Jim Bell: ASU's been involved in NASA space exploration missions for as long as
NASA's been around. One of the attractions of coming to ASU was the
history, the heritage, the, you know, the great work that had
been done by faculty and staff who'd been here a lot longer than me.
The late Ron Greeley was instrumental in helping to train some of the astronauts
and come up with the ... the plans for the lunar orbiters and the surveyor missions
and process some of that data and help to do the mapping that selected the
Apollo landing sites and try to figure out the geology of what's going
on in those places. Early Mars missions, Mercury missions, Venus missions, you know,
going back to the '60s and '70s. Phil Christensen picked up a lot of that
mantle with his incredibly successful program, mostly infrared instruments.
Mark Robinson and his group photographing the moon for a decade from up close and
really revolutionizing lunar science — sharing that data with the public.
Most of us on campus are not involved — here — are not involved in the human
exploration program, only secondarily. The history that ASU has is really on the robotics side.
Chris Hardgrove: LunaH-Map will be one of the next batch of deep space cubesats.
It's not a large data set, so we need to, you know, we need to build that data set
of missions that have the ability to execute a science mission in deep space.
Moving forward, beyond sort of LunaH-Map, I hope that this is the start of these
secondary ride-alongs. You know, if NASA wants to go to Mars, there might be 10, 20
slots for small, individual, independent spacecraft that can conduct their own
science mission, either at Mars or go elsewhere and conduct some type of
mission that has this high-risk, high-reward science return.
Jim Bell: I've been working with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which were very successful, the
Curiosity rover, which is still going on Mars, and of course we're building the
cameras for the new Mars 2020 rover, which doesn't have a name yet.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Working on Psyche mission is a crazy pleasure, and our team is now up over 600 people.
We're scattered all around: We're at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Maxar and
we're at different universities and we're a bunch of private companies. So much of
the reason that we know how to put together complicated missions like
this was learned through the Apollo system. And when you think about it, how
did we as humans figure out how to build a system that's so complicated that no
single person understands it and yet it has to work flawlessly? In this day and
age, we really believe and understand the value of diverse teams, and so that's one
of the pleasures we're going to see as we return to the moon again is there
are gonna be all kinds of people going to the moon, not just the men, the heroes of
the Apollo era. Now everybody gets to be a hero.
Mark Robinson: At ASU, we thought, "Well, if we're going back to the moon, we're going to need to train astronauts
again." So what we're doing is we're building — and it's done — an Earth
equivalent of a lunar rover to train astronauts to work on the moon. And ours
is called Tycho, after the Tycho crater. Tycho has more capability: The tires can
rotate 90 degrees so it can crab-walk, and there's other capabilities that
Grover didn't have. We could test it here, but up in Flagstaff we can go to
areas where they trained Apollo astronauts, show off the capabilities of
this new rover. Ultimately, we're talking with folks at Johnson Space Center and
they want to borrow it. They will be able to be driven remotely by someone on the
Earth or maybe even someone in orbit around the moon. We have to learn how to
control it, because we've never built anything like
this before. So it's a learning process. It's great to see it moving.
Jim Bell: It's just a great environment for faculty colleagues who are working literally all over the
solar system, staff supporting all that activity and students who are doing
their thesis work or capstone project work, laboratory work, meteorite work — just
the breadth of the work that goes on here in planetary exploration at ASU is
remarkable.