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Speaker 1: What's up?
Speaker 3: It's Sali Ward. Welcome back another episode of ologies. Hi guys,
Speaker 3: I'm happy continued summer to all of our friends in
Speaker 3: the Northern Hemisphere, Happy sweater weather to the Southern friends. Boy,
Speaker 3: howdy do we have a special two parter for you
Speaker 3: this week and next Mars. Are you ready? Okay? So
Speaker 3: that that orange orb in the night sky. It's fodder
Speaker 3: for science fiction and it's a place where billionaires ask
Speaker 3: themselves can we go there? When we ruin the planet
Speaker 3: we're on. It's kind of like a very dry rebound
Speaker 3: after we crash and burn our marriage with Earth. So
Speaker 3: maybe you love Mars. Maybe you don't know why people
Speaker 3: love Mars. Maybe you're like me, And until a few
Speaker 3: years ago, I was like, wait, is Mars a really hot?
Speaker 3: Like fiery one? Because it's red and stuff? I had
Speaker 3: no idea. So this week you're not on getting answers
Speaker 3: to the questions you feel too stupid to ask, but
Speaker 3: also some in depth knowledge of what's coming up next
Speaker 3: from one of the most chill but deeply enthusiastic ologists
Speaker 3: I've ever gotten to sit down with. Whoo Okay, but
Speaker 3: first I'll be quick. So this show would not be
Speaker 3: made without the patrons. At patreon dot com slash ologies.
Speaker 3: You can join that club for as little as a
Speaker 3: dollar a month twenty five cents a week. Unless you
Speaker 3: see what topics are coming up next, you can submit
Speaker 3: questions that I ask theologists directly. Also, I say your
Speaker 3: name sometimes I pronounce it right. So this is an
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Speaker 3: way to support the podcast if you'd like, is to
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Speaker 3: It's very exciting. It's so exciting that I was like,
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Speaker 3: or whatever, go to ologiesmerch dot com go get them. Also,
Speaker 3: your reviews and ratings keep it up in the charts
Speaker 3: for other people to discover. And I'm often writing this
Speaker 3: without a bra I'm recording in my closet, and your
Speaker 3: reviews make my week, and then I read them, such
Speaker 3: as Nikki the Nerd, who titled her review I know
Speaker 3: you're reading this Alli.
Speaker 4: She's not wrong.
Speaker 3: She said this podcast is Filippin' awesome. Every week. I
Speaker 3: now have new random factoids to spit out of people
Speaker 3: in awkward situations. So thank you Ali for being a
Speaker 3: geek and giving your fellow nerds a place to geek
Speaker 3: out together. I want to know how awkward your situations get.
Speaker 3: I told one hundred people over a PA system about
Speaker 3: getting my hands stuck in an escalator, and this story
Speaker 3: did not go as well as I thought. Anyway, it happens, Okay, Areology,
Speaker 3: Let's get into it. So first off, Mars has a
Speaker 3: lot of iron in the soil, which makes it red,
Speaker 3: which makes it look like the Solar system's big, bloody eyeball.
Speaker 3: So hence we named it after the god of war, Mars.
Speaker 3: So it's Aris in Greek mythology. And if you want
Speaker 3: to know more about Roman's ripping off Greeks, listen to
Speaker 3: the mythology episode. So the Greeks were apparently kind of
Speaker 3: ambivalent toward Aries. They were like, he's jacked and he
Speaker 3: could kick ass in battle, but also he's kind of
Speaker 3: a dick. So the word areology means study of Mars.
Speaker 3: So this ologist was introduced to me via email by
Speaker 3: my NASA friend Casey. Hi, Casey, Hi, Christine Casey's email
Speaker 3: between us simply said do you need introductions?
Speaker 4: No, you do not.
Speaker 3: Then I received a message back from her saying that
Speaker 3: she listens to the podcast. She's been a patron since
Speaker 3: approximately ten minutes after listening to her first episode, and
Speaker 3: that once she played ologies with her friend where she
Speaker 3: pretended to be me and interviewed him, and she said,
Speaker 3: and I quote, I even talked about how dirty my
Speaker 3: hair was and put in asides. And let's just say
Speaker 3: I wanted to print up her email and frame it
Speaker 3: in something ornate and gold. So this interview was on,
Speaker 3: it was happening. So she grew up in the heart
Speaker 3: of la She has the most laid back textbook so
Speaker 3: cal accent I have ever heard, maybe the chilliest areologist
Speaker 3: on any of the known planets. So I got off
Speaker 3: a plane from a work trip. I had it straight
Speaker 3: from the airport to a little conference room with squeaky
Speaker 3: chairs at Caltech in Pasadena to talk about like what
Speaker 3: Mars's deal is and the best sci fi about it,
Speaker 3: some super recent discoveries about moons and life, insane dust storms,
Speaker 3: the rovers they're building, and some of the best science
Speaker 3: dreams I've literally ever heard in my life, So please
Speaker 3: prepare for a journey into space and your rocky subconscious
Speaker 3: with aerologist Jennifer Booze. All right, so you know the drill,
Speaker 3: but this is a microphone.
Speaker 4: You talk into it. Okay, this is gonna be fun.
Speaker 4: It's great. You just so just talk regularly about the microphone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. You look at this.
Speaker 4: You're already a prop.
Speaker 3: You're already so good. At this point, I looked over
Speaker 3: and I saw that Jennifer was prepared with six printed
Speaker 3: sheets of questions from the Patreon page, asked by listeners,
Speaker 3: annotated by hand with her answers. She took the liberty
Speaker 3: of printing and answering them to prep for this. Oh
Speaker 3: my god, you printed them out and answered them.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I don't want to be caught off guard.
Speaker 3: This is great. This is the most prepared to anyone's
Speaker 3: ever been. So we'll get to all those questions in
Speaker 3: part two of this series next week, but just know
Speaker 3: she's a wonderful genius. Also, her website is so worth perusing.
Speaker 3: It's her name minus the vowels, so jnnfr dot besy,
Speaker 3: and it features this pixely drawing of herself with purple
Speaker 3: hair and a turtle body floating in the cosmos, and
Speaker 3: it has photos of her work, links to significant space labs,
Speaker 3: and a ton of easter eggs that you just have
Speaker 3: to click around to get into. And as soon as
Speaker 3: I saw it, I was like, I'm interviewing this very
Speaker 3: bizarrely amazing human being.
Speaker 4: I love her.
Speaker 3: Also, someone should clone her and populate a planet with
Speaker 3: a bunch more of her. Your website's so spectacular, by
Speaker 3: the way, I love.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I thought about making it more professional.
Speaker 5: Nah that same, No, don't do that. Okay, So you
Speaker 5: study Mars. Yes, you're an areologist.
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: Is that correct?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well I think I'm a planetary geologist who studies Mars.
Speaker 5: But I study marsologist.
Speaker 3: Okay, how long have you studied Mars. I'm going to
Speaker 3: get straight into it with basic bitch questions.
Speaker 5: Okay, I started studying Mars when I got to Caltech,
Speaker 5: so it's been about six and a half years.
Speaker 3: So Doctor Jennifer Booze got her bachelor's and master's degree
Speaker 3: in geological and planetary sciences at this little startup school.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've heard of it. It's called
Speaker 3: MIT dude, and she just defended her geological PhD this
Speaker 3: April at Caltech. During her schooling, she just always dreamed
Speaker 3: of working with rocks from far away lands. And it's
Speaker 3: so easy to spend your twenties focused on dipping pizza
Speaker 3: into nacho sauce and trying to get your brother to
Speaker 3: buy you drugs. But Jennifer was like, I gotta get
Speaker 3: my mids on some space rocks. When you got the
Speaker 3: call that you knew that you would get to work
Speaker 3: on this, like for real, Okay.
Speaker 5: So like maybe that moment would be when I was
Speaker 5: an undergrad I applied to work in a lab that
Speaker 5: studied moon rock and that would be like my first time,
Speaker 5: like my first real exposure. And when I got that
Speaker 5: that research position, it was like a summer position. I
Speaker 5: was like, Oh my god, I'm gonna be touching moon rocks,
Speaker 5: like they're going to be in my possession, Like I
Speaker 5: get to look at them every day, and like they
Speaker 5: came from the Moon. And I was reading Apollo transcripts
Speaker 5: like when they found the rocks, and I was like
Speaker 5: listening to the audio tapes and like, oh that's when
Speaker 5: they found my rock. Oh my god, and like and
Speaker 5: then one day I broke the rock, and I was like,
Speaker 5: they're gonna fire me for sure, but they didn't because
Speaker 5: they were.
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, a rock's break.
Speaker 2: Oh my.
Speaker 5: But that day when I got that job, I was
Speaker 5: just thrilled beyond belief that, like I that they someone
Speaker 5: trusted me with a rock that came from the moon
Speaker 5: that like an astronaut collected.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Yeah, that must have just been such butterflies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was like super super exciting and what.
Speaker 3: A good lesson to learn that, like you can break
Speaker 3: a moon rock and life will go on.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I remember that day I broke the rock and
Speaker 5: I just packed up my stuff and went to my dorm.
Speaker 5: I wrote an email to my advisor. I was like,
Speaker 5: I broke the rock. I'll be at my dorm and
Speaker 5: I like went and I was like really upset, and
Speaker 5: I told the people in my hall. I was like,
Speaker 5: you guys, like I definitely got fired just now, and
Speaker 5: like they all comforted me, but they were like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it sounds serious.
Speaker 4: And then my advisor was like are you coming back?
Speaker 5: And we've all broken rocks so cute. And then I
Speaker 5: was like, oh, did you like pack up your stuff
Speaker 5: like your desk area. Yeah, like I'd only been there
Speaker 5: like a couple of days, but I like packed up
Speaker 5: everything in the lab. I like made it all neat,
Speaker 5: and I just like put put it in my I
Speaker 5: just went back. I just went home, and I was
Speaker 5: just waiting just so he was at lunch. And it's
Speaker 5: like if he hadn't been at lunch, I would have
Speaker 5: just gone to his office and probably sat down and
Speaker 5: like cried and like I broke a rock.
Speaker 4: But I did. I just send him in this email,
Speaker 4: like I broke a rock.
Speaker 3: Oh, I just picture you walking across campus with like
Speaker 3: a box and like am that says I'm loney for
Speaker 3: the moon and like just being like, I guess this
Speaker 3: isn't my office.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: That's the cutest thing ever.
Speaker 5: That's great that they like the in my In my experience,
Speaker 5: my advisors have been really understanding and like, you know,
Speaker 5: just patient with me too. I mean it's nice that
Speaker 5: even scientists who study like the coolest shit even on
Speaker 5: other planets, are all like, we're all earthlings. Yeah, it's good. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we're all just little humans. Yeah, that's so cute.
Speaker 3: And speaking of little humans, when Jennifer was just a
Speaker 3: wee one, her folks took her on tours of NASA's JPL,
Speaker 3: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and she just became
Speaker 3: deeply stoked looking at the models and the replicas of
Speaker 3: the rovers. These things bumble around Mars, scrubbing rocks and
Speaker 3: taking pictures, and eventually some models zap rocks with lasers.
Speaker 3: Right now NASA is planning the next one. There's a
Speaker 3: ton unnamed rover to add to the four already up there.
Speaker 3: There's Sojourner, which kind of turned into a pumpkin metaphorically
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety seven. And there's Spirit, which is stuck
Speaker 3: with a broken wheel, but up until a few years
Speaker 3: ago was bravely pinging back. And then there's Spirits twin
Speaker 3: rover opportunity, which has been cruising around since two thousand
Speaker 3: and four. And then there's a larger Curiosity. This is
Speaker 3: the one you've probably heard of a lot more recently.
Speaker 3: It's about the size of a Mini Cooper, so says
Speaker 3: NASA itself. And Curiosity landed in August of twenty twelve,
Speaker 3: and it's been kind of bebopping around a crater named
Speaker 3: Gail for the last six years. So fun fact to
Speaker 3: help areologists figure out how loose the soil is and
Speaker 3: how far the rover has traveled. The Curiosity tires have
Speaker 3: a few dots and dashes in the tread that spell
Speaker 3: out a secret message in Morse code. What does it spell?
Speaker 3: What it spell spells JPL ding dong. So I did
Speaker 3: some digging in the dusty soil of the internet and
Speaker 3: I discovered that Rover driver Mark Mamone, he's ginger haired,
Speaker 3: jolly looking, is responsible for that Morse code. And also
Speaker 3: his cell number was just like listed. So I did
Speaker 3: what any classy stranger would do at eight pm on
Speaker 3: a Wednesday, and I texted him just being like, hey, Mark,
Speaker 3: you totally don't know me, but my name is Ali
Speaker 3: Ward and I just found out you're the one who
Speaker 3: proposed the JPL Morse code on the Curiosity tires. I'm
Speaker 3: just saying, hey, that was badass, super cool idea. But
Speaker 3: it's been five days and I have not received a response,
Speaker 3: so don't do that. So back to the Curiosity Rover
Speaker 3: landing in twenty twelve, which was an exciting time for
Speaker 3: space nuts. So Curiosity Rover, Yeah, we landed it one
Speaker 3: six years ago.
Speaker 4: I think that's right.
Speaker 3: Did you stay up late to watch it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I volunteered at a like a public event where
Speaker 5: they were showing the landing and stuff.
Speaker 3: So what was I didn't see the landing. I think
Speaker 3: it was in the middle of the night, right.
Speaker 4: It was late.
Speaker 5: I feel like it's like eleven or something. I don't
Speaker 5: really remember, though.
Speaker 3: What was that moment like when it touched down, Like,
Speaker 3: what were.
Speaker 4: You doing.
Speaker 6: That shopping from?
Speaker 5: We were just all watching the screen, and I think
Speaker 5: there was lots of screaming and people crying and lots
Speaker 5: of general excitement.
Speaker 3: Take it. There's raw video of the NASA JPL control
Speaker 3: room when the Curiosity rover touches down safely. Millions of dollars,
Speaker 3: so many millions of dollars, thousands and thousands of hours
Speaker 3: and trials and failures and redos and teamwork to get
Speaker 3: this thing on fucking Mars. People in the control room,
Speaker 3: like bearded men, grown women, just all weeping with joy.
Speaker 3: Did I watch it and cry? Maybe I did? None
Speaker 3: of your business. Jennifer at the time was also pretty
Speaker 3: jazzed because that meant she didn't have to throw her
Speaker 3: unfinished PhD thesis into a burning garbage can.
Speaker 5: My PhD research was going to be using that data.
Speaker 5: So it was just like super nervous also that it
Speaker 5: maybe wouldn't work and so and then I was gonna
Speaker 5: have to pick a new project. But I was like
Speaker 5: super excited also, So yeah, it was like high emissions and.
Speaker 3: I like if it literally bit the dust, you'd be like, well,
Speaker 3: there goes my PhD. What was your PhD project? My PhD?
Speaker 5: Uh basically came down to like five projects related to Mars.
Speaker 3: Wait a second before we even talk about what she
Speaker 3: was doing on Mars. Let's just talk about Mars. Let's
Speaker 3: just back the hell up for one second. As a
Speaker 3: planetary geologist, can you run me through, like what the
Speaker 3: fuck is Mars? What's its deal? Why is it so dry?
Speaker 3: How cold is it? How big is it? Just tell
Speaker 3: me what we're working with here, Give me some specs.
Speaker 3: Like if you were if you were a dog, and
Speaker 3: you're like, I don't know what Mors is, like, how
Speaker 3: would you start?
Speaker 5: Okay, So Mars. You know it's the next planet from
Speaker 5: ours sun, so it's going to be like older. It's
Speaker 5: also a lot smaller.
Speaker 3: At its closest, Mars is around thirty four million miles.
Speaker 3: That's fifty five million kilometers. If you live in a
Speaker 3: country with a metric system and good healthcare away. So
Speaker 3: scale wise, Mars is about half the size of Earth
Speaker 3: and has roughly one third the gravity. One third. So
Speaker 3: I looked up a few simulators of Mars gravity, and
Speaker 3: in one there's this human in an orange onesie supported
Speaker 3: by slings, taking these graceful leaps around an indoor track,
Speaker 3: kind of like a giant marionette in a prison jumpsuit.
Speaker 3: In another video, I saw what appeared to be a
Speaker 3: gaggle of French cosmonautical tourists taking a ride in a
Speaker 3: vomit Comet, which is a seatless commercial jet that makes
Speaker 3: these roller coaster dips in flights and simulates lower gravity.
Speaker 3: I don't know, from what I can tell, less gravity
Speaker 3: looks fun as hell with these middle aged Parisians resorting
Speaker 3: to whoops, they're hooting like tiny happy donkeys our kids
Speaker 3: in a ball pit. Ah, So Mars gravity. Take your weight,
Speaker 3: divide it by three. That is your bounding happy space
Speaker 3: pony weight.
Speaker 5: It's like, atmosphere is super thin right now, but in
Speaker 5: the past it had a thicker atmosphere and there was
Speaker 5: water on it for sure, Like we have evidence for
Speaker 5: like streams and lakes and all sorts of like things
Speaker 5: like that. And it was a lot warmer because it
Speaker 5: had an atmosphere, and it used to have a magnetic
Speaker 5: field like we had on Earth, but its dead doesn't
Speaker 5: have one anymore.
Speaker 3: How did magnetic fields die.
Speaker 5: The planet Mars? Because it's smaller, it kind of like
Speaker 5: cooled down a lot quicker. On Earth, it's like hot
Speaker 5: down in our core, and we have got iron spinning around,
Speaker 5: and it's also like a big planet and so, but
Speaker 5: Mars doesn't have like all those things, and so it's like, uh,
Speaker 5: it's core is like just not putting out like that
Speaker 5: kind of motion anymore. So we're not getting a magnetic
Speaker 5: field anymore.
Speaker 3: I had no idea that was even a thing. I
Speaker 3: didn't know that was an option.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the moon used to have a magnetic field too,
Speaker 5: it doesn't have one anymore.
Speaker 4: The Mars moon no our moon, Earth's moon.
Speaker 5: Yeah really Yeah, So I studied the moon before I
Speaker 5: studied in Mars.
Speaker 3: Oh God, I got so many moon questions. Oh that's
Speaker 3: gonna be another episode. Does Mars have moons?
Speaker 5: It has two moons, Phobos and Demos. Okay, there's like
Speaker 5: some debate about how the moon's form. How the Moon's form.
Speaker 5: But I think most people think they're like captured asteroids.
Speaker 5: So they're really small moons and not like ours. And uh,
Speaker 5: I think from the surface they look more like a planet's.
Speaker 3: So if you're on Mars, yeah, do you see two
Speaker 3: moons in the sky at the same time.
Speaker 5: I think you can. But I but they're so small.
Speaker 5: I think that they look more like planets. Okay, they
Speaker 5: just are like little Dimi dots.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think they're don't look like Arman for sure.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I thought maybe have you ever cracked an
Speaker 3: egg and you got a double yolk?
Speaker 4: My luck?
Speaker 3: An egg side note, how lucky is it to get
Speaker 3: a double yoker egg? I had to stop and check
Speaker 3: because I was like, how rare is that? Maybe it's
Speaker 3: happened to me twice in my life. Anyway, some traditions
Speaker 3: say it's really good luck, or that someone in the
Speaker 3: family is going to get knocked up with twins, But
Speaker 3: according to Norse legends, it's an ominous sign the death
Speaker 3: will visit. So what's actually happening? Like biologically, so, in
Speaker 3: about one in every thousand eggs, a hen just boops
Speaker 3: out an extra yolk. She's like boop. Usually younger hens
Speaker 3: do it more frequently. I don't know, maybe their bodies
Speaker 3: are just like hell yeah, I'm a baby machine. Let's go.
Speaker 3: As for Mars's double moons, some hot goss just came
Speaker 3: out this past week. Jennifer emailed me that Phobos, which
Speaker 3: she described as a twenty six kilometer wide lumpy turd
Speaker 3: ball or a cocoa puff, may not have been a
Speaker 3: aptured asteroid, but possibly it was formed out of a
Speaker 3: cloud of dust that was left over from a giant impact,
Speaker 3: kind of like our own beloved moon, and that possibly,
Speaker 3: possibly Phobos has formed many times over Mars history, and
Speaker 3: it just periodically crashes into the surface, forms a dust
Speaker 3: cloud around Mars again, and then recreates itself into a moon,
Speaker 3: and then crashes again, forms itself anew again, but smaller,
Speaker 3: over and over and over, which is like the most
Speaker 3: poetic shit I have ever heard. And also that's more
Speaker 3: comeback than Brittany, and I respect that.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: The decreasing orbit of Phobos, this tendency to kind of
Speaker 3: decrease in decreasing crash, convinced even Carl Sagan at one
Speaker 3: point that Phobos was just a hollow satellite put in
Speaker 3: place by aliens. And I love the idea that maybe
Speaker 3: Carl Sagan just thought of it kind of like a
Speaker 3: backyard shed, like aliens would just store holiday decorations in tubs,
Speaker 3: or like coffee cans filled with nails and ikea alan wrenches,
Speaker 3: maybe a lawnmower that the Martians haven't used in a
Speaker 3: few billion years because landscaping got a little parched up there.
Speaker 3: Sounds like that, but moons and so it's dry. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so what do they think happened to make Mars such
Speaker 3: a dust bowl?
Speaker 4: So it got dry.
Speaker 5: Basically it used to have water, but because it's so
Speaker 5: much smaller, its atmosphere like got lost. Basically doesn't have
Speaker 5: as much gravity like pulling it in. And it also
Speaker 5: like didn't have a magnetic field anymore, and like we say,
Speaker 5: our magnet field protects us, and so like the atmosphere
Speaker 5: just got like stripped away over time by like the
Speaker 5: solar wind and just like other atmosphere loss processes, and
Speaker 5: so it just like lost its atmosphere got drier and drier,
Speaker 5: and then now it has a thin atmosphere and everything's
Speaker 5: just dusty.
Speaker 3: Does the water evaporate into the Solar system.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just gets like lost and I guess it's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: basically I wonder where a ghosts. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 5: just like out can.
Speaker 3: Ition, just oceans just kind of missing around.
Speaker 5: Maybe I think it's like probably really scattered apart.
Speaker 4: Okay, probably just a gas.
Speaker 3: So we have a super dusty planet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, why is it red? It has a lot of iron.
Speaker 4: It's like rusty.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and same as like Utah.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, kin in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Why do you think people fucking love Mars so much?
Speaker 5: Because it is awesome? I mean it's like I agree
Speaker 5: with you. It's like it could have had aliens on it.
Speaker 5: It's like it's like a little Earth that was like
Speaker 5: way cooler in the past and now it's like a
Speaker 5: little dead, but like it has so much potential and
Speaker 5: it's like so similar to Earth in a lot of
Speaker 5: ways that people are like, we could go there if
Speaker 5: you know, we screwed up our planet. It's so like
Speaker 5: geologically diverse. You know, it's got evidence for like maybe
Speaker 5: an ocean. It's got lakes, it's got deltas and this
Speaker 5: crazy sand dunes and like there's just like so many
Speaker 5: cool things you can look at on Mars that it's
Speaker 5: just fascinating. I think that's why people love it. And
Speaker 5: there's just so much potential for like thinking about life
Speaker 5: and aliens and space travel and being on another planet
Speaker 5: and fantasies related to.
Speaker 3: That, and Martians like literal martians. Yeah, hear me out.
Speaker 3: Maybe Mars functions for us Earthlings as like the idea
Speaker 3: of like an old cabin and Joshua tree, Like it's
Speaker 3: far away but not that far away, and it's old
Speaker 3: and you don't really know why. It's kind of like decrepit,
Speaker 3: but it has a charm to it and maybe you
Speaker 3: could escape there if shit went down.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's kind of dusty too, and it's dusty.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like our our old vintage homesteader cabin
Speaker 3: in the desert.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I like that idea, right, mm hm.
Speaker 3: So what parts of this chili desert are we really
Speaker 3: poking around now? The Curiosity Rover landed in a crater
Speaker 3: Gaele Crater, named for Walter Frederick Gael who was an
Speaker 3: Australian banker by name, but he was a real space
Speaker 3: do we by night? So Gaale Crater is this huge
Speaker 3: dent in Mars and it's filled with a mountain of
Speaker 3: perhaps wind whipped debris that's taller than Mount Rainier. It
Speaker 3: looks like if you piled a bunch of brown sugar
Speaker 3: into a shallow bowl, or like a little tiny tuft
Speaker 3: of lint in a belly button. Now, why do we
Speaker 3: care about this crater because maybe it was a lake?
Speaker 3: Why did we put curiosity in the crater? That's where
Speaker 3: the lake was, okay, and that's where the cool stuff was.
Speaker 3: Got it? So if they were gonna be like any
Speaker 3: old beer cans or like signs that people had a
Speaker 3: party there, we would find it in the bottom of
Speaker 3: what used to be lake, or we'd be like there
Speaker 3: were maybe old fish in here.
Speaker 4: Yeah okay, yeah, you know.
Speaker 5: It's like it's like a basin, so stuff's gonna collect there.
Speaker 5: And we had seen from orbit that there were like
Speaker 5: layers that looked like they could have been uh, from
Speaker 5: a lake or something wet or people actually really debated
Speaker 5: what the layers were and so it's just curious.
Speaker 4: People were curious.
Speaker 5: From many different perspectives, and so that's why we went there.
Speaker 5: But picking like the landing site is like a multi
Speaker 5: year thing with like hundreds of people involved and stuff
Speaker 5: so do.
Speaker 3: People debate ferociously? Are they like in a boardroom, like
Speaker 3: over late night takeout food being like no, we're gonna
Speaker 3: put it in this basin.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So the landing site process is really an interactive process
Speaker 5: and it's actually people in the general public can participate too,
Speaker 5: but they so like the twenty twenty rover, we're having
Speaker 5: landing site workshops right now. And basically the way it
Speaker 5: works is like people who study Mars or even anybody
Speaker 5: can propose a landing site. They'd be like, I want
Speaker 5: to go to this place, but then they have to
Speaker 5: make their argument for it, and so they have these
Speaker 5: workshops that are like gearly by yearly, and people present
Speaker 5: what they found out about their spot and like why
Speaker 5: we should go there, and then.
Speaker 4: Like literally we vote, like we raise our.
Speaker 5: Hands people at the workshop and then and then it's
Speaker 5: like a popular opinion. But then there's a little bit
Speaker 5: of influence from like NASA, you know, headquarters.
Speaker 3: So it's the wait, so it is decided by a
Speaker 3: hand raise, and then NASA's like, uh I approved.
Speaker 5: You say, there's like one hundred people suggesting sites, like
Speaker 5: the hand raising process will narrow it down to like
Speaker 5: eight Okay, and then once it gets to like those
Speaker 5: few landing sites, then NASA starts being like, hey, now
Speaker 5: we have to consider like how feasible is it to
Speaker 5: go there? Like are there other engineering constraints? So people
Speaker 5: might be super psyched about a place for one reason,
Speaker 5: but like if it's not going to answer the question
Speaker 5: that it's a goal of the mission, then they're gonna
Speaker 5: be like, no, we need to stay on track.
Speaker 3: And what did you think of the opportunity rover? Do
Speaker 3: you have a favorite between curiosity and opportunity? I mean,
Speaker 3: I know that opportunities opportunity did bite the dust and
Speaker 3: it's just chilling somewhere right Spirit Spirit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what did I say?
Speaker 3: Opportunity?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm sorry, It's okay. What I tell you, I'm
Speaker 5: gonna learn. I went into this being like I'm gonna
Speaker 5: learn a lot about this the way like one way
Speaker 5: that I remember that well in many ways.
Speaker 4: But like free Spirit, like free Spirit stuck.
Speaker 3: So what happened? Run me through? What happened with Spirit?
Speaker 3: What's going on with curiosity? I know there's been some
Speaker 3: dust storms. People are super worried about the dust storms
Speaker 3: and curiosity right now. Yeah, and what they're finding.
Speaker 5: Out and then there was the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity,
Speaker 5: and so Spirit got stuck, like its wheel stopped spinning
Speaker 5: and it was like dragging it for a while. I
Speaker 5: wasn't involved in this mission, so I only know like
Speaker 5: a high level public kind of thing. But yeah, so
Speaker 5: it was like dragging its wheel Arouan and eventually it
Speaker 5: couldn't get out of it.
Speaker 3: It's you know, yeah, no.
Speaker 5: But Opportunity is still operational. So yeah, but the dust
Speaker 5: storm is stuper relevant right now because there's a dust
Speaker 5: storm on Mars right and so this is not the
Speaker 5: first time that there's been a dust storm with the
Speaker 5: rovers and what in the past. Actually, when there was
Speaker 5: a global dust storm, they were worried that we may
Speaker 5: never see spear an Opportunity again because they use solar
Speaker 5: panels for their stuff for power. But actually the dust
Speaker 5: storm like cleaned them off a bit, no, and the
Speaker 5: dust cleared. Yeah, they were they had because as they're
Speaker 5: moving around. Dust is a major problem for our work
Speaker 5: because it's just like it's really fine and it lands
Speaker 5: everywhere and it's like just like a dirty apartment kind
Speaker 5: of and it's but if you're looking at the surface,
Speaker 5: it's like hard to to see stuff underneath the dust
Speaker 5: sometimes and so actually, yeah, clean clean them off the
Speaker 5: solar panels, and.
Speaker 3: They're doing okay right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so Opportunity is like not operational right now because
Speaker 5: it doesn't it can't get enough sun. But it's still alive,
Speaker 5: like it's still sending things like hey, I'm here, but
Speaker 5: I can't do anything.
Speaker 3: And is it because of like seasonal things happening there, because.
Speaker 5: Because the dust is in the sky is like blocking
Speaker 5: the sun from going there.
Speaker 3: How big is this dust storm? And where? Why does
Speaker 3: Mars have these insane dust storms?
Speaker 5: There's just a it's a really dusty planet. You know,
Speaker 5: it doesn't have like an ocean to catch the dust
Speaker 5: that's floating around, and then there is an atmosphere and
Speaker 5: so the dust is like really fine, it can get
Speaker 5: picked up and like just entrained in the atmosphere for
Speaker 5: a long time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and uh.
Speaker 5: So okay, So but Curiosity is also witnessing this dust storm.
Speaker 5: Like when we look at pictures of the sky that
Speaker 5: it sends us, we can see that the sky is
Speaker 5: much darker. But Curiosity uses like nuclear power, it does, Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's not using solar panels, so it's like it can
Speaker 5: still function with a dust storm.
Speaker 3: I did not know that. Yeah, how much fuel?
Speaker 4: Does it happen a lot?
Speaker 3: How long will it live?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 5: For more years? Okay, I don't I don't know the
Speaker 5: exact number of years. But like, so the battery, it
Speaker 5: has a battery that it like can recharge on stuff.
Speaker 5: I don't know the details of how it's powered, but
Speaker 5: it's some sort of decay and uh, yeah.
Speaker 4: It'll live for a while.
Speaker 5: We'll be able to use it like the really power
Speaker 5: hungry things less in the future. But right now, it's like, yeah, just.
Speaker 3: Chug it along.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I didn't know that. I thought they were all
Speaker 4: solar No.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And the next one it'll be similar to curiosity.
Speaker 3: Okay, and that's the twenty twenty. Yeah, what's the twenty twenty?
Speaker 3: Get a peep? What's it looking at? Where's it going
Speaker 3: to land? So we don't know yet where it's gonna land.
Speaker 3: It's like down to three sites, okay, and you could
Speaker 3: vote with your arm, you know. I think that.
Speaker 5: At this stage, I'm not sure how much the like
Speaker 5: my individual opinion matters as as opposed to like, the
Speaker 5: people in charge of the rover, Like, I think they
Speaker 5: have a lot of say, now.
Speaker 4: But there are still workshop.
Speaker 5: There's still landing site workshops, so people are still working
Speaker 5: on the landing sites and presenting and then like the
Speaker 5: public and scientists can still go and ask questions and
Speaker 5: stuff like that.
Speaker 3: So side note, I wanted to see if any workshops
Speaker 3: remain and yes, in October of twenty eighteen, NASA will
Speaker 3: be conducting the fourth and final three day workshop to
Speaker 3: determine the landing site for the twenty twenty rover. Now,
Speaker 3: according to a page up at marsnext dot JPL dot
Speaker 3: NASA dot gov. I'll put a link in the show notes.
Speaker 3: They'll be gabbing about the potential of three remaining candidate sites,
Speaker 3: all possible sites where life could have existed and or
Speaker 3: there's a lot of evidence for rocks and fluids having interacted.
Speaker 3: So this workshop, I picture it taking place in some
Speaker 3: secret marble hall, but it's just happening at a hilton.
Speaker 3: And what's being called Los Angeles North, But hello, it's
Speaker 3: just Glendale. That's like calling New Jersey New York East.
Speaker 3: But who am I to judge? Oops? Then I went
Speaker 3: on Yelp to see how this hilton was and reviews
Speaker 3: are mixed. Some people think the pool is too cold
Speaker 3: and the walls are too thin, and one person gave
Speaker 3: it three stars because quote the restrooms needed to be
Speaker 3: restocked due to my stall not having toilet seat covers
Speaker 3: and the lady in my stall asking for toilet paper.
Speaker 4: Loll.
Speaker 3: Perhaps they should have sent a rover to this hilton
Speaker 3: to see if it was the best place to host
Speaker 3: the conference. Either way, it's going to be exciting, and
Speaker 3: now you have all the info you need to choose
Speaker 3: the rover.
Speaker 4: Spot on Mars.
Speaker 5: And so one of the big ideas behind like past
Speaker 5: Mars life is that that it was like microbes maybe
Speaker 5: living in like cracks and rocks and stuff. And so
Speaker 5: there's also in that area there's like also like volcanism
Speaker 5: and stuff, a wide variety of rocks there and a
Speaker 5: wide variety of ages, which is crucial because Mars was
Speaker 5: like probably habitable a lot old in the lot in
Speaker 5: it's like early history.
Speaker 3: How long ago do you think Mars was probably habitable? Right?
Speaker 3: Are we talking like five billion years ago or like
Speaker 3: thirty thousand billion years?
Speaker 5: No long time ago, billions of years, okay, just billion
Speaker 5: years or something like. I mean maybe there's like there
Speaker 5: is still some fluid activity more recently, but it's like
Speaker 5: such small amounts that like these would be like really
Speaker 5: lonely bugs. There's a big group of people that want
Speaker 5: to send a rovert back to the same spot where
Speaker 5: Spirit is, which is kind of a cute thought in
Speaker 5: some way, it is cute. A lot of people are like, no,
Speaker 5: we want to go somewhere new, but that that spot
Speaker 5: there's like hydrothermal activity, so which is like on Earth
Speaker 5: where a lot of people think life might have started.
Speaker 5: So that's why that's like a big That's why there's
Speaker 5: big arguments to go back there.
Speaker 3: To make primordial Martian soup. Yeah, kind of do you
Speaker 3: think that there's any hope of sending the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: rover and it like bumps butts with a spirit and
Speaker 3: spirits like I'm bac it like gets its group back.
Speaker 5: Oh you know, that'd be kind of cute if they
Speaker 5: sent it a little toolbox to fix its round. I
Speaker 5: don't know. I think that it may not go like
Speaker 5: to that exact precise spot, but it could. I mean
Speaker 5: it's possible, but yeah, it's like a highly debated thing
Speaker 5: if it should even be considered, because they're like, that's
Speaker 5: a big planet.
Speaker 4: We should go somewhere near right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do feel like, you know, I've dated people
Speaker 3: that want to go to the same restaurant like every
Speaker 3: single night. Yeah, come on, dude, a new place open
Speaker 3: up down the block. Let's try it out. I feel
Speaker 3: like we can branch out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm excited to check out some new spots.
Speaker 3: So day to day, Jennifer works on the computer. She
Speaker 3: looks at images she gets beamed from another fucking planet
Speaker 3: totally normal. Or she looks at how light hits the
Speaker 3: surface of certain materials and what they're composed of. And
Speaker 3: then of course, fulfilling bibe Jennifer's dreams. She works on
Speaker 3: Mars rovers.
Speaker 5: And then another thing that I do often is I'm
Speaker 5: on the Curiosity rover team, and so we some of
Speaker 5: my days are spent doing operation for the rover, and
Speaker 5: so we figure out like where's the river today, Like
Speaker 5: what's cool around us? Like where are we gonna shoot
Speaker 5: our laser?
Speaker 4: Oh my god, that stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so there'll be like telecons and stuff, and
Speaker 5: so I'll be on the on a telecon like most
Speaker 5: of the day.
Speaker 3: Ps. I had to email Jennifer to ask if a
Speaker 3: telecon is a fancy word for a phone call, and
Speaker 3: she said, yeah, but also you share computer screens. So
Speaker 3: my guess is it's kind of like a role playing game,
Speaker 3: but instead of your cousin in another state having her
Speaker 3: elves attack you, it's a space scientist being like, check
Speaker 3: out these sweet ass rocks.
Speaker 5: Planning out the making all rovers, the little agenda for it.
Speaker 3: Is that crazy to you that, like you came to JPL,
Speaker 3: looked at rowers when you're a kid, and now you're like,
Speaker 3: I'm on the team deciding where to point the labers
Speaker 3: on Mars? Like is that banana?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 5: Like I definitely think back to those when I'm being
Speaker 5: little and seeing the rovers at JPL.
Speaker 4: That's pretty cool to me.
Speaker 5: Then, another cool part about being a Mars geologist is
Speaker 5: that we often study analog sites, and so that will
Speaker 5: go to places on Earth that remind us of Mars
Speaker 5: and study them and think about like, oh, if we
Speaker 5: were on Mars, like how would this be different? Or
Speaker 5: like we'll ask a question like Iceland is like a
Speaker 5: place where people go to study Mars, or also like
Speaker 5: the dry valleys of Antarctica, people go there really study Mars.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so what is.
Speaker 3: It about those places and specifically Iceland. Like I know
Speaker 3: a lot of people love Mars and are thinking about
Speaker 3: going to Iceland. Where in Iceland do you go if
Speaker 3: you want to pretend like you're on Mars.
Speaker 4: I don't know specific.
Speaker 5: I couldn't say like a specific place, but like there's
Speaker 5: like lots of evidence of like volcanic rifting and so
Speaker 5: a lot of just like hydrothermal interaction kind of stuff,
Speaker 5: so like where water and hot rock met and there
Speaker 5: are volcanoes on Mars.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so Mars is like super volcanic, super basaltic, So
Speaker 5: basalt is like what's coming out on Iceland, which is
Speaker 5: why people go there. And then it's like cold too.
Speaker 5: Iceland's super cold and Mars is really cold. So that's
Speaker 5: like you got kind of a lot of the stuffs
Speaker 5: in common already a correl it there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, would you go to Mars if given the opportunity?
Speaker 5: I think it It depends on the circumstances of it,
Speaker 5: but like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, business class, You're at least going business class.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, like it's like, is there like a
Speaker 5: colony on Mars that's like already established then like yeah,
Speaker 5: but like or if I'm going to be like a
Speaker 5: cool geologist on Mars, Like yeah, for sure, but like
Speaker 5: one of the first are you like, maybe if I
Speaker 5: was like a little older, right, you.
Speaker 3: Just eked out what you could on Earth and you're like,
Speaker 3: all right, I'm ready to retire on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think I would just like weigh it out
Speaker 5: and be like am I ready to die? And then
Speaker 5: I would say if I'm like okay, yeah, that'd be
Speaker 5: kind of cool. Then yeah, it's like moving to Arizona,
Speaker 5: I'm ready to have the last phase of my life.
Speaker 5: When you were trying to figure out what you wanted
Speaker 5: to do, like with your life, like your job, at
Speaker 5: what point did you know where to see yourself?
Speaker 3: At what point where You're like, Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 3: do this, I'm going to study this, I'm going to
Speaker 3: work there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Only very recently really, yeah, because I was like, so
Speaker 5: I was like super into science in general, but I
Speaker 5: had a really hard time like figuring out what exact
Speaker 5: science I wanted to study. I like love nature, camping
Speaker 5: and stuff like that, so like I also love like
Speaker 5: weird biology thing. So it's like into a lot of
Speaker 5: stuff like environmental science, and I didn't get exposure to
Speaker 5: geology until pretty late, like until basically my freshman year
Speaker 5: in college, and then I was like, oh, dang, you
Speaker 5: can go camping and do science. So that's like how
Speaker 5: I got into geology. But then I was like I
Speaker 5: didn't even know planetary geology. Like I knew about the
Speaker 5: rovers and stuff, but like I didn't really realize how
Speaker 5: big a field it was. And then I just like
Speaker 5: slowly got like more and more into it, and I
Speaker 5: was like this suck. And it's only like now that
Speaker 5: I just graduated, I'm like thinking, now I need to
Speaker 5: make a plan for what I want to do in
Speaker 5: the future and the strategic like projects to work on
Speaker 5: strategically for things that I know will prop up crop up,
Speaker 5: so like getting involved with the twenty twenty rovers, like
Speaker 5: I want to continue to be involved with that kind
Speaker 5: of research, and so like I've been doing some stuff
Speaker 5: related to the twenty twenty rover calibration and things like that,
Speaker 5: just to like get my name out there.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, you're like come to me for your
Speaker 3: calibration and rover needs.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then like participating in the landing site workshops.
Speaker 5: I want to be like it's like super exciting to
Speaker 5: me now to know like all this background, because when
Speaker 5: I got involved with Curiosity, I didn't know as much
Speaker 5: about Gail Crater as like I know about the potential
Speaker 5: landing sites for twenty twenty. So it's like exciting to
Speaker 5: be involved from an early stage.
Speaker 3: Oh, because hear me out, Is it like watching The
Speaker 3: Bachelor from the beginning you really care about who's in
Speaker 3: the last couple shows?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Probably.
Speaker 5: I've never had that experience, but I imagine that's probably the case.
Speaker 4: Or accept this, Russ.
Speaker 3: It's just like an investment in the playoffs, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean? And then when it comes to the
Speaker 3: World Series, you're like, this matters even more to me
Speaker 3: because I've been watching since the beginning. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: get that. So now that you're in the stage with
Speaker 3: twenty twenty where they're deciding where to land it, decisions
Speaker 3: are being made, and so it's going to mean even
Speaker 3: more when you see that through to completion, to the end,
Speaker 3: or they actually the rovers there at the site that
Speaker 3: you all to help decide on. Yeah, that's going to
Speaker 3: be enormous. It's strange. Yeah, it's really exciting.
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Speaker 3: Do you dream about Mars?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I've had lots of dreams about Mars. You have what
Speaker 5: happens and then so like some of them are nightmares?
Speaker 3: Really yeah, just heads up. I'm so so glad. I
Speaker 3: asked this question because the payoff was fucking enormous.
Speaker 5: Well, I had one that was like kind of like
Speaker 5: a It was like we were on Mars and I
Speaker 5: requested an image be taken of like a crater wall
Speaker 5: by the rover and like so the image came down
Speaker 5: and it was like not that interesting, and then somebody
Speaker 5: was like do you know how much money we spent
Speaker 5: on that image? And then like they guilt trip me
Speaker 5: about it. In the nightmare that was like a Mars
Speaker 5: nightmark I had, Like just I mean, all my dreams
Speaker 5: are really bizarre. Like I had other dreams were like
Speaker 5: I went to Mars and like landed in a crater
Speaker 5: and there was like a lake there, and then there
Speaker 5: was like an exc convict that was a stowaway on
Speaker 5: my rocket ship.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, so.
Speaker 3: You're like, what are you doing here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, like no to your business, yeah exactly, Like really,
Speaker 5: I mean just like weird dreams like that. And then
Speaker 5: I had a dream one time that's like maybe my
Speaker 5: weirdest dream that I gave birth to a moon rock
Speaker 5: and like in my dream world, you could have a
Speaker 5: boy or a girl or a rock, like those are
Speaker 5: your options. And then the science the doctors took my
Speaker 5: rock baby from me and like, if you had a
Speaker 5: boy or a girl, you know, they just like weigh
Speaker 5: it on like the little scale, But if you have
Speaker 5: a rock baby, they put it like in a mass spectrometer.
Speaker 5: So they put my my rock baby in their instrument
Speaker 5: and then they're like, misboos, we have to tell you
Speaker 5: something like are you ready for this? And I was like,
Speaker 5: what's wrong is my rock baby? And they're like it's
Speaker 5: a moon rock. And then I looked at my boyfriend
Speaker 5: at the time and I was like, are you an alien?
Speaker 5: And his mom was like I never told you you're
Speaker 5: an alien. That was my weirdest dream I ever had.
Speaker 3: Everything about this is the best.
Speaker 4: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Where you so disappointed when you woke up to real life.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it was a nightmare.
Speaker 3: Also, no, I can't believe these things happened in the
Speaker 3: dream world.
Speaker 5: And like, I'd never know this unless I put a
Speaker 5: microphone in your face.
Speaker 4: I have a really vivid dreams. I used to keep
Speaker 4: a drenal.
Speaker 5: I don't blame you. You gotta publish these things. Speaking of
Speaker 5: publishing in Mars, yeah, let's talk about the Martian cliff
Speaker 5: Notes best selling book that became a movie. Dude stranded
Speaker 5: on Mars has to survive says things like I'm.
Speaker 4: Going to have the science.
Speaker 5: Okay, So Andy Ware wrote a book self published.
Speaker 4: I read it. He read it. He was not a
Speaker 4: Mars scientist, no, just a fan. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It was fanfic about Mars, right, yeah, but it got
Speaker 5: people kind of pumped about Mars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how did you feel about it? As someone who
Speaker 3: works on Mars.
Speaker 4: I was excited about it.
Speaker 5: I enjoyed the book, And I like people getting excited
Speaker 5: about Mars. I love when people, you know, asking me
Speaker 5: questions and I can answer them and uh, And I
Speaker 5: enjoyed the book and for the most part, like I
Speaker 5: wasn't like appalled by buy it like so so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was good there are other books.
Speaker 5: Like similar kind of in the same line that are
Speaker 5: super accurate.
Speaker 3: About really what's some of the best sci fi about Mars.
Speaker 5: I think like the Kim Stanley Robinson series, like Red Mars,
Speaker 5: Blue Mars, Green Mars, like okay, the first book Red Mars.
Speaker 5: He he just does like a ton of research on
Speaker 5: like what's actually happening on Mars. And he paints these
Speaker 5: landscapes that are actually incredibly accurate, and the way he
Speaker 5: just scribes them is just like incredible and beautiful. And
Speaker 5: he did a great job and of like painting Mars scenes.
Speaker 3: Good good on him, man. So this is a trilogy
Speaker 3: about Mars and making it habitable and long story short,
Speaker 3: I went down a rabbit hole about author Kim Stanley Robinson,
Speaker 3: who is not a girl Kim, but boy Kim. And
Speaker 3: he's married to a chemist and sometimes he goes by
Speaker 3: his wife's last name, which is cute. Also, he lives
Speaker 3: in Davis, California. He prefers to write out of doors. Anyway,
Speaker 3: back to Andy Wears The Martian, which I did read
Speaker 3: on a plane and confession, I will say I did
Speaker 3: read The Martian and I cried, you're really a couple
Speaker 3: of times, I was like, they're coming and gets you, buddy.
Speaker 3: I felt very emotional. I didn't think the movie it
Speaker 3: was did quite as good a job. But what are
Speaker 3: you gonna do? Also? I had to stop to look
Speaker 3: this up. But scientists say that the reason we're more
Speaker 3: likely to cry on an airplane than on the ground
Speaker 3: maybe due to hypoxia or lack of oxygen due to
Speaker 3: air pressure, because being on a plane is equivalent to
Speaker 3: being at an altitude of around eight thousand feet. Is
Speaker 3: that crazy even with the pressurized cabin. Or it may
Speaker 3: be the emotional liability of unfamiliar surroundings, and humans tend
Speaker 3: to cry when we're a little scared to promote emotional
Speaker 3: bonding with others to increase our safety. So the next
Speaker 3: time you find yourself like sobbing at a tender moment
Speaker 3: of a junk Claude van Dam movie like, blame hypoxia. Okay,
Speaker 3: let's get back to Mars rovers. Okay, tell me a
Speaker 3: little bit about how the rovers are gathering. They gather
Speaker 3: rock samples? Correct, Yeah, now, well they're not like gathering them.
Speaker 3: How they tell me how they do their business?
Speaker 5: Okay, So they like take pictures and they zap them
Speaker 5: with lasers, and they the pictures are not just like
Speaker 5: regular pictures though. They have like many wavelengths of light sometimes,
Speaker 5: and so you can tell more from than you could
Speaker 5: just have a regular picture. And then they drill them
Speaker 5: sometimes and they put them in like on the Curiosity River.
Speaker 5: There's like an instrument that's like an oven. So they
Speaker 5: put their rock powder that they drilled in the oven
Speaker 5: and they heat it up and then they measure stuff
Speaker 5: that comes off of it and they learn about different
Speaker 5: compounds that are in the river. And then there's another
Speaker 5: thing where they like vibrate the rock and they can
Speaker 5: like tell what the crystals, like different mineral crystals are. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and then do they just dump it? Do they just
Speaker 5: blow it off when they're like done with you?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, But for the most part, yeah, they drill it
Speaker 5: and then they like analyze that.
Speaker 4: It's called the dump pile.
Speaker 3: Okay, I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they like dump out the stuff they drilled and
Speaker 5: then they look at the dump pile. Oh, and we
Speaker 5: have like an arm on the rover and so like
Speaker 5: we'll put the arm up close and like look at it.
Speaker 5: And then yeah, it's just like a lot of imaging
Speaker 5: and then a couple of different like scientific instruments. So
Speaker 5: that's like for the geology, but then there's also like
Speaker 5: stuff for atmospheric detections like that sense the winds and
Speaker 5: like gases and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: And so is there like a feed coming through that
Speaker 3: just is like ddddd, like this is.
Speaker 4: What we're gathering.
Speaker 3: We get okay.
Speaker 5: So the way it works, it's kind of cool. We
Speaker 5: relay with satellites that orbit Mars. So we send stuff
Speaker 5: to the satellites and the satellites send it down to
Speaker 5: the rover, and the rover sends it back to the
Speaker 5: satellite and back to us.
Speaker 3: So to recap they send information up to the satellites,
Speaker 3: the satellites send it down to the rover, the rover
Speaker 3: sends it back to the satellite and back to us.
Speaker 3: The satellite's like our mutual friend who has cell service
Speaker 3: when we don't, and we keep being like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: ask the rover to take a soil sample, and the
Speaker 3: rovers like, holy shit, satellite tell them the soil is
Speaker 3: so red. I can't even And so we get our
Speaker 3: data in like batches. So in a way, yes, but
Speaker 3: it's not like constantly coming down. We'll get like data
Speaker 3: deliveries at like specified times. Yeah, and are you are
Speaker 3: you ever waiting for one, like knowing like we should
Speaker 3: get a data delivery in like twelve minutes.
Speaker 5: So that's how planning works sometime, where like we might
Speaker 5: not get data until like a certain place on our
Speaker 5: planning cycle, and so we'll be waiting for something to
Speaker 5: come down to like figure out how interesting something was,
Speaker 5: if we want to like keep looking at or if
Speaker 5: we want to move on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what do you think the weirdest thing is about
Speaker 3: Mars's surface?
Speaker 4: Maybe like the sand dunes? They're really weird? Really, Yeah?
Speaker 3: Do they look like sand dunes like when you when
Speaker 3: people ride camels it's from Egypt. Do they like look
Speaker 3: at my pica.
Speaker 5: There's like a large variety of sand dunes on Mars,
Speaker 5: and like some of them are are like dusty and
Speaker 5: some of them are less dusty. And then like sometimes
Speaker 5: we can see the sand dunes moving, which is kind
Speaker 5: of cool, like with the winds on Mars. But then
Speaker 5: like something like a dust devil will pick up and
Speaker 5: then we can like see active motion.
Speaker 3: What are some of the weird pictures that come back?
Speaker 3: Because I think I went down like a I think
Speaker 3: I went down a google hole ONTs of like shit
Speaker 3: that may or may not have been placed there by aliens. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what are some weird picture?
Speaker 5: Okay, so like the most famous thing, I have two examples.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I'm so excited.
Speaker 4: Okay. So, like first was like Perceval Lowell.
Speaker 5: You know, he looked at Mars through his telescope and
Speaker 5: Lowell Observatory and flag staff.
Speaker 3: Perceval Lowell PS was a Boston aristocrat aka a hell
Speaker 3: a rich guy in the late eighteen hundreds, and he
Speaker 3: was so passionate about astronomy that he founded observatories with
Speaker 3: all of his moneies. He also had a formidable mustache,
Speaker 3: and he had some theories that were well intentioned but
Speaker 3: turned out to be crackpot.
Speaker 5: And he thought he saw canals, like they're like rivers
Speaker 5: and stuff he thought he saw and so he made
Speaker 5: all these like drawings of like what he thought was
Speaker 5: like a mar civilization. He was sure there was like
Speaker 5: people on Mars and so but like when we got
Speaker 5: better pictures, it was like, no, there's no canals that
Speaker 5: are built there, you know. So that's like that was
Speaker 5: like people were so psyched on that. Yeah, and he
Speaker 5: was super psyched on it, but then we got like
Speaker 5: higher resolution stuff and we're like, uh no, it turns
Speaker 5: out it's not the case. And then well, like when
Speaker 5: we are first images. You might have heard of the
Speaker 5: Face on Mars. Yes, yeah, so it looks looks really creepy,
Speaker 5: like I'm not gonna lie. It looks like a like
Speaker 5: a giant guy and he's angry and he's looking at you.
Speaker 3: If you haven't seen this, there are images taken in
Speaker 3: the Sidonia region of Mars that appear to be an
Speaker 3: alien face monument staring into the void of the cosmos.
Speaker 3: But it looks like someone left a Halloween mask in
Speaker 3: the bushes for a year and then you took a
Speaker 3: picture of it with a razor phone at night from
Speaker 3: three hundred feet away. Also, sadly, it's just called the
Speaker 3: Face on Mars, like no one even named it Luke
Speaker 3: or Denise or anything, which is kind of a bummer. Also,
Speaker 3: the tendency to see faces in inanimate objects like light
Speaker 3: sockets and toasts, et cetera, is called paradolia. I follow
Speaker 3: an account on Instagram called faced Book like faceed Book,
Speaker 3: and it's a collection of things that look like they
Speaker 3: have faces. It's like rocks and clothes pins and wood grains,
Speaker 3: and it creeps me out so hard, but I can't
Speaker 3: unfollow it because it's like a good creepy anyway faced
Speaker 3: book if you're interested. Okay, the face on Mars. When
Speaker 3: we got better cameras, we zoomed in on this shit
Speaker 3: and and.
Speaker 5: But then when we like took a higher resolution image
Speaker 5: like many years later, it's like, oh, it's just a
Speaker 5: little mountain that's got some shadows on it, Like damn it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So those like those are really weird. The polar caps
Speaker 5: of Mars. They're like carbon dioxide and water and dust
Speaker 5: and the like. When they melt or like evaporate, they
Speaker 5: make like crazy morphologies like weird pits and like stuff that.
Speaker 5: It was just like the dim like you have a
Speaker 5: hard time, like your brain has a hard time figuring
Speaker 5: out what's up and down when you're looking at these pictures,
Speaker 5: and then they're just look so alien.
Speaker 3: Oh how much water is on Mars? And when did
Speaker 3: we find it? I say we as though I had
Speaker 3: any way to do with it. Uh.
Speaker 5: Currently on Mars, Uh, there's not a lot of water.
Speaker 5: There's like some water, like liquid water, just like in pores.
Speaker 5: Of rocks and like buried basically not really exposed on
Speaker 5: the surface, but there's like water ice in the caps.
Speaker 5: And when did we find it? I think probably the best,
Speaker 5: Like when we started getting these early images that showed
Speaker 5: like channels, there was no like solid evidence that it
Speaker 5: was formed by water, but people are like, the looks
Speaker 5: like it was formed by water, and then you know,
Speaker 5: get more and more info on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how fast does our knowledge of other planets accumulate?
Speaker 3: Like have we just gone crazy with information in the
Speaker 3: last like twenty thirty forty years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've uh we right now, we're in a time
Speaker 5: when like we have got recently and are still getting
Speaker 5: lots of information about planets from different satellites that we've sent.
Speaker 5: But like we're about to enter a time when we
Speaker 5: don't have a lot of stuff going out now. And
Speaker 5: you know, like we a lot of the emissions that
Speaker 5: went out, they took like many years to get to
Speaker 5: where they were going, and so now like either now
Speaker 5: or like recently, they've gone and done their stuff and
Speaker 5: so but we haven't sent out a steady stream and
Speaker 5: so we're about to enter like a little bit of
Speaker 5: a wol.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh that's interesting. Yeah, and how long just
Speaker 3: refresh for me? Does it take for us to get
Speaker 3: something to Mars?
Speaker 5: So like the data transmission, I think it's like seven
Speaker 5: minutes one way.
Speaker 4: And then what about an object?
Speaker 5: Okay, so like it depends on like where Mars is
Speaker 5: and its orbit and stuff like that, but I think
Speaker 5: it's like three months.
Speaker 3: Okay, that seems really fast.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's like for really fast thing. But
Speaker 5: you can you can take way longer. Also, sure you
Speaker 5: can send it ground or something. Yeah, not primate. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I want to mention that we also have Mars rocks though.
Speaker 3: Tell me about Mars rocks that.
Speaker 5: They came to Earth like meteorites that like were on
Speaker 5: the surface and then they got a check and then
Speaker 5: we can study them too.
Speaker 3: How does that happen? How does a Mars meteorite just
Speaker 3: get flung off the planet and just go.
Speaker 4: And just land here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so like a big rock flies through space and
Speaker 5: then it hits Mars and then it shoot makes a
Speaker 5: crater on Mars and it shoots off rocks. Some of
Speaker 5: the rocks land on Mars, but some of them get
Speaker 5: shot off like straight up in the air and like
Speaker 5: they reach Mars, you know, escape velocity and they're just
Speaker 5: flying through space and then they fly through space for
Speaker 5: like millions of years probably, and then they land on
Speaker 5: Earth as another impact, and then we collect them.
Speaker 3: It goes from a meteor to once it hits it
Speaker 3: becomes a meteorite.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 4: I think that's right.
Speaker 3: Okay, so once it touches down, it's like boop, I
Speaker 3: just turned to a meteorite. Yeah, how do you know
Speaker 3: what they are?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So we now have like classes because we can like
Speaker 5: kind of lump them and so like these are some
Speaker 5: to these other ones, and then but then there are
Speaker 5: some that are like bizarre and so like that's like
Speaker 5: how we found out that we had like a group
Speaker 5: of meteorites that different from the rest, and people started
Speaker 5: to wonder if they could have been come from Mars
Speaker 5: because the minerals in them were similar to what we
Speaker 5: thought we knew was on Mars. And then so this
Speaker 5: group was like finally confirmed to be from Mars when
Speaker 5: we sent a lander to Mars and we measured the atmosphere,
Speaker 5: and like isotopes in the atmosphere, like the different ratios
Speaker 5: were the same ratios that were like trapped in bubbles
Speaker 5: in these rocks and so we were like, yep, they're
Speaker 5: from Mars.
Speaker 3: WHOA yeah, and then where do you put the meteorites?
Speaker 3: Like do they get stored under like lock and.
Speaker 4: Key because you're so rare? Yeah? They well, it depends
Speaker 4: who found them.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 5: So, like NASA has like missions to Antarctica to collect
Speaker 5: meteorites and like to some deserts I think, And so
Speaker 5: those are property of NASA and you can like apply
Speaker 5: to study them, but you you can only ever borrow them.
Speaker 5: They are owned by NASA and they're stored at Johnson
Speaker 5: Space Center in Houston. Yeah, but like people can also
Speaker 5: find a meteorite on their own and then I think
Speaker 5: it's their meteorite, depending on where they found it.
Speaker 3: How often do areologists planetary geologists have someone say yo,
Speaker 3: I found a meteorite and you're like, that's alympogranite. Like
Speaker 3: how often did that happen?
Speaker 4: A lot? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 5: People like bring me rocks all the time and ask
Speaker 5: me if they are meteorites.
Speaker 3: How do you know that they're not.
Speaker 5: Sometimes I can just like be like that's an earth
Speaker 5: rock because it looks like yeah, like I like that's olympigranite. So, like,
Speaker 5: meteorites often have like a fusion crest, which is when
Speaker 5: it's all glassy on the outside of the rock, and
Speaker 5: that's like from heating up when it entered the atmosphere.
Speaker 5: So that's like one thing that we can tell. And
Speaker 5: then like there are certain things that we only see
Speaker 5: in meteorites, like this cool metal pattern called a vid
Speaker 5: Monstotton pattern, and it's like a crazy like kind of
Speaker 5: etching looking thing.
Speaker 3: By the bye, these cross hatch patterns and meteorites are
Speaker 3: caused by apparently nickel iron crystals, and they're credited to
Speaker 3: an Australian painter named ready Count Alois von Beck Vildman Statton,
Speaker 3: which honestly would be such a great name for a cat. Anyway,
Speaker 3: he discovered the patterns, he was like, whoa look at
Speaker 3: these patterns, So we named them vidden Statton in his honor,
Speaker 3: and then we found out later that a British guy
Speaker 3: with a way more boring name, William Thompson, discovered them
Speaker 3: like four years earlier, but no one cared. So some
Speaker 3: people call these pretty geometric meteorite patterns Thompson structures out
Speaker 3: of fairness, but I think we should just say Vidman
Speaker 3: Thompson or William stotton people into meteorites, let me know,
Speaker 3: because I'll have a press conference about it. Note I
Speaker 3: will be wearing a monocle just for flair. Do you
Speaker 3: have a favorite meteorite? Like you have a favorite?
Speaker 6: You do?
Speaker 4: What is it?
Speaker 3: I love it? That was zero hesitation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So a meteorite that I studied for one of
Speaker 5: my pug projects to Martian media, Right, Okay, it's called
Speaker 5: ALH eight for double oh one, sure it is, which
Speaker 5: is named from the Allen Hills of Antarctica. That's how
Speaker 5: the ALH it was fine found in eighty four, That's
Speaker 5: where the eighty four comes from. And then double O one.
Speaker 5: It was the first metia I found that year. And
Speaker 5: it was this meteorite that sparked this great debate about
Speaker 5: if there were life, was life on Mars because the
Speaker 5: people who first studied it thought that it had fossils
Speaker 5: in it, and.
Speaker 4: So it's like a little bit still of a debate.
Speaker 3: Is it serious?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: That was one of my projects, was like trying to
Speaker 5: like figure out people study this rock since ninety six
Speaker 5: was when that paper came out, Like people still think
Speaker 5: that some people still think that there's fossils in it,
Speaker 5: Like like a bacteria fossils and so like I was
Speaker 5: trying to apply like new techniques to see if there
Speaker 5: could be like a more definitive test and so like
Speaker 5: even my stuff, it was like a little inconclusive.
Speaker 3: My god, what kind of test do you do to
Speaker 3: figure if there's bacteria in there?
Speaker 5: So I was like trying to figure out. I was
Speaker 5: using what's called like paleomagnetism, where we're studying the magnetic
Speaker 5: properties of the rock, and so I was trying to
Speaker 5: figure out if proposed like bacteria, which are they They
Speaker 5: thought were magnet atactic bacteria, so that they travel like
Speaker 5: along magnetic field lines and have little magnetites on them.
Speaker 5: So I was trying to figure out which one it was,
Speaker 5: and basically it was inconclusive. Oh yeah, I know. And
Speaker 5: we thought we were being so clever.
Speaker 3: What I mean, at what point do you have to
Speaker 3: call it and say it's inconclusive?
Speaker 5: So like it's really easy to say no, but it's
Speaker 5: not so easy to say yes.
Speaker 3: So what happened with the recent announcement, Like everyone watch out,
Speaker 3: we have an announcement to make about Mars, and everyone's
Speaker 3: like I'm studying my alarm clock, I'm staying up late.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what happened with that announcement. So there were there.
Speaker 5: Like the what people call like the building blocks of
Speaker 5: life that were found with the Curiosity rover.
Speaker 4: These like.
Speaker 5: Just like molecules that are actually really hard to preserve.
Speaker 5: They were found by the rover pretty like fresh looking,
Speaker 5: and so they're I don't know, it's just like the
Speaker 5: building blocks of life that were found, and we didn't
Speaker 5: think that we would find them because they can get
Speaker 5: destroyed really easily.
Speaker 4: So that means that they.
Speaker 5: Were like resurfaced like pretty recently, which is really exciting,
Speaker 5: and that they were there at all was exciting that
Speaker 5: they could have formed.
Speaker 3: And so this was a heads up we have the
Speaker 3: ingredients to make life.
Speaker 5: We didn't find it yet, but we found the ingredients. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and that's a big deal. Yeah, especially a big deal
Speaker 5: that we found it at all, because like it's so
Speaker 5: easy for these things to be destroyed on the surface
Speaker 5: of Mars.
Speaker 4: Mars like surface is.
Speaker 5: Like subjects to a lot of radiation and then there's
Speaker 5: like lots of things on the surface that like oxidate
Speaker 5: oxidizing species or they're just kind of like not good
Speaker 5: for these molecules, and so we just like I don't
Speaker 5: think we expected that they would even still be there,
Speaker 5: and they were there.
Speaker 4: How did you react when you found out the news?
Speaker 5: And did you get a heads up like way before
Speaker 5: well that was like a curiosity rover like press release
Speaker 5: and so like I didn't know about that before.
Speaker 3: What did you How did you feel when you found
Speaker 3: out with your team?
Speaker 5: Uh, it's exciting, Like a lot of times when stuff
Speaker 5: like that, When when there's like an exciting like potential
Speaker 5: for astrobiology kind of thing coming out, what people do
Speaker 5: is like try to figure out how could it be wrong?
Speaker 5: Like to you know, kind of Okay, this is what
Speaker 5: it looks like, but could we explain it some other way?
Speaker 5: Like could we have screwed up or something? And so
Speaker 5: like a lot of times there's discussion about that like
Speaker 5: could it be actually a blip in the instrument or
Speaker 5: could it be something else? And so like that's like
Speaker 5: a hard discussion to go through, but it's like kind
Speaker 5: of a little interesting too. And so but then when
Speaker 5: all those things get like crossed off the list and
Speaker 5: like what's left is that it's actual detection, then it's exciting.
Speaker 3: I bet, because it's just like kind of incremental discoveries too,
Speaker 3: and you have another breakthrough, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like the methane, like their people propose like so
Speaker 5: many different ways. So like methane is a thing that
Speaker 5: like it doesn't survive a long time in the atmosphere,
Speaker 5: and so if it's there at all, like it had
Speaker 5: to have come from like relatively recent times. And it's
Speaker 5: like it's often a product of life, you know, like
Speaker 5: like they say, like.
Speaker 4: Cow farts and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: So we were like bacteria and so yeah, there people
Speaker 5: were like, oh man, uh, how can we explain this
Speaker 5: methane any other way other than like life. I don't
Speaker 5: think anyone's saying that it's like life making this methane.
Speaker 5: But there was like lots of debate like could the
Speaker 5: methane have come from something that we did, like from
Speaker 5: the tire breaking or the wheel braking or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it might just be an underground cavern of
Speaker 3: farting cows.
Speaker 5: Maybe you never know, Yeah, you don't know. I mean say,
Speaker 5: anything's possible.
Speaker 3: Just a cow emerges from a space cave being like,
Speaker 3: oh I didn't see that.
Speaker 5: The next rover the twenty twenty River has like a
Speaker 5: little microphone on it, does it really so it can
Speaker 5: loose into the surface of Mars and then maybe it'll hear.
Speaker 3: Like now, is it called the twenty twenty rover because
Speaker 3: they're gonna launch it in twenty twenty. Yeah, okay, that's
Speaker 3: that's cool. And it's also like clear vision.
Speaker 5: Yeah it's a catchy okay, but it's gonna it's gonna
Speaker 5: be named. Oh yeah, it's like a contest school children contest,
Speaker 5: Like they're gonna pick the name, like all I think
Speaker 5: all the rivers have been named like that.
Speaker 3: Oh that's such a cool distinction. Yeah, it's like, hey, kids,
Speaker 3: you're gonna inherit this planet once we turn into garbage,
Speaker 3: so you get to name the rovers for your next
Speaker 3: planet pretty much.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I have one million questions for you. Okay, is it
Speaker 3: okay if I ask you one million? Yeah, okay, so
Speaker 3: many questions. I love that you know you were a patron.
Speaker 5: You've looked at some of these Yeah, you've looked at
Speaker 5: all of them.
Speaker 4: The ones that were posted as of a few hours ago.
Speaker 5: Like this is what I want in someone who studies
Speaker 5: other planets. Is this level of like detail and preparation,
Speaker 5: Like this gives me faith in the space program.
Speaker 3: Okay, that is it for part one. You now have
Speaker 3: a primer on areology Mars the absolute gem of an Earthling,
Speaker 3: Jennifer Booze. So next week we come back with all
Speaker 3: kinds of very weird and awesome questions. We talk about habitability,
Speaker 3: more sci fi stuff. It's all the weird stuff next week.
Speaker 3: So to learn more about Jennifer and her work, visit
Speaker 3: j nnfr dot bz. It's her name, no vows. We
Speaker 3: are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram and I'll post
Speaker 3: some photos of me and Jennifer at Caltech recording this.
Speaker 3: I'm also at Ali Ward with one L on Twitter
Speaker 3: and Instagram. And thank you so much to Stephen Ray
Speaker 3: Morris for editing this literally the day that it goes up.
Speaker 3: I've been shooting on a new show for the past
Speaker 3: few weeks and have not had a lot of time
Speaker 3: for sleeping or eating or anything, and so Stephen, you're
Speaker 3: a trooper for helping me get this up on time.
Speaker 3: Thank you to the patrons at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 3: Ologies for the amazing Mars questions you asked next week.
Speaker 3: They are hilarious questions. You are going to want to
Speaker 3: hear them, trust me. Also, feel free to join if
Speaker 3: you like Little List twenty five cents an episode. Thank
Speaker 3: you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for running Ologiesmarch dot
Speaker 3: com for me, feel free to join the Facebook Ologies
Speaker 3: podcast group. Thank you Hannah Liippo and Aaron Talbert for
Speaker 3: running that You're Amazing theme song was written and performed
Speaker 3: by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, and if you
Speaker 3: stick around pass the credits. You know I tell a
Speaker 3: secret And this week, this week, I've freaked out because
Speaker 3: I've known Aaron Talbert since I was four, and I've
Speaker 3: been so crazy with early call times that I forgot
Speaker 3: her birthday on the twenty fifth, and I almost started crying.
Speaker 3: I texted her apologizing I'm so sorry. I was mortified,
Speaker 3: and she was like, bitch, my birthday is in January
Speaker 3: and I was like yeah, and she's like it's June.
Speaker 3: So happy early birthday next year, Aaron, And thank you
Speaker 3: for reminding me that it's not currently January and that
Speaker 3: I should probably get some sleep. Okay, come back next
Speaker 3: week for really weird Mars questions. It will make you
Speaker 3: one thousand percent more informed for your next cocktail party
Speaker 3: or capable of making the decision of which planet to
Speaker 3: live on if shit goes down here.
Speaker 6: Okayberbye hacadermatology, hobiology or doo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, zeriology, semnology.
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