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I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, t

I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, thank you for everything Jim! You'll always be our space grandpa <3) The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ). Here's a Web 1.0 page from the 90's on it, https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one. He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA. He also helped refocus NASA on the search for life on Mars. And as Chief Scientist, he started putting his weight behind terraforming Mars, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-ma... Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line. Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming. His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Why a mic? Is the atmosphere thick enough for sound to travel? Or to hear vibrations in the surface?
- dotnet00 1y ago
  Yep, it is enough to have sound: https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
- areoform 1y ago
  Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below). It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes. > the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the pumps, etc https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be. There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.
Yeul 1y ago
The only thing the current admin wants is to land on the moon again to beat the Chinese. I personally like ESA- they are purely in it for the science not flags.

paulryanrogers 1y ago

Why a mic? Is the atmosphere thick enough for sound to travel? Or to hear vibrations in the surface?

dotnet00 1y ago
Yep, it is enough to have sound: https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
areoform 1y ago
Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below). It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes. > the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the pumps, etc https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be. There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.

Yeul 1y ago

The only thing the current admin wants is to land on the moon again to beat the Chinese. I personally like ESA- they are purely in it for the science not flags.