Transcriber: Tracey J. Evans Reviewer: Denise RQ
Imagine standing there.
It's minus 70°C, a distant Sun with harsh radiation impinging on you,
soaring dust storms with highly abrasive particles,
which might even be toxic.
The air pressure about less than 1% of what we have here,
in the place we are sitting in here right now.
And the best of all,
your home is about 380 million km from here where you are standing now.
Welcome to Mars!
So, it's a world, of which a lot of us have a kind of distorted perspective,
mostly stemming from pictures like those, or this one,
where you realize Mars is a cold, dry, boring desert.
The thing is, this is a little bit tricky
because you have to understand that Mars is a highly diverse world.
It has canyons, mountains, ridges, polar caps, caves.
It's an adventurous place,
but that's not where to land the rover because it's too dangerous for the rover;
we're getting this kind of a distorted picture.
If you think of a boring dry dessert, that's totally wrong,
because the more we learn about the Red Planet,
the more we learn about its climate, its past,
its atmosphere, its subsurface,
there is one thing all those probes keep telling us over and over again,
all evidence suggests the one thing:
that Mars was much more like the Earth than it is nowadays.
It had a magnetic field, it had a higher atmospheric density,
it was warmer, basically, it might have looked just like this.
This is not the Earth.
This is how we imagine Mars about 3.5 billion years ago.
The bottom line is you could go deep sea diving
3.5 billion years ago in oceans 3 km deep on the Red planet.
Isn't that cool?
Of course then, if you do the numbers,
you say, well, Mars came into existence 4.6 billions years ago,
that means it had liquid water for about 1 billion years,
that's about 4 times the amount of time on the Earth
the life took to develop.
The big one million dollar question is,
if life ever arose on Mars,
and that's where my day job comes in.
I've got probably one of the coolest pick-up lines in a bar,
saying, "Oh, what did you do today?"
"I'm building spacecraft for searching for aliens.
I am not being paid for that as well."
That's cool.
First, you have to learn to ask the right questions:
If you look for life, what are you looking for?
What is the smallest building block for life you could imagine,
biological precipitated material,
cell wall fragments, DNA fragments, biomarker molecules?
What is it that differentiates life from, for example geological features?
If you have to find a question, you need the tools for this.
Where do you look? What kind of instruments do you use?
What kind of workflows do you follow?
And that's where my daywork comes in, in form of this lady.
Not the lady inside, but the lady itself.
That's Aouda.X.
Aouda is a 45 kg experimental spacecraft simulator.
It takes about three hours to put it on.
It's a wearable ecological system, so to say,
you can eat, you can drink in the system,
you can take a leak in this if you have to.
You can talk to the crew, they are [ unclear] control.
For example, I brought an example, a part of the middle gloves here.
You get the chance to try them on, actually, in the break.
Make sure you have some idea
of how to bind your shoelaces with the spacesuit gloves on.
That's the first thing our analog astronauts learn.
Well, Aouda is a name of a princess, an Indian one, some of you might know.
Jules Verne and his novel, "Journey around the world in 80 days"
that's the princess he marries in the end.
She is like a princess to me as well.
She is nice to look at, but she can be high maintenance.
"X" stands for experimental.
We are not just building a suit since many years ago,
in the Austrian Space Forum, but we're also putting it to test.
What kind of small things you can do with your hands?
What are the breaking points for the suit?
We will put it into a cryo chamber at minus 110°C
and see if the suit test run is doing fine.
You use, overuse it.
We see where it breaks and then make it better and get out again.
We love to have the dirt below our fingernails.
We not only develop the suit itself,
we put it to trial into somewhat representative areas on this very planet.
The idea behind is that for example here, this picture was taken
in the Dachstein ice cave in upper Austria.
That's an area that it doesn't look like the Mars pictures you're used to,
but the thing is
we have very good reasons to believe there are Martian caves.
[For] about ten years we are pretty sure they are there.
And caves would be a natural point for retreating if life ever arose on Mars,
and then the environmental parameters
were getting worse and worse on the planet.
Because there is radiation shielding, you don't have micrometer [riots],
you have a very benign temperature stability environment.
If life ever arose on Mars,
it would probably be surviving the last in those caves.
We call them the so called "swan-sea ecological niches,"
the last songs of life on a dying planet.
We go there, we put it to the test together with actual georadars
which is slated for launch at the Exo-Mars Mission, the WISDOM radar,
and put our radar beams right into the ice hundreds of years old,
look what's been beneath,
together with a space suit which is actually operating the radar, for example.
We will go to strange places
which somewhat look like a Martian surface,
like here in Rio Tinto in Southern Spain where we're...
This is actually probably the most expensive car
I have ever been driving, 1.4 million euros,
after ten years of development time,
this was the first time I had the chance to go out in the open.
It's much more than a car,
it has obviously two robotic arms with 7 degrees of freedom.
You can talk to the machine, so it's a fairly intelligent thing.
We are far beyond that old quasi religious debate
of sending robots versus humans to Mars.
It always sounded like a war going on
between the robotics and the human space communities.
No, we're saying, "Send them both,"
because they both have their distinctive advantages
which can be used if you have a clever flight planning.
Robots should certainly be, or something like robots,
hopefully on board one day when we go to Mars.
And speaking of going to Mars...
Usually, I say: "If it's blue sky it's the Earth,
[if] it's reddish sky, it's Mars."
That's true, sometimes.
The left picture was taken on February 15, last year in Morocco,
close to the Algerian border, in the north of Sahara after a dust storm.
And even here, the atmosphere doesn't look blueish anymore
because so much dust is in the air.
On the right side, that picture was taken just one week before
at Mount Sharp where the Mars science laboratory had landed.
These were pictures just one week apart, but two worlds apart.
We are going to areas, even if you show those pictures to specialists,
it will be hard for them to differentiate
which picture is which if you don't have the writing there.
We are going to places where without much effort,
you could actually imagine what it's like to stand on the surface of Mars.
One of the biggest privileges I have in my career is
I get a sneak preview of the future by doing stuff
and getting again the dirt under the fingernails, so to say.
I am not doing this alone.
There is a huge team behind this in the Austrian Space Forum.
Pretty much everybody is a volunteer.
For example, this is a picture
from our flight control and mission support center.
We have flight planners, we have remote science support specialists,
we have media people, we have lawyers - we need them.
We have psychologists, biomedical engineers;
we have more than 100 people from 23 nations taking part in missions,
actually three of them are right here in the audience,
participating here as well
and I hope, they identify themselves at the end of the break.
You need those people, you need the workforce,
you need a lot of training.
We had more than two years of preparation before we were going to Morocco
to make sure everything goes according to the plans.
That's what a typical day looks like. That's the flight plan.
Some people tend to call it a "fight" plan.
It's one of the two natural enemies of the astronaut,
the other one is sand and dust;
the other one is the fight plan.
No, seriously, this is defined months in advance, so, we know very precisely
who is going to do what at which time of the day
to perform which kind of experiment.
Speaking of those, if you go to the desert, you need a big base camp.
That's an infrastructure we had to bring up there.
We had to build up our own broadband wireless system
in the middle of the desert,
making sure no camels would run over it during the night, for example.
The things which are not really Mars-like, but you have to count for them as well.
You have beautiful night skies, obviously.
We had two fly overs from the International Space Station,
and the second fly over with a live link to Commander Chris Hadfield at the station
and talking from explorer team to explorer team
what our days would look like, for example.
We were having a lot of robotic vehicles with us.
Again, this is the Magma Rover from the Polish Mars Society,
together with my little thing here called the L.I.F.E. laser.
It's a biomarker fluorescent laser
with which we are looking for bio-molecules in the desert.
And we found quite some life in the desert, I have to say.
This is the Puli rover, actually, it's on the wrong planet,
it's from the Google Lunar XPRIZE team,
it's supposed to go to the Moon, but it made a detour over Mars in Morocco;
even hasn't wheels, it's called 'whegs, ' mixture of wheels and legs.
It can climb over steep terrain,
and it's pretty cool watching it going over the rocks.
We were going into no long range [expressions].
This is a scientific experiment, it just looks like fun. (Laughter)
This was for finding the perfect trajectories
for approaching sort of sample sites.
I always say that fun in science, is always compatible.
We were looking to what happens if something is going wrong:
you sprain an ankle, you break a toe.
We were looking at the contingency scenarios
like, for example, in Austria, when you go to the mountains, you get stuck,
you always have your rescue tent with you.
We do this Martian style together with the Technical University of Vienna,
of having an inflatable [tent].
It's about a size of a car wheel, and if you get stuck,
because you break your toe,
you unzip it, you push the right buttons
and it goes like floop, floop, floop, floop,
and you have this one.
You open the pressure bottle and you have an inflatable survival tent.
With hydraulics you can even make a couch, a table or so, inside.
You close it, you seal it, you can take off your helmet,
and hope for help on the next day, for example.
We're thinking out of the box.
Replacing GPS on Mars with our own system, for example.
This is a picture I always call 'CSI Mars.'
It's for investigating contamination issues
to make sure you can take the samples in a certain way.
And, of course
no, we are not making explode the right leg of the astronaut;
this is what I heard once.
This brings me to the probably most important part to communicate to you,
and that is: yes, we are doing serious science.
There is just a special edition of the Astrobiology Journal coming out
very soon, with the scientific results of that mission.
But we're also trying to communicate the fact
that these are humans who are doing those explorations.
When we come to think of spacecraft and spaceflight,
we always think of people in white lab coats in a quasi sterile environment
when they are doing the last screws before they fly up with the rocket.
In reality, it means for those missions,
you have people in the suit who are highly trained.
They are sweating in the suit, they are anxious sometimes
because their life depends on the simulated suit that it works,
and you want to tell their story.
Like the famous North African explorer
almost a millennium ago, Ibn Battuta said:
"Traveling makes you speechless, and then turns you into a storyteller."
Why are we doing those things? Why are we investing so much?
Why we are taking those risks for a mission
where we probably are even too old to participate in 30 years from now.
I strongly believe the first human to walk on Mars is already born
and might be watching this on a live stream right now
and going to an elementary school in Beijing.
This is the Earth seen from Mars,
and one day, there will be people standing
and seeing exactly that kind of picture right after sunset.
Why we are doing this?
It is not for creating
a 21st century equivalent of the pyramids,
or constructing a monument of technology.
No, it's much more.
It's a catalyst, a very effective catalyst
like building kind of a... almost a Rosetta stone
for unlocking and unleashing
dreams as yet undreamed.
Thank you.
(Applause)