Matthew Buffington (Host): What’s up, everybody? You are watching the third episode of NASA in Silicon Valley Live, a conversational show on Twitch TV with the various scientists, researchers, engineers and overall cool people throughout NASA but especially here at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. This is a special “Let’s Play Space Video Games” episode. Obviously on Twitch you’re all familiar with folks playing video games and talking about them, so we figured let’s get some NASA experts on this Twitch show to basically talk about the science and engineering that is related to these video games in space. So, keep in mind, these are NASA experts, but we are not professional gamers. This is not a speed run, this is not a walk through, we don’t care about K/D ratios or even being particularly good at playing any of these games. This is basically an excuse that we’re looking forward to, so we can play these space video games and talk about NASA science and NASA engineering. But as a special treat, we’re also simultaneously live on NASA TV. So, if anybody out there who is watching NASA TV wasn’t aware, if you want to ask our guests any questions you can hop on over to Twitch.TV/NASA and join the chat. I’m your host, Matthew Buffington, and my cohost, Abby Tabor, will be taking those questions from the chat throughout the episode.

Abby Tabor: Exactly. Like Matt said, we’re especially looking for science and engineering questions because we have for you here today Chad Frost, Deputy Director of Engineering here at Ames, and Mary Beth Wilhelm and in the back, if we can get the SkyCam, aerospace engineer Thomas Lambot.

Matt: Wave, Thomas, you can’t just sit there. And Dave and Bill, got to give them a shout out.

Abby: Our guests are going to take turns playing games and we’re going to ask them questions about what they’re seeing.

Matt: One last heads up, if you can’t catch us live, you can find us on demand on Twitch and also on audio podcast services throughout the solar system and beyond. But before we introduce the first game, we’re going to start off with a good old disclaimer. So, the disclaimer graphic, here we go. As a U.S. government agency, NASA will not promote or endorse or appear to promote or endorse a commercial product, service or activity. Playing these games is not an endorsement by NASA or the U.S. Federal Government. No game developer or publisher requested, nor did we or will we request to play any specific game. The games selected were purely to facilitate a conversation on space exploration, science, technology, and engineering.

So, everybody got that?

Abby: Got it.

Matt: We’re all good. With that said let’s go a bit old school and let’s play Space Wars and Lunar Lander.

Chad Frost: First off, it’s “”Space War!”, with an exclamation mark. So, we get really used to seeing all the modern three-dimensional graphics on PlayStation or your computer and it’s easy to forget where this all started and, of course, before NASA flies anything in air or in space we simulate the heck out of it so we know what it’s going to do. Somebody has to write the simulation and for things flying in space what’s maybe the most important thing that you have to simulate or take into consideration?

Matt: Gravity.

Chad: Gravity, right? So, this is the theme for today is gravity. OK, so I want to show you what “Space War!” looks like. “Space War!” was literally the first video game. Before “Space War!”

We’re talking 1960, and this was a game that was written to run on the digital equipment corporation PDP1. This is the first computer to have a graphical display. So, before this it was all, you know, typewriters, electric typewriters is how you interacted with the computer.

Matt: Do we want to show them the image real quick? Before we jump into it and playing it.

Chad: This is what it looked like. These two guys are playing “Space War!”, and they have joystick boxes. Joystick boxes and control boxes, that didn’t exist before this either. So, this was hugely ground breaking. And you will notice that this display, it’s pretty big for the era. It’s like a 19-inch diameter display. It’s a big display for the day and really high-resolution and it turns out these were radar scopes. They didn’t have a big computer display because no computers had displays. They used what they had and it was basically a radar tube. That’s how it all started is on the deck PDP1.

Matt: We kept going back and forth. While we were practising and trying to figure out who was going to play it, are you guys going to jump in?

Chad: We’re going to play. This is a simulation of two spaceships flying around a star. So, there’s gravity. The star is trying to drag the spaceships into the middle and on our little spaceships we have thrusters so we can try to overcome gravity. You will see it’s kind of dragging us into orbit and we can try and shoot each other.

Mary Beth Wilhelm: You’re going down, Chad.

Chad: Not if I get you first!

Matt: We’ve learned that Chad is pretty killer on some of those old school games.

Mary Beth: A fast learner.

Chad: We have hyper space so if it looks like we’re about to die we can warp out of there. She got me again.

Mary Beth: Pay back.

Abby: How much do you have to fight the gravity?

Chad: Quite a bit. If you sit there it will drag you into the middle and eat your ship. You have to thrust to get around the gravity well and then maneuver and try and shoot.

Matt: Oh so you’re literally doing a gravity assist.

Chad: Exactly. Like if we’re doing a flyby mission, doing a planetary space mission and doing a flyby where we try to use the gravity of a planet to accelerate the spacecraft, it’s the same thing.

Matt: This is such an old school simulation but even here at NASA Ames we have super computers that are doing this but to the thousandth degree.

Chad: Just like this but only a lot faster.

Abby: Just like this.

Chad: So, this, back in the day, a game like this took all the resources of that computer. The code was loaded in on a punched paper tape. The max memory on the PDP1 was like 4K of metal core memory. Memory was hugely expensive. But it allowed them to simulate, you know, what is basically a space mission in its most elemental form.

Matt: You’re getting some advice from SigC, lead your shots.

Chad: It’s totally addictive. You do have to lead the shots. These are torpedoes, not lasers and the gravity of the sun-got you, drags the shots into the middle.

Abby: Really, even your bullets?

Chad: You’ve got to lead it but you have to think about where the gravity is taking them.

Matt: Things that you’re sending, gravity is always at play. Not only when you’re orbiting and get someplace but when you’re trying to land so that might be a good segue on over to good old Lunar Lander.

Chad: So we’re going to switch it over.

Abby: While you do that I have a couple of comments to share. That’s pretty cool. “I’m glad they’re doing something different like this.” And also “Where can I play this?”

Chad: Both of these actually happen to be running off of my web browser. So, you can find them online.

Matt: Using the Internet search tool of your choice.

Chad: If you Google for deck PDP1 “Space War!” you should be able to find it. So, onto our next example here is Moon Lander, or Lunar Lander. This is another pretty old game. People have seen this in its Atari console, Atari2600 or before that it was an Atari arcade game but it actually goes back further than that. This was, again, written on a digital equipment computer, the PDP11. The PDP11 was the first hacker computer because it was extensible and people could get on it and do crazy stuff like games. So, this was originally called Moon Lander and it pretty much got picked up by Atari very much as it originally existed.

Matt: In one of our first episodes that we did of NASA Silicon Valley Live, we had Jim Green and Greg Schmidt, they were talking about landing on the moon. Mary Beth, as we were talking before hand, this is Lunar Lander, if you change the color it could be Mars Lander. Mary Beth is our residential Mars expert.

Mary Beth: Or Martian.

Matt: Nice. Let’s jump into this. What goes into this and what’s the engineering that has to happen to land on the moon?

Chad: This is our gravity theme. Landing on the moon, we don’t have an atmosphere to worry about unlike Mars or Earth but we still have gravity. The moon only has one sixth of the Earth’s gravity so it’s not as strong but as you will see, trying to land on the surface you constantly have to work against this tug of gravity and it means you constantly have to compensate for it as you try and land your ship. You will see up in the top left corner.

Matt: Are you going to give it a go, Mary Beth?

Mary Beth: I can try.

Chad: In the top left corner there is a fuel counter, so you start with a finite amount of fuel. There we go. And so, you’ve got a finite amount of fuel that reduces as you use the thruster and you’re changing the velocity of the spacecraft. The only thing you have to work with is the attitude, the orientation of the ship and how much thrust you’re putting out, which is very realistic. This is just how the actual lunar landers work. The only difference here is we’re working in two dimensions instead of three. You will notice in the upper right-hand corner we have information about the horizontal and vertical speed and those both need to be zero when you touch down or you’re going to make a big hole in the ground.

Abby: I like how we zoomed in there. What year was this game released?

Chad: On the PDP11 this was around the late ’60s, ’67 maybe. And it started coming out on the Atari probably in the mid-1970s.

Matt: This is amazing. She is absolutely killing it. This isn’t the first time you’ve tried it, is it?

Mary Beth: This is the second. I heard this was a lot harder than it is.

Chad: You’ve got fuel left so you can keep going.

Mary Beth: Topography is an interesting question too. Because when it comes to landing on any planetary surface you have moons and craters and mountains in the way. From Mars, there’s a lot of conversation into what is a safe place to land. When we landed on the moon, it’s smooth, it’s the dark patches on the moon when you look at it in the night sky. If you search on the Internet pictures of the North Pole of the moon or the south pole of the moon, or you look at the far side of the moon, it looks very different. It’s heavily cratered and –

Chad: Kind of like this.

Mary Beth: Exactly. It looks very foreign. Like if you didn’t know what you were looking at, at least for me, I don’t think I would guess immediately it was the moon.

Matt: I’m impressed you can talk about your work and play this game at the same time. I could not do that. So how are you on questions?

Abby: I have a couple of comments. Chad, your Lunar Lander is a hit. They want the link to download this fantastic game.

Chad: Matt, do we have any way to send out links later?

Matt: For people in the chat who are asking questions, as much as the guests can hang out after the show is over around 3:00 Pacific time, they can stay and answer questions.

Abby: Then, Chad, how many Delta V do we need to leave Earth and can you tell me what we mean by Delta V?

Chad: Delta V is basically the speed that you need to conduct a maneuver and whether we’re maneuvering from here to the moon or out into deep space or even doing little maneuvers around something else, you know, engineers put that in the terms of Delta V. It’s the change in velocity, usually expressed in meters per second. So, leaving Earth, we usually talk about it as escape velocity.

Abby: I’ve heard of that, yeah.

Thomas Lambot: Something to note about the Delta V is that it’s not the exact change of velocity. Like you start with that velocity, you end up with that velocity. As you can see on Lunar Lander, you need to thrust in some different directions and every time you do that you’re moving the velocity in some other directions. So, the Delta V total you need are maneuvers where you fire in directions to get somewhere. Delta V.

Chad: So, for example, you don’t just need to leave the Earth, you have to get into typically Earth orbit and then you have to leave Earth orbit and if we’re going to the moon now you have to do a braking maneuver to get into orbit around the moon. You may need to change that orbit. Each one of those maneuvers takes some additional amount of Delta V which translates into how much propellant do you need, how efficient is your rocket, all these details.

Mary Beth: I have a question. During the Apollo era, do you know off hand like how much margin they left for their fuel?

Chad: Yeah, it depends on which mission, right? So, the first one, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are coming in and they didn’t like what they saw when they were about to touch down and they went long. They made the decision on the fly to not touch down where they had originally planned and to eat into their fuel margin to try and find a better spot, with no guarantee that they would. And they pretty much used it all up. They didn’t have hardly any left by the time they actually touched down.

Mary Beth: Just enough to get back?

Chad: It’s actually a separate system but you wouldn’t want to run out before having touched down.

Matt: If you’re just joining us, you’re watching NASA in Silicon Valley Live, a new conversational show that we’re trying out on Twitch.TV/NASA. This is “Let’s Play Space Video Games”, and we’re going to switch things up. Mary Beth is going to switch place with Thomas, she’s going to go to the SkyCam. Thomas is coming up. Mary Beth is coming back towards the end. We’re all going to get ready for, “Let’s Play Kerbal Space Program.”

Abby: That’s good news for Poppa and Zukus who are asking if we can talk about the physics. Let’s do that.

Matt: I know Twitch has several highly skilled Kerbal streamers. In full disclosure, I’m a complete noob to Kerbal. I’ve been playing this for maybe a week now and my friend EJ and Scott Manly are extremely good. EJ has offered a lot of advice to get good. I haven’t been able the take him up on that yet. This, what we’re going to pull up here, is the console version of Kerbal Space Program. If we’d had the PC version I’d have Thomas do this because he’s played around with it. But we’re going to at least run a sub-orbital flight and we’re going to try to get in orbit if we can, depending on how much time we have. We can hop on over, guys. So, Thomas, tell us about Kerbal, what exactly is this for folks who don’t know?

Thomas: This is kind of a simulation of what the Earth will be and you have your little space assembly, the VAB over there and you can create your own rockets.

Matt: We’re going to jump into the VAB. As we jump in over here I’m going to load up one of my saves. Keep in mind, I just started on the career mode so I don’t really have anything unlocked. I’m going to open this craft.

Thomas: It’s OK, man.

Chad: Which one of those little guys is you, Matt?

Matt: I’m in there somewhere. So, what are we looking at?

Thomas: So, it looks like we have…

Thomas: Can you zoom out slightly? So, we have a rocket liquid engine with some multiple fuel tanks. There are different types of rockets. You can use some liquid engine, a fuel oxidizer, you put that together, a high pressure in a chamber, you get a high-pressure gas that you expel through the back to create some reaction force to push a rocket. You can also do that with solid fuel which is kind of the two mixed. It’s a big firecracker. You light it, it just goes, you cannot stop it. There are pros and cons for using both. It looks like you’ve put at the top a capsule with some ‘goo’ experiment on the side.

Matt: I got a kick out of this. As you’re playing it, you realize the point of the game is you’re flying different experiments, you’re doing stuff. But I haven’t unlocked a whole lot on the game but over time, as you get more science, you can unlock more things and more objects and more stuff. So yeah, I have the goo up here so we can figure out how to run these experiments and the idea is, you know.

Thomas: A pilot.

Chad: If you fly this goo into space, this is a question for Mary Beth, do we have to worry about it coming back? Are there planetary protection considerations with this space goo?

Mary Beth: No doubt.

Matt: Thomas with your work, you deal with a lot of experiments and science that goes up for sub-orbital, not necessarily for the space station.

Thomas: What we do is we get some of those science technologies, people have new concepts of things such as a new sensor or a new goo system, they want to try out, so we put that on the rocket and we launch that to 100 plus kilometers. Not to the ISS just to space and they can do their stuff. We eject the goo, we spin the goo, we do whatever we want – not whatever we want, what we’re supposed to do, and then we get the data, bring it back. So, the people who get the data, they can figure out how to make it better, how to move that technology forward.

Matt: Unfortunately, in my situation, I haven’t unlocked the telecommunications yet so we’re going to go up, run the experiment. We can keep that up on the screen.

Thomas: That’s how we do a lot of things too. Depends, sometimes we communicate some of the results, sometimes we just go pick it up, literally, get the canister back with the payload in it and say how did that go and get the recording.

Abby: So these could be biology experiments or what else?

Thomas: Yeah, biology experiments. We do a lot of technology. So, for example, a new solar cell, you want to see if they get irradiated. What happens to the materials or like the computer, if you can get irradiated stuff like that, we send it high and see how it behaves.

Matt: So I’m going to go ahead

Matt: I bet we have questions, before we jump into the launch.

Abby: Or launch while I talk. First of all, “I love space” and the commentary, “Thanks for doing this, and how is the progress on finding more Earth-like planets?”

Chad: Progress continues, right? So, this is an ongoing project. There’s lots and lots of data that came down from the Kepler and K2 and it’s still being crunched. I think you guys saw some recent results where some AI and deep learning algorithms were being used to go back over the data that’s been collected and find additional exoplanets and Earth-like planets. NASA has lots of projects in the works to continue looking for those kinds of planets. It’s really exciting.

Thomas: All the data they get, they get so much data, they push it to the crowd and give it to other scientists around the world. They crunch data and use the algorithm to find other planets. There is a way for people to participate in NASA ventures.

Abby: Ordinary people go through that data and find planets, right?

Matt: Let’s jump into this launch. Thomas, I’m going to have you talk us through and Mary Beth, if you have anything on the science goo side that we need to know as the NASA scientist, we expect you to do this.

Abby: I’ll have a physics question but I’ll let you launch.

Thomas: Don’t check the range or anything, just launch like that. Come on.

Matt: I did not check the range. I did not go through my checklist either.

Thomas: That’s a heavy turn right there. Good thing you have some fins on it.

Abby: What are the fins doing for him?

Thomas: As you build up speed, those fins will act to counteract the drag. So, you see this rocket right now is like tilted and you have some balance with the center of pressure, center of thrust and without getting details it’s easy to tip over and crash and burn. That’s why rocket science, or rocket engineering, is really what it is. Pretty complex. One mistake and everything can literally go in flames.

Abby: So this question from Block Watcher is good. “Do you have to consider relativity when going to the moon or Mars or is Newtonian mechanics enough?”

Chad: It’s a good question. Moon and Mars for the most part Newtonian suffices. If you’re going off into the deeper space, further out missions, it starts to come into effect but for moon and Mars, for the most part, we don’t have to take it into account. It depends on the mission, though, right? There’s some missions where you’re actually trying to…

Your science is all about looking at gravity effects, trying to prove out some of the fundamental laws of physics and in those cases you do. The mission’s sensitive to those parameters but if you’re just trying to get there, not so much.

Abby: OK. Interesting.

Thomas: So looks like we ran out of fuel. The goo seems to be getting cold now. That’s good data. It’s valuable.

Matt: Trying to get people a good view of the goo.

Thomas: So usually when you have rockets like that, when you run out of fuel, you just, you know, you jettison the rest of the rocket that you don’t need, the part of the rocket you don’t need because especially when you have multiple stage like on rocket on top of a rocket, when you’re like halfway through, when you use the bottom part of the rocket you can – it’s like dead mass and you need to carry that dead mass. The best we do when we go to space, you stage, meaning you remove some part of it.

Matt: I should have jettisoned my stuff a while back after I ran out of fuel?

Matt: Yeah. I’m going to go ahead and pop off after that.

Thomas: It’s a crewed flight, we have a pilot in there.

Matt: On the bottom right, if we start spinning around too much he’s going to have a bad time.

Thomas: He looks very happy when you spin it, actually.

Matt: His face.

Chad: He’s enjoying that.

Abby: I have a couple of related questions. How many years before we see engines that will enable deep space travel? And then “It’s only rocket science. When is the debut of SLS”? As in what year, the space launch system?

Chad: Those are good questions. The first question is when will we have rockets that will let us explore deep space. We’re already doing that. We’re just not doing it with crew. So, we’re sending missions into deep space. We’ve got the early probes have left the solar system, right? So, I would say this is really a two-parter. One is when are we going to have engines that will let us take crews into deep space and, again, I would say well you could do it today, it’s just a very long mission. So, if you’re prepared to send crews out there for years at a time, right, you could do that.

Abby: With the engines we have, the whole package of everything else we need.

Chad: So electric propulsion gives you higher efficiency, we’re doing that with smaller spacecraft today. There’s no reason you can’t scale that up. But even with those engines, you’re talking, you know, missions that last many, many years to get crew out into the outer part of the solar system.

Matt: There’s a parachute. He’s going to make it.

Thomas: Something to note is going to lower Earth orbit requires so much fuel. Like a rocket is like more than 85% fuel. Just to get to lower orbit you use most of that and once you’re in space you have a lot of maneuvers to do and things like that. So, the rest of that mass that is left over, you need to pack in there all the stuff you want, including a very good propulsion system to do things. So, NASA looks into some of those new types of engine, also even things like a nuclear thermal rocket that might be something that could bring us closer time travel to Mars and other places.

Abby: OK, so we’re on it?

Thomas: We are. It’s a tough problem but it’s moving.

Abby: What is SLS?

Chad: It’s the space launch system. It’s the next big giant rocket that NASA’s building to take crew out to the vicinity of the moon and beyond and I think the next SLS launch is the EM1 mission or Earth Moon 1 mission. It won’t have a crew onboard but it will test all the systems to go out around the moon and back. I think it’s currently late 2019, don’t quote me on that, but I think that’s the current launch date.

Abby: Not too far-off.

Chad: The next flight after that will be the first one that will have crew on it. You’re looking at probably 2020, ’22 or that time frame.

Thomas: It’s a pretty big rocket. The last rocket we had like that was Saturn 5, which we had to launch all the Apollo missions to go to the moon. It’s 10% more thrust in it. If you have a chance to see the SLS launch, go see it. It will be quite something.

Abby: Cool.

Matt: How are we doing on the chat Abby?

Chad: Splash down there.

Matt: I’m almost at splash down. The parachute is good, I should be fine.

Thomas: Did you bring the goo back?

Matt: The goo is on board. I haven’t unlocked the communications yet to send the data back so I have to bring it back.

Chad: Clearly you need to play this more.

Matt: Yes, I definitely need to unlock better things.

Abby: Over here I have a bunch of questions about Mars but I’m waiting for Mary Beth to come back so let’s take more of the rocket launch questions.

Chad: We have a big focus on Mars coming up here.

Abby: We do. And then another kind of question, “I have a big question about college. Is it worth it to go to the naval academy because they have the largest number of NASA astronauts rather than going with something more preferable?”

Chad: Heck, yeah, if you want to be an astronaut that’s a great path. Even if you don’t want to be an astronaut that’s a great path. The military academies are a fantastic education for engineering in particular, lots of other things too. I mean if you’re focused on a career to be an astronaut or anything in the related field, you can’t really go far wrong with the naval academy, first-class education.

Abby: I guess there are other ways in.

Chad: There certainly are. If you look at our current class of astronauts, they come from a really diverse set of backgrounds.

Abby: Which is nice.

Matt: So we collected some more science so hopefully I’ll be able to unlock more rockets and cool things to build bigger and better rockets. But I think the next step, what we’re going to do, we have some time but I have a quick reminder to anybody, if you’re just joining us now you’re watching NASA in Silicon Valley Live. A new conversational show we’re trying out here on Twitch.TV/NASA. We’re playing Kerbal Space Program. I find the irony of all of our heavily accomplished NASA experts of engineering and scientists, even Abby, you have a degree in neuroscience?

Abby: Yep.

Matt: The person with the communications and public relations degree is the one who is launching these rockets over here.

Chad: You’re making it look so easy, Matt.

Matt: I’ll play a lot and let you guys talk about the cool stuff.

Chad: I think you need to get us into orbit here.

Matt: I think we’re going to do it. So, folks, before we were even trying this out, I tried several times and it didn’t quite work so why not? We’re just going to give it a try and just to let you know how much of a noob I am to this, this is even on the training module one. So, I’m going to jump into a training module and try to get into orbit. That will be a fun one.

Abby: Let’s do it.

Matt: We’ll give that a kick and then we’ll switch things up and switch on over to the next game.

Chad: Come on, how hard can it be? It’s only rocket science.

Matt: I know, right. And keep in mind, I had a hard time like getting this one

Matt: like having this one work and it’s on the training mode. So, they’re even like have Gene Kerman is guiding me through.

Thomas: You spent a good amount of the morning trying and you said the next one is going to be the good one. So, this is the next one, right?

Matt: This is the one. Part of it is just not following directions of what my friend Gene Kerman is going to show. We’re going to flip on over, my throttle is up.

Thomas: The weather is looking good.

Matt: We’ve got all the approved forms.

Thomas: Are we good for science?

Mary Beth: Go.

Chad: Have you had your flight readiness review, Matt?

Matt: I was going to say, let’s talk about that. How realistic is this or what are they missing in Kerbal? Thomas, you’re familiar with Kerbal. What are the things that are not being simulated in here like paperwork?

Thomas: Paperwork, filings and review. All those things, it’s literally taking part of the rocket, putting them together and then push the big red button. There is no big red button. You know, you don’t look at the range, you don’t look at the weather, you don’t look at really, all sorts of things that you’re supposed to look at and to make a rocket fly there is so much stuff behind it, to check so many things. I think, Chad can talk about going through all the FDR’s, stuff like that.

Chad: There’s quite the process, right, and of course, at NASA there’s even that much more process because typically we’re dealing with humans on board. So, there’s a lot of reviews, let’s make sure all the engineering is done right, let’s make sure everything was made correctly, have we taken everything into account? It’s a long process. And, of course, in Kerbal, we’re seeing the very end where the thing’s on the pad, we’ve built it, press the button, let’s go. So that’s the fun part.

Matt: Comparing what that little sub-orbital hop was, got some cool science, brought it back, definitely useful. What’s the difference between this one? Different stages going on here for people who have no clue what they’re looking at.

Thomas: On the side I believe is two solid stage, it’s a heavy kick, a lot of boost, not that efficient but the thing you want to do when you launch a rocket, especially when you want to get orbital, the first thing is get out of the atmosphere. Go out of the atmosphere and you have – you try to turn because going to space straight up is “easy”, it’s getting to orbital speed, that’s the tough part there. Going up, you have all the part, the turn, very complex to do as Matt is going to demonstrate.

Matt: My friend Gene Kerman is going to walk through this. I tried four times and I kept bailing every single time.

Chad: You were getting close.

Matt: Let’s give this a go. Let’s get the throttle up.

Matt: Let’s try this out. Look at that.

Thomas: Let’s do it. The big winglet in the back, I wouldn’t put that in something that goes that fast – might have

some aerodynamic issues there.

Matt: The thing that has been getting me is the SAS not being turned on.

Abby: What’s that?

Chad: Stability augmentation system.

Matt: What exactly is that?

Abby: Stops it shaking so much?

Chad: It makes it that much more stable, right?

Matt: All I know is that as I’ve not had that on I have not been very successful.

Chad: You can see the end of the fin wiggling back and forth a little bit and that’s the stability augmentation system at work and it’s basically using a computer to sense what the thing, what the rocket is doing and augment the control to help it be more stable than it otherwise would be.

Abby: Did you say you can see that right now?

Chad: You can see the fin wiggling a bit.

Abby: This is that realistic? Wow.

Thomas: In orbital rocket you don’t use the fin – Well, you can. On high-speed rocket you do use the fins to change trajectories, more missile type of things.

Chad: It’s more a missile thing.

Abby: I have a couple of more questions.

Chad: Just imagine running this on the PDP1. Look how far we’ve come.

Abby: Back to our deep space topic, SG Stream is asking do you think Star Trek space journeys will one day be possible? That kind of deep space travel.

Chad: I think we need the warp drive first. I think that’s the hard part. Certainly, you know, humanity has the will, we don’t yet have the way.

Abby: OK. Working on it?

Chad: Yeah.

Thomas: Working on it.

Abby: I have a few questions on specific targets and missions so you guys let us know if you can comment on that or if you just don’t know. So, have there been any more planned missions to Ceres, that’s the asteroid?

Chad: I don’t think we have anything planned right now.

Mary Beth: I think right now they’re planning the plan.

Chad: Planning the plan.

Mary Beth: Every 10 years the planetary science community comes together and discusses what the top priorities are and determines where they want to go next and Ceres is a really cool target right now because they found clays which are indicative of water and they also found carbon. So, there’s a lot of models for how this might be happening but one of the models I heard about, which I think is pretty neat, is that Ceres, the surface you’re looking at, which is a large dwarf planet, is actually at the bottom of an old ocean, which is wild. As a planetary scientist I’m really excited about Ceres and learning more about it. I hope the community decides in a few years that we should go back and explore more.

Chad: So hopefully soon.

Abby: Hopefully soon. Now what about the IMAGE satellite, what can you tell us about IMAGE satellite and it being found again?

Chad: I don’t know anything about IMAGE.

Abby: Can’t speak to that one. This question, I wonder if this was inspired by the goo. What role does a biochemist have in space, such as Commander Peggy Whitson?

Mary Beth: Biochemistry, that’s what I do.

Chad: What a great question.

Abby: What role is there for you in space, Mary Beth?

Mary Beth: There’s many parts of NASA where biochemistry is important. The people who make sure the astronauts are safe and how they adapt in the environment, biology and how that operates in space by sending cultures or other living organisms up to the space station. Organic chemistry, so chemistry with carbon molecules happens everywhere in our solar system, from dust to the surface of other planetary bodies and actually, the molecules that we’re made out of were deposited by comets and other meteorites that rained down on Earth when it was still very young and so there’s a lot of interesting chemistry that goes on here at Ames in the astrobiology chemistry department where they try to demonstrate some of those reactions that occurred that led to the beginnings of life.

Abby: So cool, I love that stuff. It’s space science because it’s relevant to everything we’re studying out there but it’s expected because it’s biology and chemistry and lab science.

Matt: Where are we at now, Thomas and Chad?

Thomas: 72 kilometers up your engine is off and oh, OK.

Matt: The blue arch is what my arc would be but you see, my friend Gene Kerman has plotted for me the orange line. If I hit the gas at the right spot I’m going up and going down and at a certain point you keep falling, I guess?

Chad: You have to be pointed in the right direction if you’re going to fire up your engines, again.

Matt: Unfortunately that’s where the blue thing is at the bottom. We might make this happen.

Thomas: You still have some fuel so you might actually do it.

Abby: Matt, how reactive is it? If you move a little do you go winging off in the wrong direction?

Matt: Yeah, unfortunately, the SAS, the stability mode helps a ton. I’ve tried doing it and accidentally turns it off. 9 times out of 10 if something goes wrong it’s because I turn off the stability system. Which makes me wonder why the stability system is an option to have off.

Thomas: I know here on Kerbal, sometimes if you have ways to do more real gravity turn, you turn it off because otherwise the SAS tries to fight your gravity transferring in the beginning. So, it’s kind of fine tuning but, yeah, it’s what you wanted most of the time. You did a nice backflip earlier on the rocket.

Matt: I half blame that on Thomas because he’s yelling “Do a barrel roll” and I was like, I can do a roll, and that didn’t work out well.

Chad: You have a stability augmentation system on most high-speed aircraft as well and there’s usually an off switch, right? Why on earth would you have an off switch? One of the main reasons is you can practice flying without the stability augmentation system in case it ever stops working unexpectedly. You still want to be able to fly.

Matt: I’m in orbit.

Thomas: You’re in orbit. Whoa. The pin worked. That’s all you needed Matt.

Matt: Can you guys see that on camera? So, look at that.

Thomas: Good job.

Matt: You have this peak thing up at the top over here – wait, not there. What is the difference between these points and why are they important?

Thomas: So on your orbit you have the point that’s the closest to the body you are orbiting around, and the furthest one, and it’s important to know when to inject more thrust to do some orbit things like that, meaning you go at high-speed, when you go at high-speed you do some cool, orbital stuff to save your fuel. Getting from one orbit to another is really a whole game of how to properly manage your fuel because fuel is your life in space. So, a lot of smart people are needed to figure out all the things behind this. It’s a lot of work.

Matt: We’ll do another question and then we’ll get ready to pivot.

Abby: How to choose, there are lots. I would like to get through some of these. When we go to Mars will we use centrifugal or linear gravity?

Chad: I never heard it used in those terms so I’m not exactly sure what they’re asking. If you’re trying to get to Mars, you know, there’s no such thing as a straight-line trajectory in curved space. So, gravity is effectively curving space time so you’re flying a big curve. I’m not sure if that’s what they’re getting at or not. To get to Mars we’re not using any gravity assist maneuvers so we’re not flying in close to the sun, like you saw in “Space War!”, and using that to slingshot us around or anything. We’re flying a more traditional trajectory to get out there.

Abby: OK, cool.

Chad: So hopefully that answered their question.

Abby: You can come back with clarification.

Chad: If not they can submit us another question and we’ll try to figure it out.

Matt: Let me go, just as a shout out to everybody, if you’re joining us you’re watching NASA in Silicon Valley Live. This episode is “Let’s Play Space Video Games”. Let’s have Mary Beth, our resident Mars expert, she’s going to come on up and replace Chad. I think we’re due for the disclaimer as I try to get things up and ready. Let’s throw up our fun disclaimer which is: As a U.S. government agency, NASA will not promote or endorse or appear to promote or endorse a commercial product, service or activity. Playing these games is not an endorsement by NASA or the U.S. Federal Government. No game developer or publisher requested, nor did we or will we request to play any specific game. The games selected were purely to facilitate a conversation on space exploration, science, technology, and engineering. With all of that out of the way, eyes up, guardians, let’s go visit Mars.

Abby: Finally, because I have so many questions.

Matt: Ready to go to Mars in the early 3200s to play Destiny 1. I think we troubleshooted for a ridiculous amount of time yesterday to try to get this up and running. Evidently my home console doesn’t play very well. Any non-NASA home console doesn’t play well with the NASA Internet connection, and you need an Internet connection to play Destiny. In full disclosure these are recordings I’ve made. As I’m on Mars and playing it, all I could think of was I need to talk to Mary Beth. Is this accurate? Is this real? Is this really what Mars looks like or could even look like? So, as you see now, as we’re making our approach.

Mary Beth: Did we just go through a wormhole?

Matt: Basically, that’s what we do.

Abby: Before we begin, people are asking for a ballpark of when we will land humans on Mars?

Mary Beth: That’s a good question. I think the date keeps getting pushed back because getting to Mars with humans is extremely expensive so I don’t actually know what the current estimate is off the top of my head but presumably, you know, if SLS starts to show progress.

Abby: The next big rocket.

Mary Beth: Yeah, I think we’ll get there hopefully when I’m an old lady.

Matt: Is tell us about it, Mary Beth, is this what Mars looks like or could look like? We’re seeing rocks, we’re seeing dust and even like trees? So, what would it take for trees, what do you think?

Mary Beth: So, Mars is extremely dry. It’s so dry it’s like hard to explain how dry it is. For example, if you’ve heard of deserts in the US like the Mojave, that’s like maybe 10 to 100,000 times wetter than the surface of Mars today. So, this kind of vegetation level reminds me of the Mojave Desert, or the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, unless we figure out a way to maybe grow plants on the Martian surface, I think the one big hurdle to doing that would be the irradiated environment. Mars doesn’t have a protective layer like Earth does and radiation is damaging to organic compounds. I don’t know if that would be too great for life.

Matt: Tell people a little bit – before we jump into the questions, the first time I met Mary Beth was, you coauthored a paper about liquid water on Mars. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Mary Beth: Sure, one of the big questions that drives my research is did Mars ever host life? Did life ever begin on Mars? Sort of the first question you have to ask in order to answer that question is was Mars a nice place to live for a microorganism? And the number one ingredient for life on Earth is water. I worked on a team that was studying this feature called recurring slope linear which is hotly debated.

Matt: Like on these slopes over here?

Mary Beth: Exactly. They are these weird features that show up in the springtime and summertime and we identified hydration bands within a salt structure using satellites and remote sensing data. That was a pretty exciting project to work on.

Matt: I was going to say, for people who are watching I’m purposely avoiding the Fallen and Cabal and the Vex, they’re alien species that came to Mars. What is the research you’re doing of possibility of life on Mars?

Mary Beth: We look for real aliens. So, one of the big questions that NASA is trying to answer. Is there life anywhere else in the universe? So there’s a group of people who do life detection and we’re looking for the signs – we’re starting to design the instrumentation and starting to come up with the concepts to guide our future missions to look for life on Mars or in the plume of a moon or on the surface of Europa. Where we know liquid water currently exists or once existed a long time ago. So, a few billion years ago, Mars had shallow seas and a thick atmosphere and was a lot more Earth-like than the dry, dusty desert we see today.

Matt: Go ahead, Abby, let’s get some chat.

Abby: You mentioned the possibilities for growing anything on Mars and so how long until we can terraform Mars like it used to be. That’s transforming the environment so we can grow things.

Mary Beth: One guy I work with at Ames has written some papers on that and it would take a long time. Even if you liberated all the water in the poles, I don’t know if it’s like over the course of a lifetime of a human that that would be possible.

Abby: What’s the idea? You get water out of the ice?

Mary Beth: You get water out of the icecaps.

Abby: And irrigate the ground.

Mary Beth: Increase the pressure in the atmosphere. But I think kind of a more realistic picture of colonization of Mars is underground or covered by dirt or having protective – I think this notion of like astronaut just roaming around on the surface is, like for me, would be a scary thing because of the radiation environment. So, I don’t know, I think there’s different people that have different concepts of what Martian colonization would look like but I don’t know if it would be dudes driving around.

Matt: On sparrows.

Chad: Cave dwellers.

Mary Beth: Cave dwellers, exactly, yeah. That’s what in my mind, at least, that’s how I imagine it, but who knows?

Matt: Let’s do more chat.

Abby: Was there enough standing water on Mars for long enough for the biology of life to take hold?

Mary Beth: We think so and maybe it wasn’t standing water. Like early Mars could have been cold and wet. So, it might have been more like Antarctica than like the Amazon.

Abby: ‘Bacon 1989’ asks, “Didn’t the Curiosity rover come across running water but avoided it due to the possibility of contamination?”

Mary Beth: I don’t think so. There was a paper that determined that it was possible to have liquid water at or near the surface but there’s a group at NASA called Pan-Planetary Protection that are careful about the places we explore so we don’t contaminate those places or they don’t contaminate us. Curiosity was sterilized but not well enough to explore those places. If that’s true they would have avoided them maybe.

Abby: That does make sense. “ASDF512X” – Do microbes count as alien life on planets?

Mary Beth: Totally, yeah. We’re looking for microbes. We’re looking for microscopic organisms, cellular life as we know it. We’re not looking for little green men.

Mary Beth: And it makes sense, right, the ingredients for life were ubiquitous in the early solar system. They rained down everywhere and so we’re looking for life that maybe resembles terrestrial life or life as we know it but maybe is a little bit different. So that’s how we’re coming up with the framework to search for life elsewhere. We’re coming up with a reasonable set of molecules to search for that are similar to what we have on Earth.

Abby: Cool. Here is an unusual but interesting question. “Chris 84567” asks, “To terraform Mars, why don’t we fly a rocket with whole lot of poop on it for a basis for life to start. I’m serious, like fertilizer?”

Mary Beth: It’s too dry.

Abby: Does the lack of magnetic field on Mars add great difficulty to the difficult task of terraforming?

Mary Beth: Absolutely, radiation is a problem. Some of the oldest rocks on Mars are magnetized. Because Mars is so small it doesn’t have the same internal structure that Earth does so it lost its magnetic field and then got bombarded with radiation.

Matt: We’re going to switch over to more game play, introducing everybody to Phobos and Deimos, but we can keep taking some of the chat. I did want to show off, but what is Phobos?

Mary Beth: Phobos is a moon of Mars, there’s two moons that orbit Mars, Phobos and Deimos, and they’re different than our moon because our moon is actually was created by a big impact that happened on Earth. So, something very large smashed into Earth and then formed our moon. But people believe that – scientists believe Phobos and Deimos are actually captured objects. Phobos in particular is a rubble pile that has a thin crust on top of it. Definitely wouldn’t be walking around with like gravity.

Matt: That is one of the first reactions because we were hopping around on Mars, jumping and flying into the air, considering that gravity base that we’ve established on Mars. What would happen if we jumped like that for real on Phobos?

Mary Beth: I think you’d go flying.

Thomas: The smoke in the back there, probably not smoke rising like that, no gravity, no convection.

Mary Beth: No atmosphere.

Matt: So when we hop on our little bike and had the end trail things, it probably wouldn’t exist on Phobos?

Thomas: Need an atmosphere for that.

Matt: No, not much of an atmosphere.

Mary Beth: It’s also the right color. So Phobos is one of the least reflective objects in the solar system and its dark color comes from the minerals that it’s made out of.

Matt: And as it flipped over we saw Mars, is that about how close it is?

Matt: Seeing those pictures of Earth from the moon, I’m guessing if you’re on Phobos, Mars would be huge or are you further away?

Mary Beth: You’d have to go and see how far away it is from the Martian surface. There’s a cool picture I wanted to mention that just came out, I think it made the news a couple of weeks ago or maybe a few months ago, from the OSIRIS-Rex mission, where they actually took a picture of Earth and the moon in the same frame and it’s so cool, you can actually see the distance between them. So, I encourage folks to go out and search for that.

Matt: Let’s hit up as much in the chat because we’re going to have to wrap up in 3 minutes. We’re going to have to wrap up. Let’s get as many on the chat as we can before we get counted out.

Abby: Is the icecap on the pole of Mars methane or would that be some sort of water?

Mary Beth: It’s mostly carbon dioxide ice because the pressure is so low so carbon dioxide can act as ice. But there is a small percentage of it that is water and some new work that’s been coming out shows that there is some other ice deposits in the northern regions on Mars. Sorry, water ice.

Abby: ‘Frosty’ asks, “When was the moon created?”

Mary Beth: Early on in the solar system, so I think it happened, you know, within the first few hundred million years of the formation of Earth. So, the early solar system was a really violent place. There were lots of things hitting each other and then it sort of calmed down over time. So that’s when the moon was formed out of the Earth’s material.

Matt: Looks like we are getting the “wrap it up” sign. This has been amazing. So, for folks who have been watching, this has been NASA in Silicon Valley Live. Huge thanks to our guests, we have over on the SkyCam we have Chad Frost, sitting over there. We’re going to switch to the SkyCam, there we go. Of course, with Dave and Bill sitting over there. Huge thanks to Chad. Up top over here we have Thomas Lambot and Mary Beth Wilhelm. A huge thanks to everybody who watched and asked questions. A few guests are going to hang out in the chat and keep answering those questions. We are all on major social media platforms. If you enjoyed the stream please comment and let us know. We’re testing this out. This is new territory for us. If you haven’t already, go ahead and click like, share, subscribe, whatever button you see on the screen or podcast app. Having that stuff really helps other people find the content. We will be back for one more Twitch episode. We’re aiming for Monday, February 12^th, but keep an eye out on social media and we’ll send out more information as that date gets closer. Everybody, thank you so much for watching.