Exploring Mars The Sky at Night

Hello!

And welcome to the UK Space Cluster here in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

Our robotic friend here is called Rimmer, and he's an intelligent robot

that's testing software that might one day run on the surface of Mars.

But of course, we've already got robots on the Red Planet.

The most recent and most powerful of them,

curiosity, is celebrating its first year on the Martian surface.

We'll be taking a look at the highlights from that first year,

but also finding out what it will take to get humans to

survive on the Red Planet.

Chris North will be meeting some of Rimmer's family, and Pete Lawrence

will be giving us tips about how to take part in the Moore Moon Marathon.

But first, we're off to Mars.

Mars. The Red Planet, and object of our fascination.

Since the 1960s, we've sent numerous spacecraft, landers,

and robots, all trying to tell us

more about a world which might once have been like Earth.

Long ago, billions of years,

we think there were seas on Mars, and even a thick atmosphere.

But Mars lost its magnetic field,

leaving it exposed to the corrosive power of the solar wind.

It seems that most of its atmosphere was stripped away

in the first billion years.

The oceans have long since disappeared,

leaving a seemingly dry and dusty world.

But is it dead?

Like detectives to a crime scene, we are sending missions to

Mars to find evidence that the conditions for life once existed.

Chris and I have come to the Catapult Centre at Harwell.

We're going to start our exploration of Mars by talking

about the European spacecraft Mars Express.

It celebrates 10 years of amazing stereo images which should

look great on the video wall.

Anu Olja, from the National Space Centre, joins us,

as well as Louisa Preston, a planetary geologist.

They use spacecraft images to tell us what Mars is like now

and investigate how these features may have formed.

The real joy of Mars Express is that over its 10 years,

we've seen pretty much all of the planet.

We get a global view of what's going on.

Now, this isn't a Mars Express image, this is from Viking,

but you can see Mars in all its glory.

The volcanoes here, and there's so much more here, isn't there, Anu?

Yeah, it's a gorgeous image.

We've got this enormous crack in Mars' crust.

This is Valles Marineris.

It's 4,000 kilometres long, and this really brings

home how on Mars, it's as if plate tectonics were struggling to

get started, but the internal heat engine that was driving

the system on Earth, the parallel on Mars never got enough energy

to really kick off the process.

And what's really nice is that Valles Marineris, of course,

anyone can see through a small telescope,

so it's really something to get out and have a look at.

But we've selected some images from Mars Express.

So, let's have a zoom-in now,

and look at some of the particular features on the surface.

This is impressive. Where are we, and what are we looking at?

A region called Candor Chasma.

And what I love about this image is that

although we've got this giant rift valley,

when we start to look closely here, we get images that we

think are associated with flowing water, billions of years ago.

The stuff that makes us really interested is what you

see on the edges of these valleys, all these gullies.

So, on Earth, we get gullies because of flowing water.

So, these might have been carved by past water activity, which is

obviously very interesting for us.

So, how old is this landscape?

When did Valles Marineris form,

and when would there have been water flowing down its sides?

This would have been very early in Mars' history.

This would have been 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

So, this is an ancient Martian landscape.

However, some of the gullies have been identified as being much

-more recent in origin, am I right, Louisa?

-Yes!

We've done time-lapse images over a period of a year and you

can see deposits, light-tone deposits,

that are potentially related to water, that come and go

with the season, so there might still be activity in the

water sense, underneath the surface that's coming out in these gullies.

So, where are we now?

This is a crater called Holden Crater and geologically,

-this is an absolute treasure trove of geological discovery.

-Yes.

No, absolutely. I mean, you can see impact craters.

Now, this whole area as one giant impact crater,

but you've got smaller impact craters inside the larger one,

so it can help you to date it.

You know that the craters inside the large one are obviously younger.

So, you know that area is younger, which is really interesting.

And we have evidence of potential river systems.

We assume that they could be carved by water simply because

they look like things we see on Earth,

and that's our point of reference.

How well does that intuition hold up when you go to Mars?

It holds up really well.

Actually, Mars can tell us a lot about the Earth as well.

The problem is, when we see river channels on Earth,

we've trees in the way, plants, buildings,

we've got so many things actually in the way.

So, we only get a general idea of what river channels are doing.

You study Mars, you recognise them, and you learn an awful lot more.

So, this is the geologists' favourite planet,

there is no biology, there's no...

No, absolutely, this is a geologist's playground, it's brilliant.

If we go to the next image, then you'll see a close-up of, well,

look at that!

That must be an ancient... It looks like the riverbed to me.

It looks like I'm about to get my feet wet.

Is that's what I'm looking at?

Yes, you're basically looking at an extremely large river channel

and you can see all the different evidence of different flood

episodes, different river episodes,

you can see circular patterns that might be evidence of ghost craters

that were once there and there have been covered with sediments since.

Next image, where are we going next? Oh, yes! Now, this one.

Now, this is about the same scale, isn't it?

This is what I like to think of as effectively one of the largest

skating rinks in the solar system.

It's a crater about 35 kilometres across in the Martian High Arctic.

We've got water-ice as, effectively, a lake here,

and then on the edges here, it's probably water-frost,

or it's water-ice, that's been left there.

And of course, this is why Mars fascinates us so much.

We've all of these features that we've seen geologically that suggest

that billions of years ago, we had running water on Mars's surface,

which couldn't happen now, the air pressure's too low.

So, we need to try to understand,

A - what happened to Mars' atmosphere to change it

from this much more Earth-like world in the past?

And, B - if it lost its atmosphere,

what happened to the water content,

which is one of the other key foci of Mars Express?

And of course, Mars Express has found a lot of

frozen water on the planet and I was reading that

if the water was now to melt in all the craters, it would form

an ocean that was about 11 metres deep, which I think is a lovely way

of visualising the potential of Mars if it only had the atmosphere again.

As incredible as spacecraft images are,

nothing beats getting on the surface.

Robots have been scratching and sniffing Mars since 1976, looking

for evidence of water and organics, the building blocks of life.

Curiosity is NASA's latest mission, which landed a year ago.

It's the size of a small car with a plutonium power pack

and a whole suite of amazing instruments.

Its arrival at Mars was incredible and described as

"seven minutes of terror" with a landing platform,

jet thrusters, and a sky crane.

The relief and jubilation

when it touched down and opened its stereoscopic eyes was immense.

-MISSION CONTROL:

-'Touchdown confirmed.'

This is the panorama of the landing site.

You can see Mount Sharp far off in the distance,

and also the scars left on the surface

from where Curiosity came down.

Now, since landing, the rover hasn't travelled very far,

one kilometre across the surface, in fact.

But even so, the rover has been incredibly busy.

It has. The reason it's taken so long to get going is

because it had to test out all of the instruments that it has on board.

One of the first to get a workout was its famous laser,

situated atop the mast and used for vaporising rocks.

It worked brilliantly,

and the team have been happily zapping things on Mars ever since.

There's also been a workout for the two metre-long robotic arm.

It's been stretched and flexed

and the movements have been checked and tested.

But in February, Curiosity tested what is probably its most

exciting tool, the drill that sits on the end of the robotic arm.

The drill allows us to get beneath the surface, taking samples from

the insides of rocks for the first time on a planet other than Earth.

Ultimately, Curiosity has its sights set on the foothills

of Mount Sharp, eight kilometres away.

But en route, it's been going through some incredibly

interesting science.

John Bridges, from Leicester University, works on CheMin,

the instrument which analyses rocks and soil, telling us what

they're made of and in particular,

if the conditions for life are there.

Curiosity is sending back stunning panoramas.

John and Louisa join us

to analyse the latest stage of this incredible journey.

Well, this is the marvellous view from inside Gale Crater,

from Curiosity's recent image.

You can see all sorts of things in this landscape.

So, John, give us a brief tour.

Well, we're looking down there into Yellowknife Bay.

We've been driving down from our landing site over there.

Down here, and then we went down the slope,

down the river bed, if you like, into Yellowknife Bay.

Why are we actually here, Louisa?

Why is this the region for Curiosity to study?

So, impact craters in general are fantastic sites.

They allow us to look back into the history of a planet,

due to the sheer act of an impact crater being formed.

-Cos they pulled stuff up from underneath?

-Yep, and they eject it everywhere.

It's also good because from orbit,

we had a look and could see evidence of clay minerals,

and different types of minerals that would need water to form.

And also these minerals are very good at preserving

evidence of organic markers.

And so, we get to study this area to try

and find evidence of habitability.

And you can even see evidence in that image of some of the first scoops that got tested.

Let's move on to look at some of the more detailed pictures

that we're getting coming back.

We landed in a place that we call Peace Vallis, which is

an ancient riverbed.

Got right up close with our robotic arm and the mast-cam,

and of course, the characteristics of an ancient riverbed on Earth.

We found lots of little rounded clasps.

Is that what I'm looking at in the outcrop, but also underneath?

-The rounded pebbles.

-Yes. Some of them have fallen down.

-And we think they were carried along by water?

-Yes.

And they get rounded by being in this water.

They move around with each other, hit each other,

and they get abraded, that's how they become round.

-Which is why you find round pebbles on the beach.

-Absolutely.

Exactly the same.

So, that's an indicator that water was definitely involved in this.

And so, I think I'm right in saying,

that Curiosity then wandered off down this riverbed

and I think the next image will take us a little further along. Oh, wow!

-Best image!

-Look at that!

-This is spectacular.

So, this is Yellowknife Bay, if I've got my bearings right.

This is the site for some of

Curiosity's most involved investigations.

Lo and behold, we have found clay.

In the two drill sites that we have, we found clay in both places.

Clay is the thing that gets people really excited. So, why is that?

Well, clay must form in the presence of water, so, if we want

to determine if this was a habitable environment, that's a key indicator.

We really need to study the composition of the clays.

They can preserve evidence of organic molecules,

biosignatures, even life, potentially.

So, by studying the clays, you might be able to find these elusive

organic compounds that we've been looking for.

-OK, let's move on to the next image.

-Ahh!

So, this is what you are referring to, the clays that you see

just under the surface. It's amazing.

For so long, we've been thinking of Mars as the Red Planet,

but just under the surface, it's not as oxidised.

Yeah. Basically, you just go down centimetres,

and Mars is very different.

What I think is absolutely wonderful is that it's our first drill hole.

The first drill hole that we do on another planetary body,

we actually find our science goal,

finding a habitable environment, so, it's relatively easy.

It's about the instruments. That's the key thing.

It's almost like a preliminary mission.

This mission's going to tell us where to go and what exists, then

we can send a mission on afterwards to properly look for life.

Curiosity will spend the coming months getting to Mount Sharp,

where there are layers of rock,

each containing a chapter of Mars' ancient past.

Who knows what it will tell us?

Manned exploration of Mars is still the Holy Grail though.

When will WE be the ones to scratch and sniff the surface?

Since we landed on the moon, Mars has been our next destination.

Ideas for how to get to Mars

and live there seem to never get off the drawing board.

Mars seems always just around the corner.

Just how close are we to sending humans?

It's doable, but it's pushing our technology to the limits.

There are three main challenges for a human mission.

Number one, the duration.

Two years, approximately, away from home, there and back.

Secondly, surviving the radiation levels that you'll get.

It's survivable, but it's going to pose major challenges.

And finally, there's the business of landing on Mars in one piece.

Because, of course, it's got enough of an atmosphere that you can't

use an approach like we did with Apollo,

but the atmosphere is so tenuous, you can't just rely on parachutes.

So, technologically, it's feasible,

but it is pushing the envelope right out to its limits.

My fear is that I won't see it, but I'm going to be an optimist.

-2030s, international mission.

-Louisa?

I can't necessarily say in my opinion

when humans will get to Mars. We've already sent robots.

I think the preparations for humans on Mars could happen

any time now. We can start sending the robots to start gardens on Mars.

We can start sending the cargo ships to set up habitats.

So, hopefully,

we'll be seeing that in the next couple of decades, for sure.

Mars fires the imagination.

It's human nature to endeavour towards the next era of exploration.

To get there requires investment, risk,

and cooperation, which we are not yet ready for.

For the moment, we shall have to use rovers

as our avatars on alien worlds.

Chris North is hunting down the next generation of Martian invaders.

I've come to find a little piece of Mars, and to meet Bridget.

Bridget is Europe's prototype for the mission called ExoMars.

She's come to test her wheels in the Mars Yard.

Bridget is getting a little elderly.

Superseded by younger models Bruno and Bradley,

but she's still got a bit of get up and go.

Today, she's being kitted out with a new instrument, and later in

the year, she's off for some field expeditions in the Chilean desert.

ExoMars will have a two metre drill to probe deep underground

where life might still exist.

Abigail Hutty is part of the team putting Bridget through her paces.

Yes, we're looking for any kind of organic molecules.

We'd love to find microbes or bacteria or something there, but any

kind of indicator of past or present life would be fantastic to find.

As well as the drill, what other stuff is it going to have on board?

So, obviously, we've got lots of different visual systems

so we can actually, pictorially, classify the Martian environment.

We've also got loads of spectrometers on board

so that we can analyse our sample to see what kind of chemical composition

there is of the rocks and any sands or anything else that we pick up.

We've got the ground-penetrating radar,

so that can look for icy deposits beneath the surface,

or different types of rocks, and their densities beneath the surface.

How fast do you think ExoMars is going to be able to travel?

Well, really the thing that prevents us

from going top speed is our autonomous navigation.

So, we've actually got to be able to process the visual

scene in front of us, make that into a map, classify things

as a dangerous area or a safe area and then plan the course through.

That's why we can't travel any faster than the speed that we're going to.

Aron Kisdi is designing intelligent robots who can

decide where to go and what to look at for themselves.

He envisages mother robots

with little scouts who scurry around and report back.

So, looking at the far future, we really need to send missions

up there which utilise multiple rovers.

Now, in my opinion, I think we want these rovers to collaborate

and work together to achieve the mission.

So, you could have one large rover like this one

and then smaller explorers, spreading out from it, looking

at the terrain ahead, making sure that the big rover has safe passage.

And this way, we can move much faster and move safer

and in case some of them fail or get damaged on the way,

or get stuck, then they should be able to help each other out,

to still achieve the goal. And that way,

you get a much more robust mission than just with a single rover.

What kind of things do you think you'll be able to ask them

to do on their own? I mean, apart from just drive around.

Mars is huge. You have the same landmass as on Earth.

So, we really need rovers to grow faster

and explore more of the surface.

Something I'm very interested in is cave entrances.

We know that there are some cave entrances on Mars.

We have seen them from orbit, but we have never seen a close-up image.

If we can design rovers which can move quicker by themselves,

they can get to these entrances easier or potentially

discover more, smaller ones,

and once we have a close-up of them, we can design a mission

to send a rover inside one of these caves and see what's

hiding beneath the surface of Mars.

-Wow. So, not just driving on Mars, caving on Mars.

-Ha-ha! Absolutely.

Until recently, no-one could have believed that robots would

make such great strides on Mars.

But it will be some time before Man is able to scrutinise

the Martian soil for himself.

In the meantime, we shall have to watch our robot envoys with

envious eyes from across the gulf of space.

But there is one world mankind has been to - the moon.

Last month, we launched our Moore Moon Marathon,

and I've certainly enjoyed

keeping an eye on what the moon has been up to over the last few weeks.

But don't worry, you've got the rest of the summer to enter.

Pete Lawrence and Jon Culshaw have been down to Chipping Norton

to see how the people there have been getting along.

On this balmy summer's evening, Pete and I have joined some

astronomers from the Chipping Norton Amateur Astronomical Group.

They meet in the place called the Rollrights, which is

a collection of impressive Neolithic and Bronze Age stones.

Atmospheric and oozing with history.

One of the things I hope we're going to have a go at tonight is the

Moore Moon Marathon. I've spotted the moon.

It's just above the trees over there.

So, you can see the moon in daylight.

It's not particularly prominent, because the sky is very bright.

With great perspicacity,

you spotted the moon just a few moments ago between those clouds.

As the evening goes on, the sky will get darker,

the moon will be a lot more obvious, and it'll sort of roll across

the horizon and set over there, so, we should get a really good view.

CHATTING AND LAUGHTER

Well, the sky darkening and the moon becoming more vivid every moment,

and the cloud clearing as well, so here is your documentation.

Let me give you this,

so you can log down your findings in the Moore Moon Marathon.

It's like giving out the hymn sheets, it's rather nice, isn't it?

With these, you can map the moon on your own terms.

The naked eye, lunar seas first, and you can tick them off there, you can

upgrade to the binocular objects, the bright and dark craters,

quite a few of those will be visible.

Ah, we have a fellow Time Lord in our midst!

This shouldn't happen, only in the gravest of emergencies.

-It is the Moore Moon Marathon. Here is the documentation.

-Thank you.

Some of these here, lunar specials, I don't know whether you can see

the face of the Old Lady in the moon, or the basketball player.

Mark them down on your very own chart, that Pete Lawrence made

-so brilliantly.

-Lovely. Thank you very much.

Excellent. Well done, my dears. Well done.

Oh, sorry.

THEY LAUGH

We've just had the most beautiful sunset and the moon now very

vivid, very sharp-looking, perfect time to get started

on making the observations, so, where would be a good place to begin?

We've got five different sections with the Moore Moon Marathon.

They're sort of designed to get a bit harder as you go through them.

But there's another factor you have to take on board

and that's the phase of the moon.

Some of the bits and pieces can only be seen when the moon is either

full or beyond the full phase, which is a bit sneaky, isn't it?

It's always good to have those you've got to work for.

You've got to work for a few of them.

But the lunar seas, there's plenty of lunar seas

which are visible at the moment up there, and I think it would

be nice to go along and see how many people can pick those out

with their eyes, because that's a bit of a challenge on its own.

And what else can we look for?

We've got the bright and dark craters.

There are quite a number of those visible at the moment.

Tycho, that beautiful ray crater in the southern part of the moon,

doesn't look like much of a ray crater at the moment,

because you can't see those rays, can you?

That was so surprising. When it's full, you see all of the streams,

-it's not in shadow so much.

-That's right.

But it is still quite prominent, isn't it?

You can pick it out quite well.

But also, because you can see half of the moon at the moment,

there's the Lady In the moon.

I can actually see the Lady if I look with the naked eye.

You can see her there, you can see her hair up there, her profile.

She's very grandmotherly, rather Victorian, isn't she?

Yeah, I think so.

Or, more chillingly, I don't know whether you've spotted this...

You've just ruined the Lady In the moon!

You've turned her into the Cyber-Lady In the moon!

From the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who, she's a Cyberman.

That's actually very, very scary,

because that's quite close to what it looks like.

That's ruined it for me, completely.

I'm sorry, Pete. Sorry.

Let's see how everyone is progressing with the Moore Moon Marathon.

So, Rose, you've just had your first successful spot.

-What was it that you saw?

-We've just seen Copernicus.

Oh, yes, it's looking very, very bright today.

It's a perfect night for it. So, you've ticked that off.

So, what are you going to look for next?

Well, Mummy said that we should maybe look for Plato next.

So, you've done all the seas, and now you're onto this bit.

So, well done, you. You'll have it done before the night's out!

And there's another challenge afoot tonight.

The best shot of the moon through a mobile phone.

I might have a go at this one myself.

Wow. That is a wonderful shot there.

We're turning the phone on.

And we're really just balancing it over the top of the eyepiece

and already getting a lovely view.

Let's fill in the screen of the phone.

And just tap it to focus and very steadily, you just nab it, like that.

And that's what you end up with.

And that's with a camera phone.

It's just a case of getting the right kind of wide-angle eyepiece

that just syncs with the camera. Some will, some don't.

So, just try the one that works the best.

That one there is my favourite, and it gets you things like that.

There it is.

Time for the judging. Everyone's had a go.

Lulu and Jess.

I did take this one a couple of months ago.

SCOFFING LAUGHTER

-I can see the Lunar Lander!

-I can see something.

-And the next one is Andy.

-Right, here we go. There's mine.

-That's the Earth, Andy. Nice try.

-Standing in the wrong place again.

That's, that's lovely! OK, last but not least, Jon Culshaw.

Now, we want an unbiased opinion.

That's terrible!

I'm joking.

-That is pretty excellent.

-Exposure-wise, lovely.

All the wave highlights, all the way across to the terminator.

I'm... Not going to give you any more tips.

Because that's pretty good.

But, there can only be one winner.

After arduous adjudication, over to Jon.

Well, thank you. I'm very honoured to be presenting the prizes,

because it means that I haven't won.

LAUGHTER

JON IMPERSONATES SIR PATRICK MOORE:

And so the finest of the crop of some very,

very superb astral photographs indeed...

Alex!

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

'Well done, Alex. That's a great capture.

'If you've used your phone to capture the moon,

'why not put it on our Flickr site? At...'

August means one thing for Pete. The Perseid Meteor Shower.

This year,

the peak of the Perseids is actually on the evening of 12 August.

Ideally observed from midnight

through to dawn. That's when it gets

really high up in the sky.

That's when you get the maximum number of meteors that you're likely to see.

Well, it's been a quite superb night here.

Lovely skies and a great bunch of people.

And we have until the end of September to take

part in the Moore Moon Marathon.

Let's hope those balmy, clear nights continue.

Now, it's time for this month's Space Surgery,

so we've been joined by Chris North.

Well, yes, inspired by the Moore Moon Marathon, no doubt,

we've had people writing in with questions about the moon.

Our first one comes from Ben, aged 10, who asked,

Why doesn't the moon come out sometimes?

Ben, it's a good question.

the moon goes round an orbit once a month, so it moves through the sky.

Sometimes it's closer to the Sun and rises during the day,

and then it's quite hard to see.

Other times of the month, it's much further

away from the Sun in the sky and we see it in the middle of the night.

So, depending on what phase of its orbit it's in,

depends on what time you can see it.

Lucie, of course, last month we were at Stonehenge and we

mentioned those station stones which mark out possibly the most

northerly and southerly positions of moonrise and moonset.

Steve Charlton asks, since the moon is steadily moving away

from the Earth and increasing the time it takes to orbit,

how much closer would it have been

when the station stones were erected 5,000 years ago?

Well, the moon is moving away from us, but it's doing that very,

very slowly, at about the same rate as your nail grows.

So, that means that back when Stonehenge was built,

the moon would have been closer to us by about 200 metres.

And with that change in distance,

you wouldn't notice anything in the orbit of the moon around the Earth

and where it's rising and setting on the horizon.

And, Chris, possibly and a nice, simple one for you.

So, Steve Brown from Stokesley in North Yorkshire says,

Typically, how many people are in space at any given time?

Well, right now there are about six people, in fact, there

are exactly six people in the space station, and that's fairly typical.

We had nine a few weeks ago when the Chinese had three

up there as well. But typically, we've got a space station crew

and if you want to cheat, I tend to use a website called

howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com,

which gives you a nice big number and a list of people orbiting the Earth.

A good question, thanks very much.

If you have any questions for our Space Surgery from this programme

or in fact any area of astronomy, then contact us via the website...

And don't forget,

there's plenty of time to take part in our Moore Moon Marathon as well.

And with a gas cloud the size of the Earth on a doomed course

towards the centre of the galaxy,

next month we're talking about black holes with the Astronomer Royal.

So until then... ALL: Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd