2024 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium: Part 2 - Stellar imaging and looking for life while mining water on Mars

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We're returning to the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept Symposium for a dive into stellar imaging and the search for potential life in the waters of Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our Solar System and beyond. Last week we visited the 2024 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts or NIAC Symposium in Pasadena, California. We learned more about the program and heard from two NIAC fellows and their teams about technologies that could help us send swarms of laser sails to the nearest star system or put humans in hibernation states for interplanetary travel. Today we're returning to the symposium to meet two more teams, Kenneth Carpenter from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues will pitch their plan for an Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager. Then Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and his team will tell us about their plan for a system that we could add on to large-scale water mining operations on Mars that could help us screen for introduced or alien life. But first, astronaut and NIAC external council member Mae Jemison honors Lou Friedman. He's one of the co-founders of The Planetary Society and his contributions to the space community and the NIAC program absolutely deserve an award. We'll close out with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, to celebrate a new achievement for our LightSail 2 mission and what's up. Our crowdfunded solar-sailing spacecraft, RIP LightSail, is one of the winners of this year's Gizmodo Science fair. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. Before we get into today's show, I want to give everyone a heads-up that in a week, on October 2nd, 2024, there will be an annular eclipse in South America. During an annular eclipse, the moon is centered in front of the sun but doesn't completely cover it, so it leaves a ring of sunlight that's visible around the moon's edges. This upcoming annular eclipse is going to be visible from the southern tips of Argentina and Chile and some of the surrounding islands. I'll also leave some resources for observing that on this episode page. I particularly encourage people that are in the path of that annular eclipse to try to look at the shadows under trees. It's one of the coolest things ever. Happy observing to all of our South American friends. This is my second year hosting the webcast for the NIAC Symposium and it was a blast. There were so many great projects that choosing which ones to feature on these two episodes has been really challenging. The NIAC program's imaginative and future-shaping projects are based on scientific and engineering principles. Not all of them succeed, but the ones that do have the potential to seriously advance space science and exploration. This year's NIAC fellows proposed a wide-ranging swath of ideas, from Mars planes to new tritium micropowered sensors, and even wraps for spacecraft propellant depots that use electroluminescence to help us save fuel on the way to Mars. I'll leave a link to the entire conference webcast on this episode page of Planetary Radio just in case you want to watch. I'll also be inviting some of the other NIAC fellows onto the show in the future to talk about their work. Part of what makes the NIAC program shine is its external council, experts and science communicators that help shape the program and support the NIAC fellows as they turn their science fiction dreams into reality. Dr. Louis Friedman just marked his last year on the external council. I've had the honor of meeting him a few times over the years. Along with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, Lou is one of the co-founders of The Planetary Society. We're just one year short of celebrating our 45th anniversary, and selfishly, I know that my life would be utterly different if Lou and his colleagues hadn't founded The Planetary Society. Together, they created the world's largest and most effective space advocacy organization, and I could not be more grateful. Dr. Mae Jemison took to the stage to honor Lou Friedman's contributions to the NIAC community. Mae was the first African American woman in space, and along with Lou and the other NIAC external council members, she's been helping to shape the NIAC program for years.

Mae Jemison: Thank you, all, and I am really excited to be here, and there was nothing that could keep me from coming to acknowledge Lou Friedman. What I should tell you is I did write some things down because I want to make sure I don't forget anything, Lou. It's written on paper from the Alexandria Museum in Egypt, so that's how important you are to me is that I would use my paper from that museum. But I want to start off by just saying and just a little bit more on biography for Lou. Dr. Lou Friedman is an astronautics engineer, which sometimes I forget because he's so knowledgeable about everything. I think he's a astrophysicist, an astronomer, even sometimes that he hangs around in the life sciences. But he was a co-founder of The Planetary Society, as you heard, served as an executive director. At JPL, he was part of the advanced planetary studies and post-Viking Mars programs, Mariner and Venus, Mercury, the planetary Grand Tour with Voyager, Halley's Comet, reconnaissance missions, our rendezvous missions. So all of these things I bring out because of the depth of knowledge and associations and connections that he brings to NIAC in everything that he does. Now, I want to talk about Lou just from my perspective because it's just so easy. There's so many things that he brings to the table. People from organizations, from governments, individuals go to him for advice and counsel. And so I don't recall when I first met him. I know it had to be when I was in the Astronaut Corps, but I don't actually remember. I just know that I always knew about Lou Friedman and you can count on him to be there. And I remember now my first reintroduction was during a DARPA workshop, looking at interstellar flight and having been invited to Tiburon, being part of this group. I was there, Lou was there, and it just felt like Old Home Week, because Lou has never been afraid of interstellar. Where sometimes people sort of would back off from interstellar, Lou was never afraid to live there on the edge, including writing a book about star sailing, solar sails, and interstellar flight in 1988 when I first became an astronaut. And I bring that up because also he can talk you into doing anything, including me going to Italy to replace him at a conference and talk about sun diver maneuvers and solar cells and getting to interstellar. I bring that up because that's not my specialty, but I would do that, and it turned out to be very interesting, a great thing to do. But he also put together a Keck workshop that was about science and technologies to study in the interstellar medium. And what was interesting about this is that when I, again, sort of a co-conspirator, he helped pull me into it and I helped work on it, but what was interesting about it is there were all these people in the room and everybody was looking at doing large, big old probes and whether or not we can actually get there and could NASA fund it. And this is 2014 and nobody really wants to talk about interstellar. So that's where a lot of the swarming stuff came out because Mason Peck was there. There are the issues with the small chip satellites, and so Lou grabbed a group of people and pulled them over to the side and we're going to talk about doing smaller satellites, our smaller probes. And so the whole idea of swarming came swarming out of that meeting with this small group of people who were led by Lou. And I bring all of that up because he's talked about gravitational lenses, asteroid grappling, all of those things that bring us to the edge, but that's the kind of person he is who is provocative, who would allow you to bring forward, and for me, always someone who is incredibly important to the work that we do and to NIAC being here over 13 years. And this award, can I talk about it, the Lightning Award? I'm not even sure where it got the name, but what I want to say, that it's, for me, it would be lighting the path, and taking to paraphrasing Michelle Paradise yesterday, the show runner from Star Trek, I think it's lighting the edge. And what Lou has always done is to live on the edge of imagination and pull us along with him. Lou, it's a great award. It's wonderful to have known you and to be a part of your world.

Louis Friedman: I really appreciate this. Thank you. Normally I'd make a 45-minute speech, but I'm a little choked up after that and I thank you very much. It's been a great honor and great pleasure to work with NIAC for, I guess, more than a decade now and to be part of this. The one thing I'll say is that both at The Planetary Society and with NIAC, the joy I had is working with really terrific people, working with smart people. And it's not just the NIAC external council, it's been the involvement with all of the fellows over all of these years. You get a lot out of that, and that's where all the imagination and creativity comes from. So thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Congratulations, Lou. An award well deserved. On the second day of the symposium, I spoke with Dr. Kenneth Carpenter from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his team. Their team's NIAC project is the Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager or AeSI. Kenneth and his team are hoping that the Artemis program is going to allow humanity to construct a large-scale optical imaging interferometer on the moon. It would specialize in high-resolution imaging at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths to resolve the surfaces of stars, accretion disks, and potentially even the surface features and weather patterns of nearby exoplanets. Right here, I have a group with us. First we'll start with Ken Carpenter from NASA Goddard. Your project is an Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager, right?

Kenneth Carpenter: Good. You got it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How do you pronounce that acronym?

Kenneth Carpenter: We use AeSI, although it's not really an easy project, but that's the way the letters worked out, so we're stuck with it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, see now I'll be able to remember it, right? And thankfully you brought other members of your team. Could you please introduce yourself to everyone online?

Gioia Rau: Hi, I'm Dr. Gioia Rau. I am a NSF program director and a NASA astrophysicist, and I'm co-managing the study with Ken and leading the science team.

Sarah Peacock: Right. And, hi, I'm Dr. Sarah Peacock. I'm a research scientist also at NASA Goddard and co-managing the project with these two standing next to me.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So your proposal is that you want to build this long baseline interferometer on the moon, and that is enabled by the Artemis program. Thank the stars humanity is going back to the moon. We're going to be able to do this kind of science, but why would you want to put an instrument like this on the moon as opposed to, say, putting an interferometer in space that could do similar science?

Kenneth Carpenter: We actually have studied the in-space version previously, and that seemed at the time the obvious way to go, but that was without any existing infrastructure on the surface of the moon. Now with prospects of very good possibly supportive infrastructure there and astronauts nearby, we thought it was time to take a look at, well, how does it compare if we do it on the moon? Is it easier, harder, cheaper, more expensive? And it's looking now that it's very competitive. We think there are certain advantages to be on a solid surface when you're trying to move mirrors around and get everything in phase. There's nothing to push against in space. So if you move a mirror, you've got to put jets shooting the other way. On the surface of the moon, you've got the moon there to push against, so that's easier and we don't have to do the precision formation flying that we have to do with multiple spacecraft that are in free space. You can do it either way, but it's looking now, if Artemis is there and has the ability to support us at some level for deploying the instrument or for maintaining it, that that could tip it in the direction of wanting to go to the lunar surface.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Plus that could increase the longevity of something like this. It kills me inside that we have all these wonderful observatories out there that are either losing funding or losing fuel or just losing their ability to maneuver because they've been out there so long. I'm so sorry, Hubble, that you're going through this, but this means that we can actually take this approach and keep revamping this kind of interferometer. But in order to do it, you're going to need to build quite a large thing, and as with our exploration of the moon, we're going to have to do it kind of one step at a time, one phase at a time. So can you take us through a little bit of your idea of the timeline and how you would put this thing together on the moon?

Kenneth Carpenter: I think one advantage of being in this situation is we can build it up a bit at a time. The overall design in the end would have something like 30 separate mirrors scattered in an ellipse that has maybe a kilometer in diameter along the long axis, but we don't have to start building all 30. We start with maybe seven elements, have them deployed, collecting the light from the target, sending it to the central hub, which combines them and helps us create an image. You could then later on have another launch, another landing on the moon that deployed another seven elements and get up to 15, and then you could do the same thing until you get up to 30. And even at a modest number of seven, you can do really good science. But when you get up to 30, you get to a point where you can get almost instantaneous photographs at very high resolution on the sky. When you've only got seven elements, you have to take data, move them around, take data, move them around again before you can get a really good image. So that's why we want to go eventually to the larger number, but you can do some really spectacular high resolution imaging even with a modest number of mirror elements to start with.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, and I'm thinking about the wild success of the Event Horizon Telescope and the imaging of black holes or getting as close as we can with that. Imagine what we could do in this case. You're talking specifically about visual light part of the spectrum, correct? Or are you going to be branching into other parts as well?

Kenneth Carpenter: It's both.

Gioia Rau: So we are aiming for both optical, so visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also ultraviolet. So the advantage also in that case of being on the moon, so in space, is that we don't have the Earth atmosphere and so we can observe actually inter-ultraviolet, which is by the way, what Hubble observes now, but we'll be able with interferometry to have actually ultra-high resolution images of the surface of stars, eventually the interaction between stars and exoplanets of active galactic nuclei and many other stellar and space phenomena.

Kenneth Carpenter: And being able to observe in the ultraviolet gives us access to much hotter plasmas than you see if you just look in the optical.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, it'd be really interesting to be able to actually see these kinds of solar storm features on other stars and compare them to our own system. And of course the interaction between our sun and our world dictates a lot of whether or not it's habitable. If you can do both that kind of science and potentially image actual worlds, the combination of those two things could be very powerful. Do you think that this is going to have enough capability to actually send us images of other exoplanets?

Sarah Peacock: I mean, we really hope in the ideal scenario... One of the cool phenomenon that we know that happens in other planets is if you have a Jupiter-like world close to the star, it can have an evaporating atmosphere off the back, and the way that we detect that is in the ultraviolet. So as long as it can get high enough sensitivity, we might be able to actually see the tail of this planet atmosphere trailing off behind the planet. So that would be really cool to see.

Gioia Rau: So what we want to observe with AeSI is the interaction between the planet and their parent star in these exoplanetary systems.

Kenneth Carpenter: So we would hope to be able to characterize the impact of the central star on surrounding exoplanets. I don't think with this instrument we'll be able to image the actual exoplanets. That's going to require a larger interferometer, maybe an interferometer made up of smaller interferometers to eventually get to that point. But if we can characterize the systems, look at the atmosphere of surrounding planets, like Sarah's talked about, we'd get a long way along the path to the eventual holy grail, which is imaging the surfaces of exoplanets instead of other stars.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. I mean, this is the beginning of a much larger set of technologies that we're hoping to go for in the future. But what kind of long baseline are we talking here? How wide across are you hoping this thing is going to be?

Kenneth Carpenter: We're aiming for a kilometer as the maximum outer diameter for the moment. Of course, there's nothing aside from lunar terrain that might prevent us from going to larger baselines if we need it, but if you go to larger and larger baselines, you'd like a few more mirrors added in so you don't get too sparse an array going through there. And we have the ability, the optical elements around rovers, so we can move things in and out. So if we have a very large target in the sky, we can pull everything in. If we have a very small target, then we can expand the baselines anywhere from 500 meters to one, two, or more kilometers until we run into the lunar mountains, and that might cause some issue.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But still way easier than trying to accomplish something like that on Earth. I mean, we've got all these trees in the way, all these people and animals. On the moon, it might be a little easier to rove your light source or your telescopes around.

Kenneth Carpenter: I should say there are working interferometers on the Earth and we're using them to inspire how to do this in space, but you have other problems that are caused by the 24-hour night/day cycle, which limit the length of observations. You have problems caused by the atmosphere distorting the incoming wave fronts that make it hard to do some of this stuff. So we can do it in most cases better in space once we get the material up there and installed. That's a little tricky, but we think we know how to do it, and the study has been completely instrumental. The funding from NIAC has really enabled us to make huge gains in designing this and making sure it's a realistic, incredible project.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How far along are you in actually designing this thing?

Kenneth Carpenter: Well, we have a baseline design and I think our goal was to come up with something that we knew we could do, and there's a bunch of enhancements that we would like to put in, but we wanted to show we had a basic design that we could build now if we were given the funding and the go ahead. We've done that, I think. A few technologies need a little further maturation, but I think we could do that, and then we would like to investigate some items that would make it better, like being able to use a remote power source so the array doesn't have to have self-contained power or huge batteries. Put a power station up on a nearby peak, maybe put a nuclear generator on the far side of a hill to send power down, and then you can operate more during the lunar night. Right now we have a conflict between wanting to observe in dark, if we can, but also wanting to generate power, which we prefer to be in the daylight. So if we can get the power remotely, then we can observe more continuously through the entire day/night cycle.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And then dealing with the temperature changes and all the other ways that impacts your instruments. There's so much to consider there. Thankfully we have the Artemis program to help us enable this kind of thing, but have you been in contact with any of the members of the Artemis team try and pitch this for the future? Because you're going to need an incredible amount of human power to put this thing actually on the ground in the lunar regolith.

Kenneth Carpenter: We have a person at Goddard that works with Artemis. That's basically his job nowadays, to be our liaison to them. So we're at the stage of trying to make a credible concept first before we go too far with that. We would appreciate having their support, either from the astronauts or from robots may be controlled from there, and I think they would like to be supporting something that's obviously productive like this and enabling great new things to be done.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Something I'm really passionate about more recently, just because near solar maximum right now, is understanding the cycles of sunspots on these other stars. Obviously we're beginning to understand it better on our own star using many of the other instruments that are out there, but what could we learn about other stars beyond our own and this kind of cycle over time?

Gioia Rau: Sure. So different stars have different cycles. So with such kind of interferometer that has a super high angular resolution, we can really look in detail not only at a star, but really through the atmosphere. So studying, for example, where the dust form, but also looking directly imaging their surfaces. And so observing something like in sun-like stars there are sunspots or the conductive motion on the surface of the stars, or even more with astro systemology, we can observe really the cycle of different type of stars. So this will be really revolutionary in this respect. This has never been there before to observe the plage and other phenomena on stars.

Kenneth Carpenter: I think one thing that's maybe familiar to the audience here is that the sun has an 11-year solar cycle, and the spots tend to start at high latitudes and move down to where the equator as the cycle progresses. The ability to image the surface of stars like this allows us to see that kind of cycle on other stars. We don't know if the butterfly pattern on the sun is common on other stars or not. So resolving the surfaces allow us to study that. And we hope by comparing other stars and how their activity cycles go with that of the sun, that we can get a better model of magnetic activity and the internal dynamo of the sun, and that might allow us to actually get a better predictive model for what the next solar cycle, the next stellar cycle might be in terms of strength, in terms of starting time. Right now, we still have a lot of uncertainty when we try to predict what the next solar cycle is going to be. This might be the data we need for the theorists to finally nail it.

Gioia Rau: And therefore by interference, also trying to understand what's the weather cycle on nearby stars. And so for example, so on planet-hosting stars, so to understand what they call the exo-weather.

Sarah Peacock: Yeah, I think another really important thing is understanding something called the transit light source effect. So we know that there are spots on other stars, and right now when we try to detect different molecules and different exoplanet atmospheres, we have to disentangle the stellar atmosphere from the planet atmosphere, and we detect water and we don't know if it's coming from a star spot or from the planet atmosphere. And with AeSI where we can actually resolve the surface of the star and see the different spots, that will really help us understand and interpret what we're actually measuring. Is this molecule from the planet or is it from the star?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'd be curious to know too if that kind of a cycle over time is different on different sized stars based on their metallicity and all kinds of stuff. There's so many mysteries left there to unpack, so this could be very powerful.

Kenneth Carpenter: Exactly.

Gioia Rau: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: You also mentioned not just looking at stars and their interactions with their worlds, but you mentioned specifically active galactic nuclei. That is a totally different distance scale we're talking about here as opposed to something within our own galaxy and our own worlds, far beyond doing that kind of science. Is there anything you'd have to do differently in order to enable that kind of science at a distance?

Kenneth Carpenter: Well, we're lucky that the active galactic nuclei, even though they're much further away, are much larger scale. So on the sky, their angular extent is actually very similar to the size of a disk of a star. That's what allows us to do this. We don't have to necessarily change the array diameter or anything to probe that. We might not get down and resolve the very details of the central engine, but we ought to be able to see the overall geometry of it. There's a conflict in the community about the geometry of the central engine and the inclination and how that changes in different kinds of AGN, active galactic nuclei that we look at. So again, being able to go into the ultraviolet, seeing hot material, there's going to be a lot of hot material around the center of AGN, which are basically a black hole creating material. So it's exciting that once you get a capability like this, which is basically going from your standard definition TV to a high definition TV, you're going to learn a whole bunch of new things, some of which you'll anticipate, like looking at the center of AGNs and the surface of stars, and a whole bunch of things that maybe you never even thought of are going to be revealed. One thing that I do want to mention is that looking at this high resolution, you see things move across the sky in almost real time. I mean, we're used to waiting years or decades between observations to map the motion of a star across the sky. We have such high resolution here, you'll see stars like Proxima Centauri and the like actually move while you're observing, which means that all of a sudden the fixed stars become moving targets in some cases and it's like, okay, I guess we're a moving target observatory.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And combine that with all that Gaia data. It'd be really intense. But thank you so much for working on this and for joining us today.

Kenneth Carpenter: Thank you.

Gioia Rau: Thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: After my conversation with them, one of their team members sent me this adorable image of their daughter watching the livestream back at home. Talk about heartwarming. That made my whole symposium. Later that day I spoke with Dr. Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. I'm very passionate about learning about the potential habitability of worlds in our Solar System, particularly Mars. His team's project centers on developing an agnostic life finder, or ALF, that we can integrate into future martian water mining operations. The ALF system would analyze the water extracted from martian ice to look for evidence of life. Here I have Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular evolution. Thanks for joining me. And you brought another member of your team. Could you introduce yourself please?

Jan Špaček: I'm Jan Spacek.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And what institution do you work with? The same one?

Jan Špaček: Yes, same one. And also at Alpha Mars, which is a nonprofit we started to promote the idea to search for life on Mars.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The search for life on Mars is among one of the greatest questions humanity has ever asked ourselves. Trying to figure out whether or not there's life off of Earth is a complex question, but if we could find another place, another genesis of life in our own Solar System, that would mean so much for the prevalence of life across the universe. Your project, essentially, what it does is you want to add an add-on onto massive water mining systems on Mars that we're already going to have to build in order to sustain permanent human settlements on Mars. For people who aren't aware of the water reserves that we've potentially found on Mars, could you speak a little bit about where we might be sourcing that water from?

Jan Špaček: Okay. So on Mars, basically 40 degrees north towards the pole or 50 degrees south latitude to the South Pole, you have large deposits of subsurface ice, which was deposited during the last high obliquity period. That's when Mars was tilted more towards the sun, and now it's more upright. So the ice is now redeposited more towards the polar caps. But still, we have subsurface ice under less than a meter of over layer regolith, and that's a target for both ISRU for future human learning missions and for astrobiology. And you mentioned those large missions. Yes, that's a primary target, but before they send those huge ISRU missions to mine large quantities of water, they will likely send smaller prospecting missions trying to see if the ISRU actually works. One such mission is by Honeybee Robotics. It's a RedWater red well... Oh, Rodriguez well, where you just make a hole, pump hot water down into the ice, melt more ice, pump it out, and so on one of those missions we would like to collaborate.

Steven Benner: If that ice were on earth, as all the astrobiologists would tell you, it would be infected with bacteria that are living or dormant and readily revival. So when you're Columbus setting out to sail the Atlantic Ocean, you're doing exploration, it helps to believe that you'll find something that you're looking for. So one of the most important parts of this mission is to persuade the community there's actually a good chance of finding life in that ice. And the very statement that we know from astrobiology studies here on Earth that if that ice were here on Earth it would be infected is a good motivation to get people to go look at the ice on Mars.

Jan Špaček: Speaking about community, astrobiological community is rather convinced that life on Mars is likely. We need to convince the rest of the community, which does not understand our advances in understanding extremophiles on earth. So there are a lot of overlaps between extremophiles here on earth and conditions which are on Mars. So it would not be a big surprise if we find martians.

Steven Benner: And 2019, five years ago, Michael Meyer, who's at NASA headquarters, responsible for a Mars portfolio, got a bunch of astrobiologists together in Carlsbad, and they wrote a report saying where you go, look, caves this ice that we're talking about where extant life that is life living today, not fossil life, which is what these rovers are looking for three billion years ago, but why life living today is likely to be found. And that's all in a manifesto. You can go read it. Many, many pages with lots and lots of co-authors. So as Jan is saying, the astrobiology community is quite well convinced that there's something to go look for. That's the motivation to look, but we have to persuade the rest of the community not only to look because it's likely to be there, but also because we know how to find it. Especially if it's sparse, if it's scarce in that ice, and that's what of course, this particular project, NIAC project instrument is building to concentrate, sparse life in that kind of ice.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back after this short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, we already know there are some very mysterious detections, potentially of methane that we can't fully explain, right? We had that recent sample that Perseverance collected, the Cheyava Falls sample, that shows potential evidence of ancient, ancient, maybe possible biomarkers. We won't know until we get Mars samples back. Please advocate for that mission so we can get those samples back and test them. But there's so much potential here. And even if it wasn't the case that there wasn't actually extant life on Mars, currently, you're just asking to add a system onto existing water systems. I would like to know that. Because if there is some stuff in there that we couldn't detect otherwise, and then you accidentally drink it, come on, there might be some problems there.

Steven Benner: So we've persuaded you. That's great. Well, but it's more than that. You had 1976 Viking. There were three life detection experiments. All of them were positive. But because of a misinterpreted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry system, the life detection positive results were dismissed. I mean, my only contribution to this field was in 1999 we wrote a paper a quarter-century ago pointing out that the GC-mass spec results were misinterpreted as implying that the surface of Mars, the soil of Mars was self-sterilizing and therefore unable to hold life. Now, we know from rovers that there is a lot of organic material in that soil, and so we know that the GC-mass spec was misinterpreted. We have never bothered to go back and look again at those Viking 1976 results to understand exactly what kind of life they are indicating is present in the accessible soil on Mars. But I'm a great believer of going back and thinking about those data one more time because that's also positive evidence for there being the potential of existing life, metabolizing life living today.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Lynn Rothschild was talking about the perchlorates in the martian regolith essentially. We didn't even really know that was a thing back then. There was so much we didn't know about Mars when we went and did those experiments. So it is absolutely worth going back to check all of that out. But in the meantime, you're proposing this project to try to detect not just extant life that could be in the water, but also potentially life that we might introduce into the water systems on accident with our presence. And this entire idea is based off of this agnostic life-finding system, particularly the polyelectrolyte theory of the gene. I'm not a geneticist, so could you please explain a little bit more about the complexities of this?

Steven Benner: Yeah. I guess I better do it. Sure. So synthetic biologists for 40 years now have been trying to synthesize molecules like DNA, but that are different from DNA that can still support evolution. So the question is for Darwinian evolution, what kinds of molecules are necessary to enable Darwinian evolution? Some of those molecules must be able to store information and store information in an evolvable form. So lots of molecules, maybe 300 different examples of different kinds of DNA have been made in the laboratory. To ask the question, what structures must a molecule have to be able to support the needs, the informational needs of Darwinian evolution? And what has come out of that from a study of what does work and what doesn't work is the statement that what does work is a polyelectrolyte. Now, you're familiar with electrolytes, you drink them in your Gatorade to recover salt, but it means that the molecules have to have a repeating charge in their backbone. So DNA that you have is a repeating negative charge in all the phosphates that are linking together the DNA molecules. It's possible also to have repeating charges that are positive, which are held together. Synthetic biologists have made those as well. So we have a large number of several hundred examples of what molecules might support Darwinian evolution. The ones that do have a repeating charge, the ones that do not have a repeating charge. So the argument is that if you go to Vulcan or go to Kronos and speak to a Klingon, their DNA, it may have a different structure than yours. It may have a different natural history from your DNA, but it will have a repeating charge in the backbone, and that's the polyelectrolyte theory of the gene.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, this is a great foundation for trying to understand life in other worlds because how would we even know if it was life when we detected it? That is a complex question, and it sounds like you're broaching on that subject.

Jan Špaček: Yeah. So you just mentioned methane and other potential, maybe biosignatures. So the problem with biosignatures, which may be produced by life, like methane, and there's a problem that they can be produced abiotically, like through serpentinization. So unless we search for some unambiguous biosignatures, we will need to send multiple missions, maybe think about it for a couple decades, but we don't have the time. I think we can all agree that it's a good idea to find life on Mars or determine if there's life on Mars before we send humans there. But it's very surprising that NASA so far has not been doing it. If you took all the instruments we have currently on Mars, send them here on the carpet, they would probably not find life living in this carpet. So that's rather surprising and I do think that many people know about this. So that's what we are trying to fix.

Steven Benner: Right. So the distinction of course, is that what Jan's instrument is looking for are molecules that are necessary to enable evolution. What almost all of these other biosignatures are molecules that are the products of evolution. But the problem is they can also be the products of not evolution. They can be the projects of non-biological processes. And so amino acids, a biological signature, we can go try to find amino acids on Mars. Well, meteorites contain amino acids, so how do you know what you're looking at as biological or not? But polyelectrolyte a long polymer with a repeating charge built from a limited set of size and shape, regular building blocks is something that does not emerge spontaneously easily. It will not be sustained unless there's a Darwinian context for it, and it's absolutely necessary to support Darwinian evolution, and that's why it's agnostic as a life detection system.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But how would you differentiate between these kinds of molecules and all of the other stuff that might be already in that water? How does your system work?

Jan Špaček: So our system works... It's a stack of membranes with have different pore sizes. On the ends of the stacks, you have electrodes. So you are pulling from a stream of liquid, which is the martian water. You are pulling molecules which have a charge. So cations to towards cathode and ions towards anode, and then we have size separation. So the first membrane let's pass molecules, which are small enough to pass through the membrane, but they are larger than inorganic ions, so they are retained in those channels. So we are both desalting concentrating larger polyelectrolytes, and we are excluding mineral particles which might be suspended in the liquid. So that's how you distinguish between... The majority of the molecules and particles will be uncharged, and from the smaller part, which is charged, small inorganic ions are going to be filtered all the way through, while the larger polymers will be captured in those channels where we are concentrating in from. That way, we will capture maybe a mixture of molecules, but subsequent analysis we'll have much easier time sorting through those than if you analyze everything.

Steven Benner: The DNA with the repeating negative charge will go towards the positive charge electrode, but it's a polyelectrolyte, so it will go through a... It's still dissolved. It's a molecule, so it'll go through the first membrane. But because it's poly, it's big, so it won't go through the second membrane. The electrolyte, chloride, for example, this small ion which you drink in Gatorade, will go through the second membrane. And so in the first channel, after you do the separation, you've got all the genetic polyelectrolytes concentrated in that flow. Now you sit there and collect it and then you can say, "Okay, let's analyze it, see whether it has other properties that are expected from molecules that are necessary to support Darwinian evolution."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And at this point, are you just collecting them or have you already proposed a system for analyzing them to actually see what's going on there?

Jan Špaček: Yeah, so we proposed systems. We proposed to use biological MinION for analysis of DNA. That's for the introduced life we'll bring with us.

Steven Benner: They may not know what a MinION is.

Jan Špaček: MinION is, well, it's a tiny pore through which you are threading DNA, and you have a protein which is specific to DNA, which is allowing pulling the DNA through. That would not work for alien DNA, which the protein would not recognize. So for that, we will need a second device, which is, again, a tiny hole from which you are threading the polyelectrolyte. But because you don't have that protein that nicely pulls it through, you have a harder time to recognize what exactly it is. But you can tell, for example, the shape of the molecule you are pulling through. So if you have long molecules with uniform building blocks in that molecule, you can guess that it's likely not a mineral particle or something like that. So that's a biological MinION or nanopore, non-solid state nanopore, then we would like to employ mass spectrometry and a classic chemical analysis [inaudible 00:41:13] and stuff like that.

Steven Benner: Yeah. So mass spectrometers have already flown to Mars. The MinION... I don't think the nanopores have ever flown to Mars at this point, but they will be very... They're much more simple instruments than the ones that you need to do mass spectrometry.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And see, that's good. There's ways of figuring out whether or not it's Earth life or Mars life. Most of the proposals I've heard are just looking at chirality to try to take a guess at it. It sounds like there's more complicated ways that you could actually do this kind of science. And I'm thinking too that this could give us a good indicator of how much basically contamination from our planet we've introduced to the systems on accident as a total byproduct of this kind of research.

Jan Špaček: So this will allow us to monitor how much we introduce, and if it's in that [inaudible 00:41:58] over time the bioload we introduced should decrease. If it's increasing, we have a problem because now the Earth bacteria is living on Mars and proliferating, which we would not like to have. But we can monitor this. And also to monitor life, we brought... Of course, use of PCR is the most straightforward genomic method how to analyze life we know, but for the unknown life, you need those nanopores and mass spectrometers.

Steven Benner: Yeah. So this is the polymerase chain reaction, PCR.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: This has far-reaching consequences, not just for Mars, but I'm thinking about all of our other worlds, potentially ocean worlds out there in our Solar System that we're also hoping might find life. But the samples that we got from Cassini flying through those jets coming out of Enceladus were absolutely next level, and if we could apply this kind of science to it, that could produce answers that we really need.

Steven Benner: Well, that's right. So we're on what's called an interdisciplinary center for astrobiology research with Brent Christner, trying to implement this general kind of question for the ices of Europa as well. Now, your problem with flying through Cassini is that these architectures to go through that plume are encountering that plume at 11 kilometers per second, 30 kilometers per second, which will tend to toast almost all the molecules that are present there. But you're absolutely right. We have plenty of water to look at, and we don't have a clear understanding of what's necessary for life to originate or to be transmitted from one place where it is originated to another place. And so we are going to be looking at every body of water sooner or later with the instrument that Jan is building.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: This is so exciting and answers so many questions for me. I'm so glad that someone is working on this. I know many people have wanted to do some kind of extant life search on Mars, but it's underfunded. Honestly. We're hoping in the future we're going to be able to send these missions, but if we know that we're going to try to have that moon to Mars pipeline that is foundationally built on the Artemis program, thinking about this now before we take that stepping stone and incorporating it into our plans, this is exactly the moment to be doing this kind of research.

Jan Špaček: Yeah, I agree with this point, and I would add there is not much time. The astrobiology missions and the grant proposals hoops you need to jump through, it takes about two decades to get from the initial idea to execution on Mars. We might not have the time for search for life on the extant life. So we need to speed things up somehow. I don't know if it's possible to do it with NASA. We'll try, but we'll see.

Steven Benner: I was on a Mars mission architecture definition team for sample return in 1999. That's a quarter of a century ago. Now, Mike Meyer had his team together in Carlsbad five years ago, and now we're down to the last... Well, we don't know, in two new launch cycles, maybe three, four and six years, the Chinese could very well be sending people to Mars, and that is now actually a short time relative to the mission design process by which grants are funded in the United States. So we're very much interested in contacting anybody who's going to Mars, Elon Musk, and anybody who's interested that we would like to put on the preliminary robotic mission that's going to Mars first. Because you want to set up robotic water mining before you send people there who are going to depend on that water mining. You want to make sure it works first. And we have a low cost add-on to actually resolve the question, is there life there, definitely yes, or to a limited detection if the answer is no.

Jan Špaček: So Steven just suggested the geopolitical angle of viewing things. We now know that China is doing the sample return likely from subsurface ice on Mars in 2028, likely analyzing the samples in 2031. So it might be that the Chinese Space Agency is going to be the first to find life on Mars, which is I would say a big milestone in the new space race. So that's another thing to consider.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. No matter what nation discovers life on Mars, it is going to be the greatest moment in human history. Not like we're sure it's going to happen, but if it does, I'm just glad everyone's doing it. That said, let's start a race so we can get funding in order to get there and get the science done. I'm so looking forward to going back to the symposium next year. Thank you so much to everyone that helped make it happen and to the NIAC program for letting me be a part of it. And as a bonus, Mat Kaplan, who's the creator of Planetary Radio, and I, did a special event after hours at NIAC. We talk with some of the NIAC leadership and a few of the fellows that you haven't heard from in these episodes. We share that whole thing on our YouTube channel, and I'll also leave a link for that on this episode page for Planetary Radio. And now it's time for what's up with Bruce Betts. We're celebrating our LightSail 2 mission. It was just announced as one of the winners of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair. The Planetary Society's LightSail program demonstrated that solar sailing is a viable means for propulsion for small satellites. With the help of 50,000 people from around the world, we developed and launched the first fully crowdfunded space mission in history. Solar sails use sunlight instead of rocket fuel for propulsion. They're one of the few technologies that could be used for interstellar travel, as we saw in last week's episode with the team that proposed laser sailing to Proxima Centauri. Our LightSail 2 spacecraft was in space from June 2019 to 2022 when it ultimately descended into the Earth's atmosphere and ended its mission. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's NIAC part two.

Bruce Betts: The revenge.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The revenge of NIAC. There were some good projects this year, and I was really excited to see that there were so many solar sailing or laser sailing projects. I mean, I know people are constantly asking us whether or not we're going to do a LightSail 3. So it's nice that some other organizations are galaxy braining this.

Bruce Betts: I'm sorry, what?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Galaxy braining. Yeah.

Bruce Betts: Okay. Oh, you kids and your modern lingo.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Do you get frequent emails about people who are like, "Let's sail to Proxima Centauri with a bunch of laser sails"?

Bruce Betts: Oh yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I've heard that from so many people.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, no, they just haven't looked into all the complexities that have to be solved to even pretend to do that, and it's a huge long list, and that goes along with a huge, huge, huge cost if you ever even could do it. I mean, I think someday you can, but, I mean, you have everything from... I mean, just pick any topic. The communications issue alone. How the heck do you communicate from four light years away with a little tiny spacecraft with very limited power? How do you slow down? How do you stick a camera on there? How do you survive for that long in space? How do you communicate as you're going? On and on and on. So it's a beautiful idea. Someday, indeed, we may get there with solar sails of one kind or another is currently probably the most realistic, but that is still really far away. So I would temper the expectations at least, but I'm certainly for looking into it in a realistic manner and because eventually we need to do all these things to get to that point. But there's a long way. So LightSail 2 is kind of humanity learning to crawl in this technology and that... I don't know what that is. That's like a Formula 1 race of the future.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, it's going to be really tricky to get out there, but if it happens, it will in part be because of LightSail. I also met another one of the NIAC fellows, Mahmooda Sultana, who I believe was from NASA Ames, and they're trying to figure out how they can straight up encode things like spectrometers using quantum dot technology directly into the sails so they can send sails out to Uranus and Neptune, places like that. I mean, that would be very helpful if we could literally produce instruments as flat and light as the sail itself so that we don't have to actually send a whole instrument on one of these objects. Clearly, even trying to get a CubeSat or three CubeSats stuck together as we do with LightSail was a challenge, but.

Bruce Betts: Obviously that would be great, and there are groups who have used things. The first solar sail to successfully fly in space was the Japanese IKAROS. And IKAROS, they actually put not that on there, but they had panels that they could change from dark to light and then try to use that as their method of using attitude control and steering. And they weren't able to steer a lot because they were spinning, intentionally spinning spacecraft, so their turning control was very limited, say, compared to ours. But they had some very clever technology they were working on building into the sail. And yes, I didn't know about the quantum dot technology, but there are a lot of... Well, I don't know about a lot, but there's certainly groups trying to do and integrate those things together that someday hopefully will be good stuff.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm so impressed with humans. And I'm impressed with... I mean, forgive me for a second, but I'm impressed with you and with the LightSail team. I mean, between us and JAXA and all of the collaborations that have been going on, it feels like we've really kind of opened up the door to a whole new light sailing age. And a lot of these ideas are really far-flung and it's going to take a while for us to reach them, but man, it feels like it changed a whole lot.

Bruce Betts: I didn't really hear much after you said you were impressed with me.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: After that just white noise and Bruce fading in-

Bruce Betts: Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... into the clouds.

Bruce Betts: No, not that part. I just couldn't resist that. I mean, that's why we're very proud of what we've done and feel we've made a technology jump forward, and also just raised the profile of solar sailing and the legitimacy of solar sailing and sailing and space, making it easier for others to propose it and actually get funding. Those were our goals by demonstrating controlled solar sailing with a small spacecraft, so people can actually do this with CubeSats. It's not easy, but you can do it, and we did it. And so that's great. And we're looking for these other entities and the ones with deep pockets such as, oh, I don't know, NASA, to go out there and do it. And in fact, they are doing it. They had one mission that failed before it ever got to sail, but now ACS3 is in orbit, who we worked with and exchanged information and provided our data to them. And now ACS3 is deployed its sail that's about a little more than twice the area of our sail and with some fancy booms technology that they're testing out and they got it deployed. They have not started, last I knew, trying to do solar sailing. They're evaluating their deployment still.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Still, that's huge. I'm hoping I can bring someone from their team onto the show in the future to talk about that. But in the meantime, I also did learn that LightSail has been awarded once more... We're one of the winners in the Gizmodo Science Fair.

Bruce Betts: We are.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What is the Gizmodo Science Fair?

Bruce Betts: It's Gizmodo, the Gizmodo website news source for all things tech, science, et cetera, et cetera. And this is the second year they've done it. They hold their so-called Science Fair and basically evaluate a number of different projects that they think are spiffy. They use better words than that because they write for a living. So here it is. The Gizmodo Science Fair celebrates the research process and all the challenges that come with it. And this year's winners were selected for their creativity and perseverance in tackling an important problem or moving a field forward. And so they interviewed us a few months ago as they picked us out. There was no application, and then we were just made aware that they had picked their winners, and by the time this show airs, it'll be on Gizmodo's website and I'm sure we'll put something up soon about it as well. So we're honored to receive this, and it's nice that people are still taking a look at what we're doing. I know the technical side of the world is, it's nice to think that others have not forgotten us, and so it's good stuff. It goes along with some of our previous awards, as long as I'm bragging for The Planetary Society with Time Magazine and Popular Science voting as one of the Innovations of the Year in the first year of the mission, 2019.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And there was that Smithsonian exhibit that we got to put together. That was really cool.

Bruce Betts: Indeed. We were in the futurism exhibit. We were in the Smithsonian for the full duration of that and gave them a quarter scale model of the sail and then a full scale model of the spacecraft, the loaf of bread size core of the spacecraft. Anyway, yes, that was great. We love it. We love it. We love it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's great that they just interviewed you because I had this mental image of you making one of those science fair boards all about LightSail.

Bruce Betts: Oh God. Yeah. This was the first science fair I've ever been on a team that won, but don't tell anyone. Very dramatic memories from elementary school when I didn't really understand what science was. But I will have you know that my first ever science fair entry, which was like second grade, I drew a map or orbits of the planets of the Solar System. So I didn't have a good experiment, but I definitely was already thinking planets.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's so cute. I wish I had a picture of that.

Bruce Betts: So yeah, Gizmodo, rock on.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Pretty sweet. Thanks, Gizmodo. Well, all right, what's our random space fact this week?

Bruce Betts: Oh yeah. Random space fact. Hey, so remember that Europa Clipper thing that's going to launch really soon?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh my gosh. That's coming up so quick.

Bruce Betts: During the course of its planned mission, it will receive nearly 3,000 times the radiation dose that would be lethal for humans. There you go.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm so sorry, little Clipper.

Bruce Betts: It's not human, it's not even alive. It's kind of important to remember that. But it gives you an idea of how nasty that environment is, and that's with them going out and then coming into near Europa. It gets worse as you get closer to Jupiter, which is why IO missions pretty much do a flyby here and there and don't mess around in close because Jupiter's massive magnetic field is whipping around all sorts of charge particles and you got a really nasty particle radiation environment.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Bruce Betts: So anyway, that's why we have robotic spacecraft. They can go anywhere. Well, okay, not anywhere. But they're also robots, so it's sad in a different way when they reach end of mission.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's true. To go where no human could ever go ever. I'm surprised Juno is still operating. I'm really impressed with these missions, but we'll see.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, no, it's impressive what they do. And a lot of missions last a long time once they get out there, but it's particularly impressive for something like Juno diving into the radiation so frequently.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh man. October is going to be intense. I'm really wishing all the luck to the Europa Clipper team and also to the HERA team trying to send that mission out to see what we did to Didymos and Dimorphos with that DART mission.

Bruce Betts: Launchtober [inaudible 00:57:44].

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though, we need T-shirts. Well, I'll see you next week for more talk of Europa Clipper, I'm sure.

Bruce Betts: Well, of course there will be. And in the meantime, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about the radiation you're not receiving by hanging out on Europa. Thank you and good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week to look forward to the launch of the European Space Agency's HERA mission. Remember NASA's double asteroid redirection test that smashed into Dimorphos? ESA's going back to observe the aftermath. And hold onto your space hats because October is going to be a ridiculously cool month for space launches. Between HERA and Europa Clipper, we're all going to be on the edge of our seats and hopefully having many happy moments to toast to the success of all the teams around the world that have done so much great work to help us understand our star system and its worlds. Love the show? You can get Planetary Radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review or a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also leave us your space thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email at [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, leave a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our member community app. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our space-loving members. You can join us as we work to support the scientists and engineers that turn dreams into spacecraft at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, ad astra.