This week, Boing Boing visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA’s next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft (MSL) have been built for launch in late 2011 from Florida. Our big photo gallery with first-ever media access for “hands-on” images is here. Spacecraft assembly and testing specialists showed Boing Boing the rover and the other spacecraft components, including the descent stage “sky crane.” Shipment from the clean room to Florida is scheduled to begin within the next two months, with launch scheduled for late 2011 and landing on Mars in mid-2012.

Xeni spoke with Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist at JPL for the MSL mission, to understand more about how MSL works and what its creators hope to accomplish, how one scores a job designing interplanetary explorer robots, and how this updated Mars rover is (or is not) like an iPad.

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Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing: So, the MSL and Curiosity unveiling this week represents a big milestone for you folks.

Ashwin Vasavada, NASA JPL: Right. The rover is almost complete. We’ve been working on for several years now, it has all come together and works great and we’re putting the final touches on.

BB: So as I understand it, Curiosity will have a lot more science gathering capability than either Spirit or Opportunity.

Ashwin Vasavada: Yes. You can think of it as having nearly everything that Spirit and Opportunity had in the sense that it’s a rover capable of driving over some pretty rough terrain, have cameras to look around at the landscape, had some instruments on the end of a robotic arm to look at rocks up-close and do some chemical analysis up-close on the rock. But in addition to that, it has a major new capability of being able to take samples of rocks and soils, and analyze those samples in instruments on board the rover itself.

BB: So much of the science and the public interest around Mars expeditions has been — is there water on Mars, with the thought being that this would mean life on Mars. How does this change that question?

Ashwin Vasavada: Well, that definitely is the kind of overarching question in Mars exploration, is there life on Mars today? Was there ever life on Mars in the past? As we’ve tried to answer that question over the past two decades, we realized it’s a pretty difficult question to answer. Not only do you need very sophisticated instruments to be able to detect microbial life, but that may not be the kind of life that we’re used to on Earth.

But you also have to know a lot about Mars itself as a planet and where you might want to look for life, where the sort of environmental niches are on Mars. What the Mars Science Laboratory aims to do is not detect life directly, but ask those questions about the environment on Mars, and specifically early Mars, a period for which there’s a lot of evidence that there were rivers and lakes and a much more kind of a life-friendly environment. So we’re going to go to a place that dates back from Mars’ early history, maybe three billion, four billion years ago and try to detect whether that environment at that time was an environment that could have supported life.

Video
Link: Space reporter Miles O’Brien
visited JPL in 2010 as Ashwin and colleagues prepared the
“rover on steroids” for departure for the Red Planet.

BB: And the ability to
gather and analyze soil samples, rocks is a big leap in that
direction?

Ashwin
Vasavada: That’s correct. The signatures that
we’re looking for would be, for example, different minerals
that might be present in the rocks and soils that only form in
the presence of water. So for example, we’ve detected clays
from orbiting spacecraft around Mars, clays on the surface. And
clay minerals are pretty interesting because they form in the
presence of water that’s interacted with more pristine rock.
They also form in the presence of water that’s basically
neutral in pH, in other words, neither too basic or too acidic.

So the presence of clay is a signature that there
might be a life-friendly environment and we’ll be able to
confirm that on the surface.

BB: So let’s talk about the rover
itself. As I understand, it’s simply too big to run on solar
power. So instead, this one as I understand it will be equipped
with a radioactive thermal generator that uses basically
decaying plutonium to generate electricity.

Ashwin Vasavada: That’s correct.
That’s the kind of device that we’ve used on missions to the
outer planets for many years where the sunlight isn’t strong
enough to generate electricity through solar panels. But this
time, we’re using it on Mars mostly because Mars is a dusty
place and solar panels tend to get covered up and degrade over
time.

BB: So the choice
to use nuclear power is not just because it’s a really large
craft, it’s the fact that the environment is so full of dust.

Ashwin Vasavada: That’s
correct. It’s primarily because of the dust but it’s also the
fact that this will be a very long-lived mission so we can’t
afford to have the dust accumulate and we wanted to design
those vehicle to be able to go to higher latitudes if the
science pushed us in that direction.

And at higher
latitudes like on Earth, there’s less sunlight as well. It
turns out that where we’re probably going to go is more near
the equator, but we still will benefit from being free of any
constraints due to dust.

BB: Who decides exactly where the
rover will be aimed?

Ashwin Vasavada:
Well, we try to involve pretty much everybody
who knows anything about Mars is open to give us
[Laughter] suggestions and help us
understand these different sites. So we’ve had an open process
where we’ve invited all — basically, all working Mars
scientists from around the world and we’ve gathered them
together in hotel conference rooms now four times over the past
four years and we have some very vigorous discussions and
people share ideas and propose sites. We’ve narrowed it down to
four final sites. And we’re also in parallel with the
scientific studies studying the safety of those sites whether
we can actually land successfully on those sites and we’ll
deliver all information to NASA and NASA will make the
decision.

BB: So you
mentioned the landing. This CGI
animation of what it will be like for this rover to
land looks pretty Rube Goldberg! This is complicated
and risky stuff, very far from home. Mars is a notoriously hard
place to land a spacecraft, and the plan for how this one will
get there is different than its predecessor rovers.

Ashwin Vasavada: Right, and that’s
mostly due to the size of the Mars Science Laboratory. So we’ve
gotten used to seeing Mars spacecraft land with the airbags and
that turned out to be a nice way to land, but we can’t use it
for a vehicle that’s this heavy. We weigh a metric ton. We’re
about 900 kilograms and it would just require more airbags than
we want to carry with us to Mars.

Because of this, we
have gone back to the sort of the old school approach and
landing with rockets firing and setting it down on the ground.
But we’ve put in a little twist where the rockets are actually
attached to what we call a “descent stage” that flies the rover
down and the rover is attached to the underside of that stage.

And the very final 10 feet or so above the surface,
that descent stage lowers the rover down on a series of tethers
to the surface and lands the rover on its wheels. And that
turns out to be the most economical and safest way to land this
particular vehicle on Mars.

BB: I understand there is a James Cameron
connection with the cameras on this rover?

Ashwin Vasavada: Yes, there is. He
became involved when he hooked up with the camera team that
proposed cameras for these rovers and there are 3D cameras that
were capable of video and that seemed to be very much along the
lines of his interest. So he became a co-investigator on the
camera team for this rover. He had previously worked with the
camera team which is in San Diego to develop not only 3D video
cameras, but also zoom-cameras so you could really be cinematic
with them. And unfortunately, the zoom capability didn’t make
it in time for us to go on this mission, but we still have the
3D video cameras.

BB:
Will this basically be silent films or will there be audio
gathering capability? Microphones?

Ashwin Vasavada: They will be
silent. Yeah, that’s something we haven’t done yet on Mars, is
actually listen to the sound of Mars. If we did listen, we’d
probably hear ourselves mostly, because we think Mars is a
pretty quiet place. [Laughter] So we’d
probably mostly hear the wheels driving along.

BB: So the idea is that the data
that’s needed most right now, and the data that there’s the
most of, is visual data.

Ashwin
Vasavada: Right. The visual data really gives
the public a sense of being there, which is one of the main
reasons we want to do the 3D and the video. But scientifically,
any imaging of the landscape is extremely valuable for
detecting things like whether water flowed across the surface
and basically, doing a geologic study of the landing site.

BB: How soon will we
here on Earth be able to see the footage that’s gathered?

Ashwin Vasavada: We hope
to take a few pictures the very day that we land on Mars, which
is pretty much customary for spacecraft. We land and then we
take a few pictures and then we spend a few hours making sure
everything else is working, but we take sort of an insurance
picture right after landing.

And then, in the next
few days, we’ll hopefully be able to send quite a few pictures
back. We’ll have a very good data link to Mars since we have
some orbiters existing at Mars that will be relaying all the
data for us.

BB: So the
rover is headed to Florida within the next couple of months.

Ashwin Vasavada: That’s
right.

BB: And then, is
there a sense of when it’s likely to go up?

Ashwin Vasavada: Yeah. We have a
fixed window which opens up on November 25th of this year and
last until December 18th. And so, for about two hours, every
day during that window, we have a chance to launch it to Mars
and we’ll launch at the first opportunity when everything seems
to be ready to go.

BB:
So you’re basically planning not to sleep during that month?

Ashwin Vasavada: Well
yeah. [Laughter] In fact, there’s a lot
of people who haven’t slept in the past few months already.

BB: I remember talking
to Steve Squyres about that, like his personal sleep schedule
during the earlier mission, adapting his circadian rhythms to
“Mars days” instead of “Earth days.”

Ashwin Vasavada: Yeah. I mean when
we land is when the scientists lose all the sleep because Mars
has a twenty-four and a half hour day and to make the most out
of the first few months on Mars, we actually start sleeping in
sync with Mars. And so, we go to bed a half hour later everyday
and that gets really fun after a month or two.

BB: Let’s talk about the design.
Who designs the Mars Rovers and what kind of background do you
have to have to get that totally awesome job?

Ashwin Vasavada: JPL is a
fantastic place to work exactly for that reason. We have some
of the world’s best engineers here who get to have the fun and
really the challenge of designing these incredibly complex, but
really cool vehicles. We have a lot of different kind of
engineers. We need all the flavors, electrical, software,
everything. And then, we have a few scientists like myself
around to help the engineers understand the constraints of
their designing, too, and what the eventual purpose of the
rover is.

So I get to basically advice all these
really amazing engineers as they’re building these things in
there. They’re very clever and interesting people.

BB: Do the designs build
off one another? So for instance, are these Mars Rovers sort of
technological descendants of earlier models, like generations
of iPhones, or iPads, or do you have to start more from scratch
with each new series because it’s doing different things than
its predecessor?

Ashwin Vasavada:
It’s a little of both. We definitely build on
proven technologies. So even the first rover from JPL, the
Sojourner Rover in 1997, which was just a little bigger than a
shoebox—that still had the six-wheel design and the
kind of Rocker-Bogie
suspension and we’ve used that same six-wheel
Rocker-Bogie suspension on the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers,
which are golf cart size and then MSL, which is a car size.

So that’s been something we’re not going to change,
but we do have to invent new things every once in a while like
a new landing system or this sampling system we have for MSL,
which is the first time we are doing that.

BB: And how difficult is
it to build advanced technology that can do all the jobs you
needed to do, but also be durable enough to survive in such an
unforgiving environment where you can’t just go fix it. What
are some of the factors that you have to take into account and
that make a robot built for Mars different from a robot you’ve
built for here on Earth?

Ashwin
Vasavada: That’s a great question. There are a
lot of different factors. You have to choose the materials that
you work with very carefully, things that won’t wear down in
the environment on Mars that can take the hundred degree
fluctuations in temperature that you see on the surface every
day. That’s can actually be a hundred degrees centigrade. On
Earth, you might see a few tens of degrees from day to night
and you still wouldn’t want to leave your laptop outside
overnight. We’re talking a couple hundred degrees of change
each day. On Mars with these vehicles, they’re just as complex
as that and they’re out in the environment all the time. Now
fortunately, it doesn’t rain, so we don’t have to worry about
water too much, but we have to worry a lot about temperature
and ultraviolet light and the fact that we have moving parts.
We have as few as possible, but we can’t avoid having things
like wheels and arms that move. We can’t lubricate them once we
launched them, so we have to design things where things will
work as we — after we finished them, they’ll last for three or
four years being used every single day.

BB: Could the rovers ever be built to fix
themselves?

Ashwin
Vasavada: We haven’t tried that. We saw that in
the Disney movie WALL-E, where he screwed
on a couple of new —

BB: How did you know that’s what
inspired my question!

Ashwin
Vasavada: I remember seeing that,the robot
screwed on a couple of new cameras when his eyes broke. Man, I
wish we could do that, but what we do instead is, on these NASA
spacecraft including MSL, we send redundant parts that we can
switch to. So there’s actually a good amount of electronics in
the rover that are basically a spare and we can switch to a
spare computer, we can switch to an entirely spare new circuits
and that gives us some flexibility if something breaks.

Other things like the robotic arm and the wheels
itself and that sort of thing, we only have one set. Now,
Spirit and Opportunity have each had one wheel fail and they
can just sort of limp along by dragging that wheel along. And
so, it doesn’t necessarily mean the mission is over if these
things break. But we basically do a mixture of trying to be
very careful about having redundant parts and very robust
software, and then just hoping nothing goes wrong.

BB: Are these parts made in a
factory, or sort of “made by hand” at JPL?

Ashwin Vasavada: At the
part level, we do make use of commercially available or at
least space-qualified parts when we can. If we were building
everything from scratch, it would be an enormously expensive
and horribly long process. But at the macro level, the rover
itself, it’s definitely a prototype kind of process. This is
the first and only of its kind and we invent a lot of things as
we go along and do a lot of testing and
experimentation.

It’s incredibly complex and there are
many different aspects of it in terms of the mechanical work,
then building the entire thermal system for the rover to work
correctly. And it’s all sort of a unique design. We build upon
past experience, but this rover is new in a lot of ways and
nothing else exists like it.

BB: Well, and then with that in
mind, so we talked a lot about the way technology that was
originally developed for NASA has worked its way down to the
commercial sector, Tang, there’s the archetypal example.

Ashwin Vasavada: Right,
yeah. [Laughs]

BB: Both of us can think of many,
many other examples. Now, how has that played out with the
different generations of Mars Rovers? What are some examples of
technologies or ideas that originated with this program, but
eventually became incorporated into commercial products, or
perhaps if that hasn’t happened, maybe you could venture a
guess as to what might come out of this.

Ashwin Vasavada: When I first
started working on these spacecraft, there definitely was a lot
more of that in the direction that NASA was inventing things
for this spacecraft, but then would go out into society. And
now, that society itself has become so driven by electronics
and computers and things, the flow works in both
directions.

So we benefit a lot from the fact that
other companies are spending a lot of resources making faster
computers and 3D imaging technology and things like that, and
so, there’s kind of a partnership. We invent things here that
go out and then we borrow a lot from other companies as well.

BB: Any final thoughts
for the space-loving audience at Boing Boing? Anything in
particular that you would make sure that people not miss about
this story?

Ashwin
Vasavada: I hope that people follow along as we
launch in November and land in August of 2012. I think what
will be really unique about this mission is the fact that we’ll
have these HD color video cameras on Mars and really for the
first time, we’ll be able to see Mars the same way that we see
things on Earth in HD, in color and moving a little
bit.

BB: This is the
first time ever that we’ll have that opportunity with a NASA
exploratory mission, right? This is it.

Ashwin Vasavada: That’s
right. And so, we really hope to bring as best as we can a
virtual presence to people on Earth to be exploring Mars with
us. That alone is really exciting, but then we have an
incredibly deep and rich science to deal with this rover as
well: ten instruments, some of which are as complex as
spacecraft themselves.

We think we’re just going to
have a really great, hopefully a decade long mission if we’re
lucky. We’re planning for two years, but we’re hoping for ten.

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[
Editor’s note: Special thanks to
space journalist Miles O’Brien
for guidance with this feature, and to Boing Boing science
editor Maggie Koerth-Baker. Photos in this post courtesy Joseph
Linaschke. ]