Hi.
I am Jim Garvin—Chief Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
And I want to take you on a journey of the imagination into space.
Talking about how we bring back the information to space to understand this universe that
we live in.
And it all starts at Earth.
As we study our planet, get to know its vagaries, understand how its climate may react, we are
faced with a challenge.
Tremendous influx of information, 24/7, day/night information, that builds the state variables
for our planet.
We've been doing this for decades.
We are now poised to go into a stage of understanding so that we can predict.
And today, our mathematical models that describe our planet are partly data-limited.
We have some of the boundary conditions, but not all of them.
And as we collect more remote-sensing data about our planet, across the next decade,
we will need even more telecommunications bandwidth to paint a picture of how our planet
responds.
Because Earth is our point of departure.
It is where we live and it's how we understand other worlds out there—potentially, exoplanets
around other suns.
So it's our job, through an improving, growing space communications infrastructure, to bring
the data back from Earth.
In some cases, terabytes a day to understand this planet.
The other thing that's very important about the Earth is our planet lives in space.
We live in space.
As our planet lives in space, we need to be more situationally aware what space does to
our world.
We interact with the Sun, and we interact with the collisional debris of our solar system.
That cosmic collisional debris produces signatures in the climate record of our planet.
And yet, we are just literally at the precipice of understanding what is out there.
Today, we understand where our planet is collided with by pieces of asteroids and comets.
But we don't have good inventory of what they are.
And as we embark on a "Protect our Planet Initiative," we will need to do a census of
those objects, with space-based assets, that measure them, that see the ones we can't see
from our planet.
And open our eyes to their possibility.
So, one of the things we will need for space communications is higher bandwidth to better
communicate with what's happening to our own planet.
In addition, as we go to these small objects, we have a mission called "OSIRIS-REx" that
will be visiting the Bennu asteroid, returning samples of it by the early twenties.
We will need to interact with these objects.
Improved bandwidth of telecommunications will allow more informed interaction, better sampling,
better utilization, even redirecting of these objects.
These are some of the goals that NASA has where improved space telecommunications will
allow us to do more, better science, better engineering.
And then there's Mars, our brotherly planet.
Today, we've collected a mass of information about Mars, but it is incomplete.
It's a masterpiece unfinished.
We don't have 24/7 situational awareness for this world.
We don't have Google Mars for every square city block.
Today, we know Mars is changing.
It's a dramatic world.
An incredibly exciting one.
We can see in the images we have, signs of things on Mars that are actually moving, indicating
activity.
But we've covered less than a tenth of one percent at the kind of scales we need to see
these motions—to see what might be the eruption of fluids that will tell us where to look
under the surface of Mars and how the world works.
We also know where we need to go.
But today we are limited by just a few places where we have adequate remote sensing to plan
missions like the Curiosity Rover.
This is the Gale Crater.
After years of work with our Mars reconnaissance orbiter producing terabytes of data, we now
found one of just a handful of places that are well suited for asking questions.
Were there any signs of environments where past life could have existed on Mars?
Can we get there?
In fact, the Curiosity Mission, launched in late 2011, arriving in 2012, is an example
of a high-latency robotic solution to exploring Mars.
And after a long trip, Curiosity has given us that foothold on Mars.
And many of the aspects of that mission, challenging as they were, were fully autonomous.
No interaction, no direct telecommunications either with assets nearby or with people on
Earth.
As we move out to explore Mars, we'll need to do more.
One of the examples of what we've done so well is capture and document what we've done.
Here is a descent image, video, of landing on Mars from the Curiosity Rover.
But this data took months to return to Earth.
Imagine the telecommunications infrastructure that would allow us to return this descent
movie at 4 frames a second, at 20 frames a second, within a day, or within an hour.
We are a long way away from that capability today, and that is the kind of thing we are
going to need.
And as we look at the rock-scapes of Mars, and make difficult decisions with Curiosity
about where to drill, where to grind up the samples for internal ingesting for analysis
with the SAM instrument and CheMin instrument, these instruments that tell us analytically
how Mars works.
We're struck with a big problem: we can only get maybe 1 to 5 percent of the data we actually
collect on Mars back to Earth efficiently.
We're bandwidth limited even with the wonderful telecommunications system we have now.
We have to learn to do more if we are going to best use these assets to prepare the way
someday for better robots and then, of course, for human beings.
We're reminded of the Apollo program.
But we went to the Moon a long time ago.
We learned to do things on the Moon that were unimaginable—to drive across the Moon.
Today, we look at the Moon from orbiting spacecraft like our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
That, with a direct telecommunications link, can give us the ability to study the Moon
up close almost as if it were Earth.
And the Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter now has returned much of the Moon at a scales of 3
or 4 meters across.
It's the only world other than Earth we have that resolution, we have Google Moon.
As we think about going back to the Moon, with both robots and people to look at its
exquisite records, we'll need to do more.
And the Moon is a good test case, a good test particle, for how to do that as we choose
where to explore with human beings.
There's also Mercury, a challenging planet where we've made the first forays with the
Messenger Mission.
Again, a data-starved solution with a brilliant spacecraft mission designed by the Applied
Physics Lab that has shown its a whole new world.
Imagine with 100 times the bandwidth with what we would be learning about Mercury, faster.
Sometimes the pace of discovery is driven by the pace of data.
And then the planet Venus, an enigma looking for someone to solve, solve the problems with
this world.
A world with a gigantic atmosphere, a runaway greenhouse climate state, extreme heat, and
challenging environments at the surface.
A place where to do work there we'll need whole new approaches.
The imaging radar missions of the nineties produced a wonderful data set, the Magellan
Mission, that shows us Venus as it is today, but it's incomplete.
It's a masterpiece unfinished.
Imagine a telecommunications solution that would take these wonderful radar maps of Venus
you see us flying through now and improve the resolution by a factor of 100.
Today we see all of Venus at hundreds of meter scale.
Imagine seeing much of Venus at meter scale as if we were there.
That's the kind of scale we'll think we'll need as we study its surface and atmosphere,
to improve our understanding and ask ourselves:
"If the Earth were to loose its oceans, how would it evolve to be like a Venus?"
Our challenges in science are to be predictable and ask, "What if?"
And usually those are driven by having the data to produce boundary conditions for models
to explain.
Today we are also at Saturn, with the Cassini Mission.
We've been back to Jupiter with Galileo, we're going there with Juno.
These missions billions of kilometers from Earth are incredibly bandwidth limited.
Most of the satellites that we send there contain large 12- to 15- to 20-meter radio-telecommunications
dishes.
Most of the power is needed for just communicating at the level of signals that are no stronger
than a watt or two to produce wonderful data.
Cassini's done that now for almost 9 years.
And we can imagine what it would have been able to do had the bandwidth of telecommunications
in the Saturn system been as high as they are at Mars or at the Moon.
So again, what we could do versus what we can do is limited by our telecommunications
solutions today, many in which where invented in the sixties and seventies.
We're ready for a new era, an adaptable era, so that missions like Cassini, missions to
Mars, missions to look beyond into that outer universe can produce the data we need.
And then there's the Pluto mission.
As we look at the most outer reaches of our solar system and fly by these distant worlds,
these dwarf planets, we'll be returning just, you know, a smallest amount of information
we can possibly collect for a very short dwell-time.
Imagine if that bandwidth were increased by a factor of 10.
We would have so much more information about this whole part of the solar system we barely
understand.
We didn't even know it really existed other than Pluto just a few decades ago.
Our next mission to Mars, the Maven Mission, which will paint a picture of how the atmosphere
works, how it escapes, how it interacts with the Sun, the solar wind.
Again, this mission is an exquisite science mission, but it will not be carrying a camera.
Partly because the telecommunications infrastructure we have to get information back from Mars
is limiting.
It's limiting today.
We need to put it beyond a few megabits a second, to hundreds of megabits to HD quality
as we go to Mars.
And then there's the next telescopes we'll send, the James Webb Space Telescope being
our next foray as a time machine into the universe.
The Webb Telescope is an engineering marvel, being developed at Goddard, with partners
in Europe, across the country.
We will use direct telecommunications from Webb down to ground receiving stations here
on Earth, at White Sands and elsewhere, to allow the information flow to work, but again,
we'll be bandwidth limited.
The next-generation telescopes like Webb and beyond will need more communications to collect
more data, to see more of the universe at different temporal/spatial scales, to see
more of the stuff we're discovering:
The missing matter, the dark energy and dark matter, and even the planets.
So, our next steps to Mars, as well, will be critical, as we go back to the surface
with another kind of roving vehicle in the 2020 timeframe.
We will be collecting a whole new gateway dataset for the future, which will include,
in principle, the containment of samples to eventually be returned by robots and humans.
These are bold new steps.
So as we look back and look forward, we also look at human space flight and the legacy
of the Space Shuttle that carried us so long into space.
What will replace the Shuttle will be a Space Launch System with a capsule-based architecture
that will carry humans beings beyond low-Earth orbit.
And this Orion SLS System, which will carry us to kinds of destinations we have not been
to before, small bodies perhaps to the Moon and Mars, will need a space telecommunications
architecture that's different from Apollo.
More adaptable, higher bandwidth, more connections, more, different kinds of interfaces.
These will be critical to the future as we imagine humans going to places like Mars.
And whether this can happen in the thirties, or whenever, human beings to the Mars system,
human beings beyond even, will be one of the most challenging things we undertake as engineers
and scientists at NASA.
And building the telecommunication infrastructure to be aware, to buy the engineering data,
the decision-making data both at the spacecraft, at nearby assets and on the Earth, will be
essential.
We don't know how we are going to go but we do know this: our task is not so much to foresee
all the pathways in the future.
They are flexible, we will adapt to what we learn about ourselves in the universe.
But they are to enable that future.
Telecommunications is the great enabler.
Its brought the data back for the first 55 years of the space era, and it will be ready
to bring back the data for the next 55.
So our children's children will have that legacy.
It's our job to produce that.
NASA's job is to get the ideas to allow that to happen.
And so, the universe is not going to wait.
The more we send to explore it, the more data we'll require—the more new kinds of data—as
we learn to measure the unmeasurable, this will require a new telecommunications solutions.
So today, the answers is, let's communicate, let's navigate, and so that's our job.
Thank you.