Welcome to Watch this Space.
I'm NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
Today I want to start by celebrating the amazing
accomplishments of our Opportunity rover on Mars.
Originally planned for just 90-days, Opportunity
explored the Red Planet for an astonishing
15-years.
Along with its sister rover Spirit, which also
far outlived its original mission, Opportunity
brought us new discoveries about our planetary
neighbor that will inform future robotic missions
and even human missions to Mars.
We gave an update on the mission February
thirteenth at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Last night the team made its final planned
commands.
At the time part of the team went up to Mission
Control to send up more commands to ask the rover
to respond.
One-way light time is about thirteen and a half
minutes.
It took thirteen and a half minutes to get a
signal up to Mars and if the rover did respond it
would take another thirteen and a half
minutes to come back.
To find out more on what the outcome was from last
night, I'd like to introduce you to the panel
right now.
We begin with introductions, our JPL
Director, Mike Watkins, the NASA Administrator Jim
Bridenstine, and also the Associate Administrator
Thomas Zurbuchen.
Thomas we'll start with you.
Thank you so much, I was there yesterday and I was
there with the team as these commands went out
into the deep sky, and I learned this morning that
we had not heard back.
And our Opportunity remained silent.
It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense
of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare
that the Opportunity mission as complete.
And with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission
as complete.
This is a celebration of so many achievements.
I'll just start by saying that when this little
rover landed, the objective was to have it
be able to move eleven hundred yards and
survive for ninety days on Mars, ninety SOLs.
And instead here we are fourteen years later,
after twenty-eight miles of travel and today we get
to celebrate the end of this mission.
So its an honor for me as the NASA administrator to
come out here to this amazing facility with so
many amazingly talented people to say thank you
for your great work, not just for our country, but
for the science that people are going to be
benefitting all over the world, their going to be
benefitting from this science for years to come.
Spirit and Opportunity may be gone, but they leave us
a legacy, and that's a legacy of a new paradigm
for solar system exploration.
A robotic geologist on Mars and an integrated
science and engineering operations team here on Earth
all set out together on a mission of discovery.
They didn't know what they would find, they didn't
know which direction they would go, sometimes from
one day to the next, and they made it work.
And they made it work longer than any of us
thought possible, by both brilliant scientific
deduction of where to go, and brilliant engineering
to keep the rovers alive.
Cheering!
Opportunity hit a hole-in-one when she landed.
The airbag system rolled into this small crater
called Eagle Crater, and when the rover first
turned on its cameras, it saw that the rim of the of
the small crater was lined with exposed bedrock.
So we took out our microscope for the first
time and we took a picture and the surface of Mars at
that location is littered with an uncountable number
of little round things.
They were called blueberries because they
looked like blueberries in a muffin.
What we discovered was that those are features
that form in water and they were a really
definitive sign that there had been liquid water on
the surface of Mars sometime in the past.
And after we left Eagle Crater we went to
Endurance Crater and that's the crater that we
drove down in.
And there we did what the geologist call and
in-sequence stratographic section.
Which is essentially reading the chapters of
the Martian history book in reverse order.
That rover became a stratigrapher.
The first time we had a stratigrapher on Mars.
We knew we wanted to go after Endurance to
Victoria.
We put pedal to the metal and we started heading
there, tens of kilometers away.
We had to literally surf across these dunes of
windblown material and the rover got stuck in one of
those.
We had to get the rover unstuck.
What we found is that the best way to get it out is
just to put it into reverse and gun it.
The rover eventually popped out.
And so we changed our driving strategy so we
recognized these ripples as hazards.
We get to this giant half-mile diameter crater,
Victoria Crater, and we want to figure out, gee,
how can we go into this thing?
All the sudden we got HiRISE images.
We could see the rover in the image.
And that was the very first image that we got,
from space, showing one of our rovers.
We spent a year scouting the edge of that crater to
decide where we wanted to go in to get the best
stratographic section.
We found a place to go in and we drove down in.
We spent about a year inside Victoria Crater.
The science team was really excited about the
idea of driving to Endeavour Crater, over
twenty kilometers away.
That was a long drive to do.
It was going to take multiple years, but they
decided to do it anyway.
There were too many of these dangerous ripples in
our way and we actually had to take this
circuitous route that at times took us away from
the crater only then to cut back and then approach
it more directly.
And then we pull up to Endeavour Crater and all
the sudden there's all these new things to look
at.
We first discovered the Homestake vein.
It was this very, very bright linear feature.
It turns out that there was a big gypsum vein and
we see these gypsum veins now all over.
So it was our first taste of what was a really
important process on Mars.
We were driving to a valley and along the way
there we realized that right about the point we
were about to get to this valley that was when we
were going to cross the marathon mark.
So we said "Well that's cool.
We're just going to name this valley after that,
call it Marathon Valley."
That was when we reached the distance of a
marathon, twenty-six point two miles on another
planet.
We continued driving through some slopes down a
little bit on the interior of the crater rim until we
came back out so we could continue on to the next
valley, Perseverance Valley, where the rover
was exploring when we lost contact.
We said we are going to operate this vehicle until
the day where we can't, and that's exactly what we
did and I'm really proud.
We set a foundation that will serve as the basis
for future exploration.
NASA is committed to sending humans forward to
the Moon in the next decade, and this time,
we're going to stay.
We want to establish a permanent, sustainable
presence beyond Earth as we push farther into the
solar system.
To do that, we're going to need the next generation
of lunar landers.
We've already kicked off that process, and we held
an industry day at NASA Headquarters on February
fourteenth to discuss the next steps.
♪ ♪
Today we're highlighting a broad agency announcement
about putting humans back on the surface of the
Moon.
And of course you're here today because one of your,
your company is interested in participating in this
activity.
And we're very interested in your participation in a
way that maybe historically NASA hasn't
involved commercial industry in the way we're
involving it today.
And I'm going to tell you why we are doing it.
The President issued what we call Space Policy
Directive One.
It says that we are going to go back to the Moon,
and I like to say we are going to go forward to the
Moon.
We're going to go to the Moon in a way that we have
never gone to the Moon before.
We are going to go with international partners.
We are going to go with commercial partners.
And here's the key element, we are going to
go sustainably.
In other words, this time when we go to the Moon, we
are going to stay.
We're not going back to the Moon to leave flags
and footprints and then not go back for another
fifty years, we're going to go sustainably, to
stay.
With landers and robots and rovers and humans and
that's what we are here to talk about today.
We're going to put humans on the surface of the
Moon.
We're going to build an architecture where we can
go back and forth again and again and again.
Another piece of Space Policy Directive One is
actually using the resources of the Moon.
It was discovered back in 2008 that there was
potentially water ice on the surface of the Moon.
In 2009 NASA did a study and we've now discovered
that there's hundreds of billions of tons of water
ice on the surface of the Moon.
So, new American policy, we're going to utilize the
resources of the Moon.
Water ice represents oxygen, air to breath.
It represents water to drink, in other words,
life support.
But it also represents rocket fuel, hydrogen and
oxygen is the same fuel that powers the Space
Shuttle.
So all of that is abundant in hundreds of billions of
tons at the poles of the Moon.
So we're going to back to the Moon, we're going to
go forward to the Moon, we're going to go with
international partners, and with commercial
partners, we're going to go sustainably.
We're going to utilize the resources of the Moon.
We're going to retire risk.
We're going to prove technology.
And then we are going to take as much of this as
possible and replicate it at Mars.
And this all part of the President's Space Policy
Directive One, that we here at NASA are charged
with moving out on.
And friends, we're moving out very quickly.
This is the beginning where we really want, Jim
and I wanted to kick off and kind of show you the
bigger architecture the things we're planning and
how we think this is very different that what we did
before when we went to the Moon with humans.
This really sustainable, this is going to be fast,
we are going to need the best and brightest from
you in industry, we're going to need the best and
brightest from the international partner
community to pull all this off.
And we've got a great plan to do this.
It all fits under Space Policy Directive One with
sustainability, it fits under that.
Win cooperation with industry, commercial
partners and also international partners.
I want to thank the entire NASA family for their hard
work as we push the boundaries of human
exploration, As we make new discoveries about our
Earth, our solar system and the universe beyond,
as we improve flight, and as we innovate new technologies.
It's an exciting time and there's a lot on our
plate, but I know we'll continue to rise to the
challenge.
Thank you again for watching. Check out
nasa.gov/watchthisspace and follow me on Twitter
@JimBridenstine.
Ad Astra.
♪ ♪