Marc kaufman, published by national geographic. Id like to ask to please turn off your cell phone, and please dont take any pictures during the presentation. Fyi, tomorrow in the New York Times in the science section, it will be all about mars and features will be an article by this evenings speaker, mr. Kaufman. Curiosity is a cartsized robot county rover that has been exploring gale crater on mars since landing there august 2012. Nasa launched curiosity in november 2011 from cape canaveral. It took a little over eight months to reach mars. The rovers goal is to investigate the martian climate and geology and determine whether the crater has ever been ever had environmental conditions favorable to life. This is quite an intriguing subject for those interested in the exploration of space and for Science Fiction readers, too. No matter what category you fall into this evenings lecture is sure to fascinate. Marc kaufman has an be a journalist for more than 35 years. He has worked as a science and space writer and jet for for the Washington Post for the past 12 years, and has spoken extensively on astro biology here in the u. S. And abroad. Mr. Kaufman is also the awe cor of a book published in 2011 title first contact. Scientific breakthroughs in the hunt for life beyond earth. Please give a very warm welcome. Were very pleased to have here tonight, dr. Marc kaufman. [applause] thank you all for coming. This is a terrific time to be talking about mars because it turns out that a lot of events are taking place right now. Theres a lot of change. And a lot of wonderful developments. So, lets get started. Head shot of our character of the night, mars. Approximately half the size of earth. One and a half times as far away from the sun as we are. And as i will describe, it is a place that is long lived in the imagination of people here, probably more than any other planet and for good reason. And right now we are just on the edge of learning remarkable things about the place. In fact we are learning remarkable things about the place that have to that kind of bring back into the future some of the things that have been discussed for centuries. But first a little bit. Mars has been very much in the news. This was the exciting spring comet that passed by mars a month and a half ago or so and almost hit the planet and it struck me as one of those really kind of key moments in terms of how things have changed because there are two rovers on the ground now, and five orbiting satellites, and so if it had hit mars, a lot of money would have gone down the drain. Were a spacefaring society, and things like that can really matter. Also, this is the capsule that some day will hopefully bring astronauts to mars. Just last week was lawned for the first time, called orion. Orbited twice and successfully landed. And this is many people are of the opinion that the American Space program is kind of sleeping or moribund. In fact that ill try to argue thats not the case at all. And just today, this is to some extent the subject of what ive written about for the times, but just today there was another report from curiosity, from the Curiosity Team, and what they said was truly remarkable. This late are in the talk ill explain it a little bit more but what this proves in terms of what they see and what as geologists and geochemists know how to interpret, this is a delta. This is end of a river that most likely was going into a lake and its right there in gale crater where they were, and we now have prove positive that way back when, 3. 5 to maybe 4 billion years ago, o or more, mars was very, very wet, and much warmer, and keep in mind the number 3. 8. Thats the around the era when life began on earth, and when earth was warm and kind of wet and i dont know. Mars wasnt too different. And this is kind of a rendering of what perhaps mars looked like back then, or just based on the information that they have now. Lakes, rain, snow, a water cycle. That the news that is happening now in terms of mars. And what i want to do is go back in history a bit and then talk about curiosity in terms of how it is that we have come to this really, really exciting point. Scapellny the 19th century looked at mars, maybe a little too much, and saw canals everywhere, and this became a major kind of cause celeb and a personal lull in the United States started the notion that mars was inhabited by intelligent people who were making canals and doing exciting things. And ironically they kind of intuitived something that turned out to be partially true but they were off on most things. But again, the canals. The martian chronicles. Virtually everybody on then team came in because of the book. Its the iconic tale, and again, here we have the canals, some water or whatever. So water is key to our understanding of mars. This is carl saggan with the viking rover or viking lander which there are two of 0 them that landed on mars in 1977. And at the time, saggan was iconic figure and continued to be for a while. The cosmos seriesas yet to come. He was one of the first astro biologists, people who thought that a search for life beyond earth was plausible and necessary and exciting. He took it pretty far. One of his jobs with viking was to look for visible life, and it was explain to me that he got irate when nasa did not put lights on so they could see these things at night. He was saying, when they come at night we wont see them in any case they didnt come because this is where they landed and this is what it was like. It was after all of that buildup of canals and water and life and sagan talking about all kinds of living things coming to eat at the trough of viking, this is what they found. It was really pretty barren. There were some tested that seemed to suggest there were living microbes about they were debunked and the view is that they really did not find anything and certainly the way of biology. Heres another picture, and you can see not very enticing. Not something that just screams out, hey, life used to be here or life is here now. And i think it would be fair to say that because the viking pictures and the stories it was able to tell was so kind of bleak. It was exciting in many ways, remarkable they landed, but what they reported back was kind of so depressing and so different than what people had anticipated, that there was very, very little Mars Exploration for the next 20 years. Just kind of fell off the agenda. Then gradually they nasa began sending orbiting satellites there and began sending back pictures and thingert started to things started to change. This is the delta, one of many features on mars that if it was on earth, people would say, hey, that used to be a river. It took a long time this image was probably taken in the mid90s and a lot of scienceties would say we dont know what it was. Could have been just ice or could have been Carbon Dioxide in some kind of frozen form but there was a reluctance to say there was not only Running Water but standing water and water that would have run for a long time. They already knew there had been some major breaks, dam breaks and water would flow when that happened, but those were catastrophic kind of things. This is the kind of thing you would find on earth, and one over the main reasons why they said it couldnt be just a delta like a river delta on earth, is because the understanding was that the mars atmosphere back then couldnt handle that. It was much too thin. And anything that was standing water would quickly either evaporate or sub limate and freeze. Some of the more daring scientist would say what were looking at is obviously a riverbed and then a lake and other things. What they also began to see after sending up some instruments that could read this kind of information, was minerals. There are classes, large classes of minerals that are formed only in water. No water, no clay. No water, no souffle sulfates, and yet now theyre able to, with new technology from the orbiting satellite able to determine that there was quite a bit of clay. There was sulfates. And a picture started to emerge of a place that now is very dry, very barren, and but maybe objects wasnt. This was taken by the highrise camera on the mars reconnaissance orbiter, and the colors are not true colors. What they do is they enhance them so you can see the features. Otherwise its just a brown undistinguished kind of scene. But if youre interested in this kind of thing, go to the highrise hirise site on the web, and you can find thousands of these magnificent images of a mars that is very different than what people would have imagined. In any case, there are there begins to be more activity, more interest. There were viking landed in 1977. The next lander was in 1997, and then there were the two small rovers that landed in i think in 2004 and they have one of them is still going. Kind of remarkable. But they knew they needed more. These were little tiny things. The first lander after viking was basically the size of a small electric toy car. The others were bigger but they didnt have much capacity. So, they dreamed of something much more sophisticated and came up with what we now know as curiosity. It was given the name curiosity. Its two tons as opposed to 25 pounds, and it has ten instruments and much, much more sophisticated. So, here we go. Because its much larger, you have a problem. How do you land it . The little ones, they lapped them in big balls, literally drop on to the martian surface, bump along for a while and then the ball would open and they would drive out but you cooperate do it with something that was more than two tons. So this gentleman, adam came up with the idea of the sky crane and he is part of this new generation of nasa and other engineers who are not what you would kind of think about old school engineers. He played for a long time in a rock band. He doesnt have his earrings on now but he usually does. Got an elvis kind pompadour. He came up with this idea they would come into the martian atmosphere, theyre going 13. 2 132,000 miles an hour. Im sorry. Thats how fast theyre going, and they have seven minutes to go to zero. Without crashing. And his job was to figure out how to do it. This sky crane is a very last stage of that, where basically there was a mechanism that would hover for awheel over the ground for a while over the ground and then slowly drop it down, the curiosity down to the surface. Never been done before. And part of an extremely Important Development because in order for humans to be some day dropped on to mars, they need something that can land maybe 30 tons, much more sophisticated than this. But theyre in the process of figuring it out. So, this is the first time this was the first time we had a camera at the bottom of the rover and its landing mechanism. There was a camera taking picture. This is he heat shield after the heat shield has been shot off and the camera started taking picture, and you can see it going down, going down, going down. This is the very enwhen its doing the sky crane. Engineers really happy. To be at jpl that night, which i had the good fortune to toe to do was one of the happiest days of my life that they put so much time and effort into and it carried really deeply about it. And so this was an enormous success. And heres our its interesting story about how they got into the habit of taking these selfies. Obviously it looks like someone is there taking the picture. Theres not. It has an arm and the arm goes out and theres a camera on it and it take picture ands and they photoshop the arm out. Theres our guy. Its cold, down to minus 200 degrees fahrenheit, and theres a lot of radiation that comes down, and all in all its a very harsh varmint so this has to be designed in order to be able to handle that, and so far its now two and a half years and has done a phenomenal job of doing that. This is gale crater, formed 3. 5 to 3point pt. 8 billion years ago when avalanche meteorite hit. It dig as big hole and then starts kick ago things out. Theres a lot of debate how this particular mountain in the middle hoff crater came to be put theres an unusual 3. 2mile high mound in the middle of the crater. They selected it because there were signs that there had been water. Some of those not a delta but sand going down. And also there was a lot of minerals that the minimum recalls formed only in water, and then you have this mountain. No rover or machine of my type has ever gone to another planet and had a mountain like this to look at. It has lots of different layers. It will gradually climb the layers but it is utterly unique, and is this actually why i got involved in the whole story, because this was something i hope people understand how you unique this was. It struck me has really signal moment in the history of space science, and in fact it has been. So, gale crater. Just to put it in at bit of context by the way, there have been seven successful landings on mars, and not being hopefully not being nationalistic or gyppingowistic here jingoist yipping here but nasa has opportunity them. There is old metal on the planet but if theres one thing that the United States does really, really well, that no one else does, its go to mars. It makes us exceptional. In any case, the blue is the northern lowlands. It is well talk about this more later but it is about a mile to two miles below the other green and then yellow and tan elevations, and this is a very key thing because there is some suggestion that is getting louder and louder, the suggestion more persuasive, that perhaps there was once a huge ocean up there, which would have enormous implications because of the potential for life. You can see where curiosity is. This is call the dichotomy where it cuts across, and about a third of mars is this very low area, and then twothirds is the highlands. And after curiosity lan lands, starts looking around, has 17 cameras, some really spectacular. This is what it sees and contrast if the with what viking saw, and you see why they got so excited. These are features that theyre very brown now but you can imagine maybe were once somewhat different, and also you can see the fine layering quite so well here but they are clear layers, and layers means that sedimentary rock as opposed to volcanic, basalt or whatever, and the sedimentary rock has to be brought there, be it water or wind or whatever. And then it becomes rock over time. But this is all sedimentary, and was just what the Curiosity Team described mount sharp was the Promised Land. Its taken a while to get there but theyre there now. One of the first things they found on landing by the way, they landed at a place they named after ray bradbury, the author of the martian chronicles because thats what brought all the people into their jobs. But this is a conglomerate. Kind of like a concrete and they found it wasnt within a month or so of landing, and conglomerate requires water. It doesnt it cannot come about, cant be formed without water and in this case a lot of water, and also there are lot of small pebbles in this, and the small pebbles, the scientists interpret as being something the size that only water could brick could bring down. So went two months of arriving they had ground through something that had been speculated on for decades, which was there was Running Water on mars. And there it was. They could find until the con glock rats and then other things as conglomerates conglomeratn found it in other things as well. This was kind of a more real life picture. And doesnt maybe come across too well here but that its mt. Sharp on the other side. That is a channel, a big canyon coming down mount sharp, and this is what was begin the anymore peace vallis, and then the stream and the sand that curiosity landed at the end of that and where i soughtsaw this conglomerate. This was like really makes sense in terms of the location and this is over on this side would be the rim of the crater. Just to back pedal for a second, mars, name after the roman god of war, always kind of had this sanguine, kind of bloody feel to it because its kind of red and everything thinks its the red planet. I keep saying its not the red planet. Its like a tiny, tiny blotch of red on top of what is a planet with rocks very similar to ours in fact the same rocks often times. And curiosity ran over some rocks and you can see inside. Kind of bluish gray. The red is just a blush on the top. And thats the case all over the planet. The red is iron oxide, which became an important component of certain things happened to the planet, and it creates alet of dust, but it seemed to define the planet but in fact it doesnt. After landing, they were supposed to go straight to the Promised Land to mount sharp, but they saw this feature right here. Unfortunately you cant see it too well right now but there are three different kinds of rock that come together. And one of them is kind of lower than the others. This is where they landed, and thats kind of the jet exhaust, and this is the track they took. Going the opposite way from mounter mount sharp. This was kind of a daring thing to do. Their mission was to go to sharp, but they were officially also a mission of discovery. They decided this was very, very promising, and so they headed in the other direction. Theyve gotten some criticism for that over the years, but as youll see it was very successful and i believe a wonderful thing to have done. This is where they ended up. This is an area called yellow knife bay, and you again remember those images that we saw from viking that was just volcanic, you know, rocks strewn around. This look like in fact was the bottom of a lake. Look at this. These are he kinds of things kind of mud this is actually mud stone as opposed to sandstone, and looks very much like what would happen when a lake or what the call a playa, a low kind of marsh, when it would dry up, and here you go. That what they found. Some then what then they drilled into it. But this never before on mars or any other planet has this kind of thing been found, and then researched. Just again to backtrack for a second, this is the arm of curiosity. Its seven feet long, has a number of cameras and collecting tools and a gatherer a way to take what is drilled and put it into the ovens inside curiosity. All that is on there. Seven feet out you can imagine its kind of like its heavy and not easy. Fortunately the gravity there is much less so you can do it. Its hard thing to do but has a drill. The first time theres been a drill on mars or another planet and this is what theyve done. At this point theyve done five major drills. Takes a lot of time. It has to be calculated just right, and then also they want to do it at the right angle because they could easily kind of break or damage this very important tool, and also they want to make sure that are dooring it in a place that deserves that it kind of attention. But the drill has worked extremely well, goes down, as well see, not very far, but t