Derrol Nail:

After a 300 million mile journey through space, the Mars Perseverance Rover is ready to begin the most challenging part of the trip, landing on the red planet. If successful, it will embark on the most advanced mission ever sent here, to discover if life ever existed on Mars. The rocket ranch welcomes Dr. Moogega Cooper, NASA JPL’s planetary protection lead for Mars Perseverance. She’ll tell us how she and her team are actually protecting Mars and she’ll describe the incredibly complex maneuvers needed to land on the red planet. Plus, she’ll tell us about the most exciting parts of its astrobiology mission. I’m Derrol Nail and this is the Rocket Ranch.

Launch Countdown Sequence:

EGS program chief engineer verifying no constraints to launch. Three, two, one, and lift off. Welcome to space.

Derrol Nail:

It’s an exciting time. We are not too far away from the landing of the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars. This was a project you were involved in pretty closely.

Moogega Cooper:

Definitely. Yeah.

Derrol Nail:

You know every part of that Rover.

Moogega Cooper:

Every square centimeter.

Derrol Nail:

And why is that?

Moogega Cooper:

So every single part, almost every single part of the Rover that’s landing right now and the whole system that’s landing it has been sampled by myself or my team.

Derrol Nail:

To make sure that it had no life on it, right?

Moogega Cooper:

Excess amount of microbes, exactly. So we have to make sure that it was clean enough so it doesn’t contaminate the surface of Mars where we’re trying to explore for possible ancient life.

Derrol Nail:

So it’s a high-tech robotic geologist, right?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah.

Derrol Nail:

Going to the surface and doing the work of a geologist remotely.

Moogega Cooper:

Exactly. Yeah. It’s going to go there and do so many exciting things, both for future human missions, creating oxygen for fuel or for breathing air, looking at the weather system so that we can make sure we prepare accordingly, bring the right sunscreen and all kinds of things. Great tech demos. It’s really exciting.

Derrol Nail:

So before we get to the surface, there’s this exciting part where the Perseverance Rover has to land. It’s a big deal.

Moogega Cooper:

It is.

Derrol Nail:

So much so they call it the seven minutes of terror. Now, why is that?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, because it’s a terrifying seven-minute process where many things have to go right. You have a parachute that has to be deployed at the right time. You have to have a separation of the back shell and the heat shield in a way so that the heat shield doesn’t slam back into the launch vehicle or into the descent stage. You have to make sure all those components are gone. The descent stage needs to fire at just the right time so that the whole system doesn’t slam onto the surface of Mars. It has to descend on an umbilical. Those umbilicals need to be cut at the right time. It needs to fly away so that it doesn’t drag the Rover. I mean, all of these things have to happen right.

Derrol Nail:

It’s such a fascinating engineering feat that you guys are pulling off there. It’s just amazing. Even watching the animations, it’s just like, wow.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, it’s amazing. The EDL team, Entry Descent and Landing Team, has done such a phenomenal job in planning and preparing for this. It’s really exciting. Should be seven minutes of excitement.

Derrol Nail:

That’s what you would rename it.

Moogega Cooper:

That’s for everybody else, except for the EDL team.

Derrol Nail:

Great point. And speaking of excitement, most people are familiar, if you follow the exploration programs out at JPL, with that shot of the control room, the mission control room, where everybody is there. Now, this is a podcast, so we kind of paint word pictures. But you’ve got everybody there, they’re sitting behind their monitors and their workstations. And there is that moment where they confirm that it’s gone through the atmosphere, it’s done everything that you just described and landed softly and gently on the surface of Mars and now it can do its work. Why do you see people jumping for joy and hugging each other and crying?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah. I mean, with all of those things that have to be right, that means there’s so many things that could go wrong. And with that successful signal acquisition that yes, we indeed landed, I mean, that just sparks such a sense of joy because now you know you can move on to the next phase to start surface operations. So you’ll get Adam Steltzner jumping for joy in the room, which will be Al Chen this time around. He’s going to be jumping for joy in his whatever color shirt they print out for this crew and the whole team. So yeah, it’s just exciting because now you have cemented that phase into stone. Then, now, you can move on to the next big thing.

Derrol Nail:

Now, the science begins, the scary part of getting off the Earth, traveling 300 million miles and landing on the surface is over. Now, the science can begin. One of the things I think of when they do the EDL, when it lands is that… I don’t know if it was during Curiosity or one of the recent missions where I believe there was a choreographed dance move…

Moogega Cooper:

Oh, that was for Insight.

Derrol Nail:

The Insight lander. Right. Any knowledge of any plans for any celebratory dances?

Moogega Cooper:

I don’t know of any plans, but I know the person that would do something. I could ask this person.

Derrol Nail:

Are you going to out that person?

Moogega Cooper:

I won’t out this person, but I might ask him to do something or give me a little bit of knowledge. I’ll sneak you in a word later.

Derrol Nail:

I appreciate that. Yeah. You have to watch, basically. Watch the landing show. That’ll be an exciting one to watch. What will you be doing for the landing of the rover?

Moogega Cooper:

I will be, at the minimum, watching online from the comfort of my home. I hope to find some sort of party. Of course, a COVID safe party, but I will find some party to watch, hopefully with colleagues, at a socially distant distance.

Derrol Nail:

Right, right. Because I mean, that’s part of it, right? It is celebrating with those that you have put so much blood, sweat and tears with when a project comes to fruition like that. Once it’s landed on Mars, we’re talking about the science beginning. This Rover is going to be doing some incredible work that’s different than any of the rovers we’ve landed before. Talk a little bit about that.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah. So even down to the drill, if you look at prior Rovers, like the Curiosity Rover, it has a drill that’s meant to grind the soil and the dirt and the rocks into a fine powder. If you look at the drill for the Curiosity or for Perseverance, it’s actually a coring drill. So it’s meant to take more of an intact sample, about the size of a piece of chalk for those of you old enough to know chalkboards.

[laughter]

Moogega Cooper:

Right? So even down to the drill, it’s completely different. We’ll understand stratigraphy. So if you imagine like lines on the side of a rock, those lines tell you different information and having those lines preserved gives you orders of more magnitude of more information about that geology than if you ground it all up and mix it together.

Derrol Nail:

Ah. So having it as a core, a solid core. How long is that?

Moogega Cooper:

It’s about 10 centimeters long.

Derrol Nail:

10 centimeters, okay. We know that this has been called an astrobiology mission. We’re going to be looking for signs of life in these cores?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah. Signs of ancient life.

Derrol Nail:

Ancient life.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah.

Derrol Nail:

Dinosaur bones?

Moogega Cooper:

Not dinosaur bones.

Derrol Nail:

I remember that line from our launch coverage, which of which you were a co-host. You said, “No, we’re not going to be finding dinosaur bones.”

Moogega Cooper:

Trying to make it a thing though.

Derrol Nail:

It’s a thing with me at least.

Moogega Cooper:

We’ll make it a thing.

Derrol Nail:

Well, what do you think? I mean, what would be a sign of ancient life?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, so they’re looking for what we call biosignatures. There are carbon structures. There are things that if you see this signature, you know that it came from or that chances are high that it came from a biological source. With the Allan Hills meteorite, there were signatures there that people would argue back and forth, whether or not it came from a biological source or naturally occurring, just regular geology-induced processes. So there are these biosignatures that really hint more strongly at the fact that it comes from something that was living.

Derrol Nail:

Now, the Allan Hills meteorite, this was something that struck Mars and pieces of Mars hit Earth.

Moogega Cooper:

That’s right.

Derrol Nail:

And we know that we have parts of Mars on Earth, but they traveled through our atmosphere and it was exposed to the environment of Earth. But that’s interesting that there was such incredible debate.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, there was. Yeah. And I think it was Lori Glaze during her interview, doing a launch commentary that said,… someone said that it was all kind of inadvertent, random sample returned. Oh, I think it was Jennifer Trosper. Sample return kind of at random. Something hit Mars millions of years ago, maybe billions of years ago and it launched out and it fell onto Earth. But now we can use instruments to selectively choose where we want our samples to be. And it’s really incredible that we have the choice based on these in-situ instruments to pick the right place.

Derrol Nail:

And let’s talk a little bit about that. The place you picked was Jezero Crater and a lot has been made about this. It looks like it was a river delta that flowed into a lake.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah. So there’s a lake and it has these river deltas. Basically, evidence that water was flowing in and flowing out of this lake area. So those deltas are really great at preserving those sediments, those bio-signatures, whatever might be there, possible biosignatures, into a nice surface that we can core and interrogate.

Derrol Nail:

What do you think? Do you think there might be ancient life on Mars?

Moogega Cooper:

I mean, with the numbers out there, I mean, there are a lot of… Could life exists somewhere else? Possibly. And the nice thing about being a scientist at heart and a scientist by training is that it doesn’t matter what I think. Let’s see what the data says. Well, we, of course, have an informed opinion. We have an informed location that we’re going to that will set us up for success, that if life does or ancient life does exist anywhere on Mars, that’s a really great place to find it.

Derrol Nail:

And we’re going to fly those samples back to Earth. First time anything like this has ever been done.

Moogega Cooper:

That’s right, yeah. There has been no sample return from Mars in ever.

Derrol Nail:

And any planet.

Moogega Cooper:

Or any planet. That’s right. Yeah. And there’s the moon, of course, Apollo. They brought samples back. Other than that…

Derrol Nail:

That’s it. There’s also a really neat tech demonstration with the Mars helicopter. And that’s getting a lot of buzz because people are like, “How do you fly on Mars in such a super-thin atmosphere?” We know that here on Earth, you need an atmosphere. You need something for which to drive and propel you up. Right?

Moogega Cooper:

Exactly.

Derrol Nail:

But that barely exists on Mars.

Moogega Cooper:

It does and that’s why it was such a huge challenge and I give so much kudos to the team that actually made this happen. Yeah, you don’t have very much atmosphere. It’s 1% of that of Earth, so you don’t have a lot to give you lift. And so, they had to make the propellers extremely light. There’s lot of foam in there. If you were to cut away the carbon fiber wrapping on the outside, it’s mostly air in there, but yet it’s still structurally sound. It has to work. It has to spin without breaking apart into little pieces. So yeah, they made light propellers. They made the body, the fuselage very light. And then the propellors also spin at a very high rate.

Derrol Nail:

When you were here, what was that experience like watching the launch?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, I’ve watched launches in the past, but I haven’t seen the launch end-to-end of something that I’ve worked on. This was the first launch where I knew that I helped with that baby in there and that payload fairing. I’ve contributed to that. And to see it launch, it just meant so much more to me. And I didn’t think that a launch would mean any more than it usually does. It’s already spectacular. But yeah, it was just very, very emotional.

Derrol Nail:

You were a part of the launch broadcast. Could you describe what was going through your mind, what you were feeling as you were watching the rocket liftoff?

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah. There was a lot of compartmentalization happening during the launch broadcast because you were there, you kind of had a job to do and I wanted to stay focused on the cause, but also something exciting is happening that took seven years to get to this point. So yeah, it was a mix between professionalism and excitement and just, “Okay. Keep it together. A lot of internal monologues happening.” But yeah, it was amazing.

Derrol Nail:

Dr. Moogega Cooper, we appreciate you being here and visiting us here on the Rocket Ranch. And thanks for sharing your insight on the Mars 2020 project and the Perseverance Rover.

Moogega Cooper:

Yeah, go Perseverance!

Derrol Nail:

Good luck on the landing too.

Moogega Cooper:

Thank you, yeah.

Derrol Nail:

A special, thanks to Dr. Moogega Cooper, NASA JPL’s planetary protection lead for Mars Perseverance. And to learn more about everything going on at the Kennedy Space Center, go to nasa.gov/kennedy. And if you’d like to find out what’s happening at our other NASA centers around the country, go to nasa.gov/podcast. A special shout out to our producer, John Sackman, and editor, Frankie Martin. And remember, on the Rocket Ranch, you’ve got to keep looking up.