave up shapes the tell us
that this water that soaked the ground

occasionally came to the surface and
flowed across the ground.

OK so we spent.

Sixty Martian days exploring the little
crater we name the Eagle Crater

where we landed with and went to another
crater that we named insurance levy

insurance crater we began to head south in
the first thing we went to was our he or

the heat shield is the thing that protects
the vehicle as a descends through

the Martian atmosphere once we're once we
don't need it anymore we just drop it and

it falls on the Martian surface
the pictures at the top.

What that he looked like
last time I saw it and

here it is you know busted into
pieces on the surface of Mars and

there's the crater that it made when
a hit now we went to the heat shield.

Not to learn about Mars but
to learn about heat shields.

OK For decades engineers have been
given the task of trying to design

a heat shield that will work in the very
poorly understood atmosphere of Mars but

until our mission not one of those
engineers had had the chance to actually

see their creation after it had done its
job we were able to go to the heat shield

go to this fractured part of it take our
microscope take a cross-sectional image

through the chart he chilled and give
it to the engineer who had designed and

built the thing so that he could
assess how well it performed.

Now of course we're scientists
at the same time we're doing our

engineering investigation if he were
looking around for rocks we found one or

two metres away from his shield just
sitting there we call it heechul rock.

We're going over to measure the
composition of this thing turns out this

thing is not made of conventional
rock at all this is a nickel.

It's a meteorite it's an iron meteorite
that was just sitting there right

next to the heat shield pure dumb luck.

I told the team we shouldn't stay
here it's obviously a place where big

metal objects fall from the sky.

We left the heat shield and we began
a long long arduous drive to the south and

as we drove south we began to encounter
these little wind blown ripples and

the farther south we got the bigger they
were until we were effectively driving

through a doing field and we would drive
up one side of these ripples and then

over and down the other side and we go
after one after another after another and

we did find we just drove over
hundreds of these things and

then one day and
I still don't understand this.

But one day we were driving along
over these these ripples and we ran.

And into one that was just a little
bit different from all the others

I still don't understand how and
the wheels broke through the crust and

we did fifty meters worth the wheel turns
thinking we were driving when in fact we

were just digging ourselves deeper and
deeper and deeper into the soil.

We came in the next morning and all six
wheels were buried over the hubcaps

this was a bad day.

Now the first rule in a situation like
this is don't do anything stupid that's

going to make the problem worse
OK The sun is shining We've got power

the roguish are not going anywhere so
we've got time to work this out.

And we built the rovers we actually
built four of them two of them

are an opportunity or on Mars the other
two are back here on Earth and those two

rovers we can use to simulate predicaments
the we have gotten ourselves into and

then try to figure a way out of them now
another it in order to simulate this

particular predicament we needed a very
large quantity of fake Martian soil.

If you ever called upon.

To create Martian soil Here's the recipe
that I recommend that you use.

It is roughly equal parts place
sand the stuff in Kid sand

boxes clay and diet summations for.

The very fine grain stuff that's the stuff
that's used in swimming pool filters and

once we figured out this recipe
a bunch of engineers and

pickup trucks fanned out across the L.A.

basin and bought up literally tons
of these three ingredients people

were getting algae in their swimming
pools all summer long because of us.

And we brought it back to J.P.L. and
we mixed it up it was horrible work and

made these dunes and pits and mounds and

then we would drive the rover
into it get the rover stuck just

as it did on Mars you can see it caked on
the wheels in the same way it did on Mars.

And we spent two and
a half weeks rehearsing

trying to find the optimal way to
extract a robot from a sand dune on.

Another planet there are a lot of things
you can do you can run the wheels

of different philosophies you can
steer the wheels back and forth and

try to open up the holes that they're in
you can rock the vehicle OK we tried all

of those are a bunch of other things and
we finally found the optimal technique

the optimal technique it turns out
was to put it in reverse and got it.

Right there's no place to go
to look this stuff up OK.

So here we are gone on Mars
that's the left front wheel.

Over many Martian days here's the left
rear wheel I mean we're really stuck we

did one hundred ninety two
meters worth of wheel turns

to get the rover to move one meter but
one wonderful Saturday morning.

After six weeks stuck in a feature we
later came to call Purgatory Dune.

The rover popped out and

we've been treating those little dunes
with much greater respect ever since.

So.

Sense of scale Here's Eagle Crater the
little crater that we landed in there's

insurance greater heat shield was about
here Purgatory Dune was about here what

we're trying to get to was this enormous
crater down here Victoria Now you notice

that the names of the craters and see the
one kilometer scale are there the names of

the craters come from famous ships of
exploration eagle of course was the Apollo

eleven command module in durance was
Ernest Shackleton ship in the Antarctic

the Victoria was one of Magellan's ships.

Magellan left Spain with
two hundred sixty men and

five ships they set out
towards the Spice Islands.

Magellan himself.

Was killed in the Philippines.

Most of the ships were
lost many lives were lost

three years later having
circum navigated the.

Globe The one remaining ship
the Victoria with eighteen surviving

sailors from the original two hundred
sixty limped back to Spain so

we chose that name for this crater
thinking would be an apt analogy for

the condition that we would be in with
our beat up little rover driven by

surviving graduate students
if we ever got that far.

But I'm pleased to say very pleased to say
that we did make it to Victoria Crater and

wonderfully at virtually the exact moment
that we pulled up to the rim of the crater

a spectacular new camera one
that changed those very well.

On a new orbital called the mark on its
orbital orbiter pulled into orbit around

Mars they turned on the camera and they
took this marvelous picture of Victoria

crater so I'll blow up just
that little portion of it.

There it is.

If you look real close.

There's opportunity in fact if you look
really close you can even see the shadow

of the camera mast being
cast on the Martian surface

it was really cool to see our rover again.

We spent two years of Victoria Crater
the first year was spent traversing along

the rim of the crater and you can see the
intricate wheel tracks that we made as we

drove across the top of this six or eight
metre tall cliff with the rover the rover

drivers told me when we were all done that
was going to Stephen I'm not seeing it.

But that's what they said but but
seriously these wheel tracks to me

actually these represent one of the finest
accomplishments in the history of

planetary robotics because what you've got
is you've got a bunch of engineers who's

job first and foremost is to keep
the vehicle safe driving along the top of

an eight metre cliff and a bunch of
scientists saying go closer go closer

go closer and we did go very close
over and over and over again we've got

spectacular views here is one of them
this is a place called Cape St Mary.

Eight metre tall cliff I blow up that
portion there you go and look at the cross

that look at the layering in that rock and
the way the layers cut across one another

you could take a terrestrial geologist and
shown this picture and

tell them they were looking at
the Navajo sandstone from Utah and

they would believe you what you're seeing
there is the signature of an ancient

dune field there was once a dune field
at this place blowing sand around and

producing this spectacular layering
on exactly the scale that you see

interestingly all rocks on earth I don't
know if you've been to many talks by

geologists what geologists love to do is
put their rock camera into the scene for

scale so there is my digital rock hammer.

And it's just magnificent
stuff we also went down

into the crater came back out
again spent about two years there.

At that point we had decided what to
do next you couldn't see in durance

at the top it took us years
to get to Victoria Crater.

And what we decided to
do at that point and

James was actually instrumental in
in motivating this decision but

what we decided to do was to
head towards Endeavor Crater.

And there were a huge twenty two
kilometers in diameter it's hundreds and

hundreds of meters deep and
what makes it especially interesting and

important is that it is older than all
the stuff we've been driving around on

so the rhythm of this create this crater
it's been almost completely buried by

the same rocks that we've been seeing
over and over since Stone Mountain.

And then the rim of it is poking
up like islands through a sea of

these sandstone and we knew that if we
could get there it took us three years

sixty metres take a panorama sixty
metres take a panorama we did that for

three solid years before we finally
got to the rim of the Devore but

we got there and everything changed it was
like a brand new landing site it was like

the mission started all over again this
happened about two three years ago.

Spectacular view when we got there
this is a just as we were pulling up

the thing it was cool
about the drive to and

that ever was you can see this
stuff from miles away and

every day we get a little closer a little
closer was like being on a ship at sea and

you could see land off in the distance and
we finally got there.

As we speak right now the rover is revalue
where that arrow is it's actually just

over that ridge and

a little valley on the far side we
have found I wish I had time to tell

you about all the wonderful things that
we have found here here's one of them.

This is a vein.

Of a very bright mineral this
veins about as wide as your thumb

it's about as long as your forearm
we found hundreds of these and

this thing is made of
a sensually pure gypsum.

Gypsum is a calcium sulphate it's a salt
the precipitation from liquid water so

this is a place where water in large
quantities flowed through fractures in

the Rock and precipitated out
this bright white vein of gypsum.

This what.

I get to that this was a weird
one this was really strange so

we were driving.

Along the route the rim of this crater
doing a little bit of climbing and so

these are two pictures this was taken
on day thirty five twenty eight and

this is the same scene OK this rock here.

Is that rock there this one here is that
one here here's the same scene twelve

days later and look at that.

There's this little rock
it's about this big.

It's white around the outside it's
deep red in the center it looks

like a jelly donut and
if you showed up and.

You just showed up this
really freaked us out.

And we had we there were all
sorts of crazy theories flying

around the over the internet
work nuts on this one.

It turns out all it was was
that we had a few days before

this picture was taken we had done a
little what we call determine the turn and

place its little pirouette to maneuver and
as the one of the wheels was sort of

shattering across the ground as we did the
maneuver it kind of just simply went this

thing out of the rock and then it
obligingly flipped itself upside down so

that what we're seeing is the underside of
this rock and we're seeing a rock that has

not been exposed to the Martian
atmosphere for billions of years and

we just sheer dumb luck just just
flipped it out and there it was and

we've measured the composition of this
it turns out it's very very rich and

manganese compounds tells another again
a very very interesting story about water

the flow of anything around here really
very very close to the surface so

sometimes you just get lucky.

OK The Mars marathon so
a rover that was designed to last for

ninety days and
drive one kilometer has as of

a couple weeks ago gone twenty six
point two miles so we have completed

a marathon on Mars and so to celebrate
this we actually had an event at J.P.L.

this we ran a marathon only was a relay
nobody ran a full twenty six miles but all

you could see all the runners with their
bibs on and they would hand off and then

the final final leg which was like two
meters was run by one of our rovers and

and so we actually have completed marathon
on Mars and I'm actually I'm actually very

proud of that this picture which has
just come down in the past few days.

This is taken from where
the rover is right now.

There's an impact crater right
here called Spirit of St Louis

this big huge thing sitting inside
the crater very interesting I don't

know what that is it may
actually be what's left of

the thing that made the crater in the
first place that we have named Lindbergh.

We're looking at the rocks
in the immediate.

City and the value that you see
just beyond the Spirit of St Louis

crater we have named marathon Valley and
that's the next place we're going to go

now I mention that James his work had a
lot to do with us going to Endeavor Crater

one of the most important pieces of
science that James did back when he was

a Cornell was that after we sort of
decided well maybe we're going to head off

towards this Endeavor Crater James
dug carefully into

spectral data taken from orbit for
Endeavor Crater and what he was able to

show is that in a few special places
along the rim of Endeavor crater and

it turns out maybe the very best
of those is marathon Valley and

we've been making a beeline to
this place because of that you see

the definite signature of clay minerals
They're claiming they're also tremendously

important because clay minerals form
in the presence of liquid water but in

contrast to a lot of this over the other
stuff they form in neutral ph conditions

OK A lot of the minerals that we find and
we want to answer and water on Mars water

on Mars Well a lot of places what we've
really discovered is evidence for so

if you're a gas at all Mars OK but

here in Marathon Valley if James
is right and I think he is.

We're going to play minerals and that's
going to be tremendously important to us.

Well.

There we go.

Whenever I give talks about.

The project I always end the moon with
a slide wrote a book about the project

called Roving Mars and
in an appendix I tried to list

the names of everybody who worked on the
project there are more than four thousand

names on that list so
I'm just one of a very very big team.

It's an extraordinary group of people
that I'm very proud to be part of this is

part of the team here this is down
to Cape Canaveral this is the night

that we set the Opportunity rover out for
the launch pad.

And for everyone.

Us who has been part of
this mission it has been

in the very literal sense of the phrase
the adventure of a lifetime and

I really want to thank you very much for
inviting me here to tell you thank you

OK

thank you OK to Iraq.

And he says we have time for
questions you.

Could.

Read here.

OK.

OK.

You know I talked to were.

Very very nasty and.

Have.

No I haven't broken shoulder
would be overstating it

the shoulder joint has three degrees
of freedom it can go like this and

it can go like that this degree of
freedom does not work reliably anymore so

we've chosen not to use it this one works
so when we need to go side to side we

go like that which is there with the rover
So yes so that the the as I'm a joint on

the shoulder as we call it is no longer
we don't use that anymore so I think.

The other things that are wrong with
opportunity I can list them all.

So there's the as Mr One of the shoulder
another one is that the right front

steering actuator no longer works so
when we turn a place or

when we do any kind of turn we can
steer the right front and rear wheels.

And we can so we can do a nice little turn
place and the right front wheel doesn't.

Turn doesn't actuate in
the steering fashion anymore.

That.

Was that flaw was what was responsible for
typically winking that jelly donut rock

out of the ground if it had been working
properly that wouldn't have happened it's.

Just like the the silica discovery OK just
dumb luck that this thing work because

the rover wasn't working for properly but
yes that's Turing actuator doesn't work.

The only other significant
thing things that are wrong.

The infrared spectrometer
are no longer functions and

the reason for that is that in order
to preserve the lifetime of the rover

to let it live as long as it had
we had to turn off the heat or

the survival heater the keep that thing
warm at night to conserve power and

eventually that broke the instrument
the only other thing that's wrong

is that one of our spectrometers we
called our last power spectrometer

it has a radiation source
of cobalt fifty seven.

Works great the half life of COBOL fifty
seven is two hundred seventy one days

now when we had a ninety day mission that
seemed just fine right you know four

thousand DAYS IN we're out of cobalt so
that instrument doesn't work anymore but

everything else is there we're finding
clues include in their operation tool

that's still working we haven't worn that
out yet all six wheels are still turned so

we're doing really really well
solar power the solar panels

this is been an interesting thing at
the Spirit site you see lots and lots and

lots of dust build up
punctuated very infrequent

intervals by these cleaning events as we
call it only happened like three times

over Spirit's lifetime opportunity we've
never really gotten that rover dirty

the wind regime at the opportunity
site is very different and

instead of the occasional blast you get
these little things all the time and we've

just never really gotten thirty rover at
that site so the solar arrays are fine.

Others.

Are.

OK.

OK.

Yes.

Curiosity I love curiosity that's that's
the other over that I'm spending a fair

amount of time on James
spends a lot of time on that.

Over these days.

Curiosity does all the things
that I would have wanted spirit

to do an opportunity to do
two main things first of all.

Cheery our city has nuclear power you
don't have to wait for a lucky wind

gust to clean it off it's got a steady
nuclear power source that just keeps it

going all the time the other thing and
this is an experiment that both James and

I are involved in it carries this
wonderful instrument it's called Sam and

this thing is able to we can drill into
rock we can put it into this instrument

package inside the rover and we can detect
organic molecules that like the parts per

billion level I mean just really really
tiny trace amounts of organics and

turns out to be hard to do there on
a lot of organic molecules on Mars but

we're working real hard with that
seeing some encouraging results and so

that ability to look for organics and

that ability to just keep on truckin even
when the rovers dusty those are the two

things I wish I had a spare
an opportunity to have both my curiosity.

All the questions where the back.

Rest.

Yeah that's that's an interesting
that's an interesting question.

That's something I've thought a lot about
and I take very very seriously these

rovers all together to get them
to Mars cost about eight hundred

million taxpayer dollars
thank you all very much.

When we first landed expecting to ninety
day missions when you did the math it

worked out to about four and
a half million dollars a day.

And I hammered that number I hammered that
number into my team's heads I didn't want

to make it it's very easy to go a hundred
million that's a few slices of pizza for

every american know you could do
an enormous amount of good in the world

with a hundred million dollars and
I wanted everybody they heard that.

Number for me over and over for years I
want everybody coming into work thinking

my God we had before to have million
dollars worth of science today and

there were some days we did and there were
other days that we didn't but we took that

responsibility very very seriously I mean
to answer your question I've always felt.

That.

In a society that says wealthy as
ours as a society that is able

to do a pretty good job
not a perfect job but

a decent job with taking care of the basic
needs of the citizens has a certain

imperative to spend some fraction of its
resources on things that you know for lack

of a better phrase enrich the human spirit
we should be spending money on the arts

we should be spending money on basic
research that's not going to pay off for

hundreds of years and we should be
spending money to answer fundamental

questions like Are we alone in
the universe had life first arise and

so yeah we have spent eight hundred
million dollars Our efforts do not

fill in the potholes they don't put roofs
on the schools they don't put libraries in

the schools or textbook in the libraries
they put knowledge into the textbooks.

And I sleep OK at night.

But that's what we do.

Yeah.

Well OK.

So where the atmosphere go yeah
that's a really interesting one so.

How why do we think that Mars was how
did Mars get to be warmer in the past

a good hypothesis is that it had a dense
atmosphere which is what he's referring to

and it was a greenhouse effect carbon
dioxide is a wonderful greenhouse gas

as we know but where did all go OK So
here's a theory.

We know that very long ago
early in its history Mars

had a magnetic field somehow generated
in the Martian core there was a magnetic

field because we can see the remnants
of that magnetic field still frozen

in the oldest rocks on the surface but
younger rocks don't show that So

after a little while maybe the first
five hundred million years first.

Billion years something like that
the magnetic field one away why I probably

because the core froze or you had a liquid
molten metal core that was convecting away

but then the planet cooled it frozen no
magnetic field Now why is that important

the reason that's important is because one
of the things that magnetic field does

is it protects the planet's
atmosphere from the solar wind there

is this steady stream of charged particles
flowing outwards from the sun and

if you have a magnetic field the solar
wind will be diverted by that and

it magnetic field around the planet that's
a protective bubble but if the magnetic

field collapses it goes away now all of a
sudden those solar wind particles impinge

on the top of the Martian atmosphere and
they can strip away atmosphere of gas and

that process may have been in
large part responsible for

atmospheric lost and losing that
greenhouse effect now there's a mission

called maven it's an orbiter
it's at Mars now and

its job is to answer exactly that question
by studying the interaction between

the upper atmosphere of Mars and
the solar wind and seeing

you know what are the last rates really
like OK is this a viable hypothesis for

you know where did the atmosphere
go why is it different today.

Other questions yeah.

Sure.

That's right there's more he wrote

the other nine nine different
principal investigators.

And I mean there there were a couple
couple of major differences.

One difference was that our
mission a rose from catastrophe.

The two missions that
preceded ours launch to

Mars in one thousand nine
hundred eight one of them

crashed on the Martian surface the other
one burned up in the Martian atmosphere

because of a mix up over English in metric
units that's a very bad way to lose this.

Craft don't let it happen to you.

Because of those the goal for
the two thousand and

three mission was to try to fly
something that at least had a payload

that was ready to go and at that point I
had been the principal investigator for

a two thousand and one Lander mission
that had a bunch of instruments on it

instruments were built tested calibrated.

And NASA just decided to take that
whole thing lock stock and barrel and

put it onto the Rovers and you know build
another one so we'd have two sets but

part of the reason any ARE was done the
way it was was because we had an existing

payload with a single P.-I in the case
of curiosity there was time to do it and

sort of the more traditional way other
things big difference in price OK

this is an eight hundred million dollars
mission curiosity is more like two and

a half billion so that much money
you want if you want to kind

of spread the love around a little bit OK.

So there are a couple couple reasons
that it was done differently

either one works in one of
the good things about having.

The entire science payload
under the direction of a single

principal investigator is that it gives me
a kind of more pieces on my chess board

it gives me more levers that I can
push when I need to fix something so

if I got one instrument Janet just
to pick a trivial as simple example

I got one instrument that's ahead of
schedule and doing great on budget and

then I get another one
where I'm out of money and

I've got a problem I can take money from
one do it to the other boards if you got

there from Principal Investigator you
can't you can't do that sort of thing so

it just gave me a lot of
flexibility to kind of tune things

the other thing is that in designing
the payload I was able to design it so

that all the pieces work together so the
size of the area that the rock abrasion

tool grinds off is just right for
one spectrometer fit in there for another

spectrometer fit and for the microscopic
imager to cover it completely and

it's just right for the infrared
spectrometer to look at it and so forth so

we were able to design.

The instruments as an ensemble as
a suite that was was complimentary so

they work for us but obviously
it's working for curiosity too so

either approach could be fine yeah.

OK.

That was not planned scientific
Marshall missions to Mars coming

up yes there are me see if I
can list them all for you.

In two thousand and sixteen so next
year there is a mission called Insight

and that is the lander that's going
to land on the Martian surface and

it's going to do geo physics it's going to
look for Mars quakes it's going to try to

learn about the interior of Mars
in two thousand and eighteen

the European Space Agency is going
to fly another mission it's a rover

mission it's called Exo Mars and it's
going to land on the Martian surface and

explore it's particularly interested
in what might be signs of biology.

In two thousand and
twenty we're going to fly

another rover is just called
Mars twenty twenty right now and

that one has a really interesting job that
one is the design to drill into rocks and

take solid cores of rock which then
it will cash on the surface take

all these little rock samples pick them
very carefully put them all together in

one place and then some future mission
will be able to pick up those samples and

bring it back to Earth so it's the
beginning of our sample return program.

Then there's a bunch of other
stuff going on to India.

India just successfully sent
a fantastic orbiter mission to Mars and

it's working and it's working
beautifully in two thousand and

twenty one the United Arab Emirates is
thinking about doing it at their own

mission to Mars so it's becoming
the thing to do it's kind of.

Yeah right here.

How much oil does the rover use it
uses if it doesn't use oil at all.

OK It uses grease so
if you think about the rover so

it's got these wheels that turn and then
to make the wheel turn you need a motor

and a gear box and so in the gearbox
you've got these years that are moving and

to lubricate that you need
a little bit of grease so

we've got a little bit of
grease in those your boxes but

that's all we don't use in
the oil at all just the grease.

Or just one.

OK I go all night go
ahead you're going to.

Go ahead one more.

OK So when you're for the first party
question deals with human spaceflight OK.

Let me answer the second part first I mean
huge fan of Sony you know sending humans

to Mars you know I'm a robot guy
I have devoted my entire career

to building robots and sending them to
Mars but I believe that the the best

most successful most
compelling most inspiring.

Most scientifically productive
exploration is going to be done by humans

now if your criterion is
simply science bang for

the buck you know what's going to give us
the most science return per unit dollar

then robots are always going to win but
that's not why we do this stuff OK.

I will tell you for example there is a you
know somebody once famously said nobody's

ever going to give a robot a tickertape
parade and that's true OK scientists have

are humans have a capability
to inspire that robots to not.

Spirit and Opportunity were built
by a bunch of people like me

who grew up in the sixty's in the
seventy's watching Mercury and Gemini and

Apollo on television and

dreaming of sending spaceships to
Mars someday and now we get to do a.

So there's a real real value in
that in terms of the science.

Jeez you know these rovers what what
our magnificent state of the art robots

like Opportunity curiosity do in a day
a human can do in about thirty seconds

I mean what Spirit and Opportunity did in
six ten eleven years on Mars James and

I could have done a good two weeks OK.

And have the ability to improvise and
ways that the robots don't so

I'm a huge huge fan of sending humans
to Mars it can't happen soon enough for

me now to get to your other question.

Right now.

Nasa.

Has the long term goal of sending humans
to Mars but in the near term they

have many many pressures on them to
achieve many different things and

a budget that in my personal view is not
adequate to achieve all those things so

just as one example you mentioned
human spaceflight right now really

NASA is conducting to
almost completely separate

human space flight programs in
parallel one of them is centered on

utilizing the International Space Station
which is a magnificent accomplishment and

getting cargo and crew there be a
commercial means the other one is focused

on this new space launch system this big
new rocket the Arayan crew capsule and

sending humans out into deep space we
clearly have enough research sources

to do one or the other of those
trying to do both of them in parallel

is proving to be very very problematic so.

I think in order to achieve that
long range goal of getting humans

to Mars it is necessary to reduce
some of the pressures on the NASA

budget either by a reduction in scope
of what NASA is expected to do or

by increasing the resources.

OK thank you very much.