Sample Return Missions - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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I'm Professor Noel Fitzpatrick and as a vet I know you want the best care for your animal companion. Pet insurance can help but you need to choose wisely as not all policies are the same. Pet plan aimed to pay claims quickly and without a fuss and that's one reason why so many vets work with them. Get your pet the best veterinary care. Save 10% on new policies when you insure at petplan.co.uk. T's and C's apply fits all media as an appointed representative of Pet Plan Limited. She on your desk? Yeah she's on my desk. Helpful. I mean good sound proofing. Yeah sure. Yeah if she just stays there that'll be fine. Yeah she'll be up again. Anyway. Okay hold on a sec. Okay whenever you're ready. Earth and Mars have dare I say it been sharing spit for billions of years so that should influence our perception of the risk. It's kind of like an all in one package of stuff that can perhaps help life to start. Where's Bruce Willis when you need him? Yeah. Hello and welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smeddus. Thank you everything okay over there? So the meow you can hear is my cat who's not happy that I'm not playing with her. Anyway enough about cats. This month it's all about sample returns. We're travelling all over the place from asteroids and comets to the moon and Mars. We've got a lot to cram into one little show though as we'll see how we get on. Yeah we'll try our best we'll see what happens. Dr Robert Massey the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here too. So Robert why are sample return missions important? Yeah I mean this is like you know most people think about space and astronomy together and I think that's completely fair and I think of astronomy as you know the oldest form of space exploration and one of the oldest sciences too. And most of the time we have to make maximum use of this little bit of light or other signal we're getting from some incredibly distant object like you know distant stars galaxies and obviously black holes but in the solar system we can do that in situ sampling. We can send spacecraft to planets, moons and asteroids and some of the time they can land on their surfaces and some of the time they can even bring chunks of those things back to Earth and that's much more beneficial because on a spacecraft any kind of lab even if you land on the surface like a Mars rover the instruments you have are set after launch you obviously can't change them once the thing's on its way but if we have those samples in an Earth based lab then we can do that. So for example some of the Apollo samples some 50 years ago are still valuable because the techniques have improved in the meantime and it's better also than testing things like meteorites that are samples of other things that fall to Earth because we've got much more control over that kind of processing because a meteorite coming in through the Earth's atmosphere well first of all it's probably been in space for millions of years so it will have been affected by the Sun's radiation and all those things. It'll be in better shape if it's come from the planetary surface or more representative of that surface than if it's travelled through space and burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere you know that's clearly a pretty violent thing to do to it and I just love the fact that we've got samples here from the Moon from very soon hopefully from Mars from asteroids and comets and even you know the one that we tend to forget about is we've got a little bit of solar wind samples as well in the Genesis mission which was almost a disaster actually crash landed on Earth but they were still able to retrieve these bits of solar wind back in 2001. Yeah and I think that was the hard thing about finding stories for this episode because I'm like what do we talk about there are so many different ways that we could go through this but yeah there's a lot to cover. I feel like that should be the tagline of the show though that the Genesis mission was largely considered a disaster. A disaster but what is it was coming back from the dead wasn't it it was just brilliant you know the fact that it was science. It sounds like something from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy right that was why they regarded it as a bad idea. Anyway cheers Robert we'll catch it with you later for some more questions and this one's still gazing tips. Now sample return missions are difficult possibly twice as difficult if not more than any other mission not only do they have to get to their target destination but they also have to get back to Earth again as well. Yeah so Osiris Rex launched in 2016 and was the first US mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. It returned to Earth on September 24th 2023 to drop off a capsule with material from an asteroid named Bennu and the results are in. I spoke with Dr Sarah Russell a meteorite researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who is also the deputy mission sample scientist among many other roles and she started by explaining how the aim of the mission is actually embedded in its name. Osiris Rex is an acronym for the main science aims and the O's is the most important name that stands for origins it's all about learning about the beginning of our solar system and we're doing that by going to an asteroid that we think originated right at the beginning of the solar system and can tell us about what the environment was like at that time visiting an asteroid that may be similar to ones that impacted the early Earth so it could tell us what was hitting the early Earth as well and so it could tell us all these things about our own origins that was the main thing. The S and I is about spectral interpretation so that's comparing data that we can get from asteroids from Earth to data that we can get in space and data that we can get with the return sample as well by comparing all those it will help us learn more about all the other asteroids out there as well and then RI was resource identification seeing if there's anything valuable inside asteroids that we could potentially perhaps use to mine in the future and then the final S is about security so the target of the mission is an asteroid called Bennu is a near Earth asteroid that has a very small chance of hitting the Earth in the future and we wanted to learn more about how it moved and how similar asteroids moved as well which can help us in the future assess potentially hazardous asteroids. How do you actually get to an asteroid and then collect those samples that then have to make their way back to Earth? What is that process? How does it work? Yeah with great difficulty and I had so much respect for the engineers. Yeah the engineers on this mission who designed this are absolute geniuses it was absolutely amazing so first of all Bennu is really too small to have any proper gravity so it wasn't properly in orbit around Bennu it was flying along it so it's like sort of a red arrow but millions and millions of miles away flying around it and then the sampling itself was what's called a touch and go which means that of the seven-year mission it was just a few seconds of terror involved in actually collecting the samples so an arm from the spacecraft went down and touched surface of the asteroid and collected the sample and that was actually even more terrifying than we were actually expecting because we thought the asteroid would be like a solid surface but actually it has almost no strength at all it's like a ball pit and the arm of the spacecraft just went straight through and it was only because it had some thrusters on it that it actually managed to get out at all. Oh wow yeah scary and so how much is collected on a mission like that? What size sample are you able to get? Yeah so the aim of the mission was to get at least 60 grams and we nailed that we got 121 grams so some people say it's not very much but actually it's the biggest sample return mission from beyond the moon so it's a lot to us because we analyze it sort of tiny grain by tiny grain it's actually loads. Yeah and so then so it collects this sample how does it then get back to earth and how scary is that process for you as someone that's on the team? Yeah that's that's scary yeah there was another sample return mission called Genesis where the parachute didn't open properly and so our biggest horrible fear was that would happen on this time but it didn't it worked like a dream everything was fine so the spacecraft dropped capsule at the top of the atmosphere spacecraft now has actually gone off to explore other asteroids. And how do you make sure that that sample stays protected on that return mission? What special measures have to go into making sure that your sample isn't contaminated? Yeah so we wanted to make sure that the sample container stayed intact which luckily it did because it didn't crash and then it was the sample container was taken straight to the Johnson Space Center so it arrived there the next day and it was transferred to a glove box. I think other glove boxes in your car just like yes we popped in the glove box. I know it sounds like glove box in the car but this is literally a box with like gloves on it so that you can put your hands through and deal with it but so the sample is being kept in a nitrogen only atmosphere and that means that it never comes into contact with the air from the earth that means it it's hopefully the reactions that it will undergo be greatly minimized. And we're at this really exciting point where you've been doing tests on these samples and we've got some results so let's start with the process first what are the tests that you're running on these samples and I suppose what are the samples they're just you know dust and rock and minerals to some extent. Yeah if you imagine you grab a handful of a rocky beach that's what you've got so it's we've got a few pebbles that are centimeter sized it's mostly much more fine grain than that sort of millimeter size grains and it's mostly black looks black doesn't look very interesting to be honest with you but that's what we had to deal with and we split up into teams so the sample analysis team is made up of hundreds of scientists across the world and we divided into sub teams so I was in the mineralogy team so I was looking at what the minerals and the rocks were made of but we also have an organics team focusing on the organic components and a physical properties team and a chemistry team. Okay and so yeah what what are the tests that you run on this? So what we were doing in the mineralogy team we were taking each tiny grain and we were CT scanning it so where you might do a CT scan in a hospital which sort of showed us what the inside structure was and then we put it in our electron microscope to see what it looked like at a really fine scale and that also enabled us to do some chemical tests as well so we could see what elements were present and we could also do other tests as well like x-ray diffraction which tells us what the structure of the minerals inside there was. And what did you find? So what we found was that the rock was made mostly of clay minerals which is kind of what we were expecting so when we looked at the asteroid from space we thought we could see the presence of water and the best way to kind of preserve water in a rock like this is in the form of clay minerals that can absorb that into their structure but the thing that really surprised us that we weren't expecting is that we saw this whole range of salt minerals so these included carbonate minerals like calcium carbonate also sodium carbonate, phosphates we found this very unusual sodium magnesium phosphate and we also found sodium chloride table salts and potassium chloride so we found this kind of whole array of minerals that we weren't really expecting because we don't really see them on meteorites and we think that's because when every meteorite comes through the earth's atmosphere and it's exposed to the humidity of earth and it's kind of delicate soluble salts will just disappear. And so what does that actually tell us because this mission is all about understanding our early solar system so what can we glean from all of those samples and understanding those minerals? Yes so we were really excited to see the salts because it reminded us of a rock type on earth called evaporites and these are formed when maybe a lake becomes really hot and the water evaporates away and leaves behind a sequence of salts and so these are fairly well understood they're often used for mining and that sort of thing on on earth these deposits so we could use that to sort of say what kind of water was there before so we think that there was alkaline salty room temperature water that was present not on the surface of the asteroid because it would just immediately evaporate but in kind of pods of water underneath the surface and that was really exciting for a couple of reasons so firstly we think we see these kind of briny water in other places in the solar system too there's salt deposits on series that may have formed by briny water and cellar dust has got spurts of material coming out that probably comes from a brine as well so we think that maybe we've seen this evidence for stuff that happens actually over the solar system so on the earth's surface evaporites are quite rare and usual but maybe they're really common in our solar system so they might be telling us about this universal geological process and the other exciting thing is that brines are great places to grow organic molecules so the organic molecules will probably quite simple at the beginning of the solar system but after they've been experienced these salts and this water that could enable more things to grow and while we were doing our mineralogy study our organics colleagues were looking at what organics were there and they found some really exciting array of organics so they found amino acids including 15 out of 20 of the amino acids found in life they found all five of the nuclear bases that are used in RNA and DNA so this makes us think that maybe asteroids like Bennu in the beginning of the solar system would have rained down on the early earth not just earth Mars as well and could have brought all of this stuff to the earth so it would have brought water would have brought all these interesting organic molecules also phosphates that can help act as a fertilizer as well so it's kind of like an all-in-one package of stuff that can perhaps help life to start. Thank you to Dr Sarah Russell from the Natural History Museum in London so we spoke a lot about the minerals of Bennu but as Sarah mentioned part of the sample mission was to understand the asteroid's movement and you know potential threat towards earth so do we have any results on that part of the mission yet? Yeah there have been a few papers on that so calculating this risk of impact that we have between Bennu and the earth and also some sort of climate modelling has been done in case of impacts as well just so we could better understand it so I'll start by saying that any possible but unlikely impact is way way in the future right we're talking late next century so nothing for sort of us to worry about in the near term here but therein lies the problem with it being so far away this risk because we know Bennu's orbit to some accuracy and we know that earth's orbit to much higher accuracy to be fair but then what we have to do is extrapolate those orbits way way into the future and so any tiny uncertainties you have now just get massively inflated as you go anywhere into the future right they just balloon the further out you go in time right and so the most significant percent chance of impact is going to occur in September 2182 okay with a current probability impact of 0.037 percent which is like a 1 in 2700 chance right so the probability is low and it's way off right it's more likely the asteroid is going to be somewhere else in that region of uncertainty right at the time and just fly past earth but the chance is not zero currently yeah right Bennu is considered one of the most hazardous objects of the known asteroids again it was why it was chosen for the SI-RES-REx mission as well and so because of its size at like 500 meters wide it's about 1600 feet just for some context right I want to give you sort of like okay the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was more like 10 to 15 kilometers wide yeah six to 10 miles so we're not talking anything like that kind of size it's a lot smaller than that so the impact if it did actually impact with birth then subsequent impact wouldn't be as bad as catastrophic yeah exactly like it still would be a huge area of devastation forever it hit obviously there would be an impact on the climate so there's been a lot of studies that have looked at what that impact would be in fact there was a paper that came out just this month February 2025 looking at this because obviously you're going to throw dust up into the atmosphere that's going to block the sun and change everything that's going on yeah so they found in this paper that it would be 400 000 tons of dust in the atmosphere it would lead to a global dropping temperatures on average of about four degrees celsius and then a 15 drop in the amount of precipitation and you'd obviously then get the subsequent drops in photosynthesis and like the productivity of like marine life and land life and things like that so a little decline yeah yeah so life on earth would take a bit of a beating and obviously you have to adapt and while this isn't a problem for our generation just rest assured that you know scientists are still keeping an eye on this obviously you're going to improve our estimates of orbits so it's being monitored right and i'm not losing any sleep over this right because the percentage chance is very low and it's much more likely that it's going to be somewhere else and just fly past earth quite close instead okay but what i think was really interesting about this mission is that the spacecraft has now gone off to explore another asteroid so it's been renamed acyrus apex so what's next for this mission yeah i mean i love this it's like waste not want not like that's a very good at doing this it repurposing stuff and you know they returned the sample without acyrus rex actually coming back to earth it looped round earth and just sort of jettisoned the sample back to the atmosphere and it parachuted down yeah i'm on my way and shut this back at you you know so it was absolutely it was great that they did this and so now it's heading out to an asteroid called apophis which is a similar size to beno it's about 450 meters wide and for those not familiar apophis is particularly infamous because back in december 2004 that was when initially it was discovered our uncertainties on apophis's orbit weren't great they were quite big which gave it a 2.7 chance that apophis would impact earth on friday the 13th of april 2029 i'm sure the media loved that one yeah i think the reason for its infamy was probably fueled by the fact that it might have impacted on friday the 13th yes exactly it didn't really it really didn't help with the fear mongering at the time but as i said with these things we get more observations our uncertainties on the orbit come down and so we know a better we know better where it's going to be in the next couple of years and you know out to hundreds of years in the future as well and so we now know that in 2029 that's not going to happen instead we're just going to get a really cool close flyby of apophis about 30 000 kilometers that's 10 times closer than the moon that this asteroid's going to come it's going to be the closest that you know an old asteroid's come to the earth ever in human recorded history right so it's going to be a really fun thing to spot in the sky rather than you know something to worry about and so i think it's great that you know a cyrus rex has been redubbed to cyrus apex to go and study apophis it's actually going to like rendezvous with it in april 2029 so just a few days after that really close approach to earth and it's then going to study the asteroid for about 18 months and once again sort of approach the surface fire it's just us to throw up material so we can learn more about what apophis is made of because you know we have to kind of question things like you know is it just certain types of asteroids that end up coming into the inner solar system do they have the same you know ingredients for life like spin detected on benu as announced this past month as well you know like amino acids and things like that you know or are they completely different you know we just don't know because we don't have enough data samples so the more and more of these sample return missions we send the more information we get about our solar system and maybe even clues to where we came from as well yeah they're very cool and so there were also the japanese hyabusa missions which collected more asteroid samples um so how were they different because they've come before a cyrus rex so what yeah how were they different from a cyrus rex yes there's been both hyabusa one and hyabusa two that jacks are sent in to space to collect asteroid samples and they were the real trailblazers for this type of mission as well it had never been done before hyabusa one so hyabusa one was the just hyabusa i say hyabusa one just differentiated from hyabusa two but it was just named hyabusa it was the first right and it managed to collect less than a gram of material from the ever so slightly smaller asteroid um it's a cower back in 2005 and it returned that to earth in 2010 but obviously with such a small sample it's really very hard to make any strong conclusions because you can find some things in it but you obviously don't get the natural variation you would get from a larger sample so hyabusa two then went to the much bigger asteroid of ryugu at the end of the 2010s that returned 5.4 grams of material back to earth in late 2020 so that's 0.2 ounces for our metrically challenged listeners there and i'm just to give you an idea of how much it actually was again it's a small amount but it's better than what hyabusa brought back but still you know you struggle to make any sort of like big conclusions about that and you compare that to a cyrus rex which returned about 120 grams about four ounces of material from benny right so it was much easier for us to ask you to answer a lot of questions there was also multiple teams that could work on like different bits of the sample as well with different techniques and different instruments it could be split because every time you need to do a different test with a different you know instrument or you know different experiment that takes a bit of the sample and so you know you reduce it each time so there's more tests you can do with with more of it which is is great but it was kind of like the same questions that they were trying to answer with both missions like what were the asteroids made of what ingredients were there did the asteroids bring ingredients for life to earth did they bring water to earth what was the concentration of these different things but our cyrus rex had more of the sort of instruments to study the asteroid as well while it was there just because of the fact that hyabusa missions had shown that this was possible beforehand so we could you know pack it full of a few more instruments so they were so key and instrumental in our understanding of asteroids thanks Becky and in a moment we'll be talking about the Mars sample return mission I'm Professor Nolford's Patrick and as a vet I know you want the best care for your animal companion pet insurance can help but you need to choose wisely as not all policies are the same pet plan aim to pay claims quickly and without a fuss and that's one reason why so many vets work with them get your pet the best veterinary care save 10% on new policies when you ensure at petplan.co.uk TSNC's apply fits all media as an appointed representative of pet plan limited you've got social dialed in search is doing its thing so why do your marketing results look the same as six months that's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else podcast listeners are a different audience entirely more engaged harder to reach through traditional channels and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation we're acost and we put them right in front of you browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts book host reads or run your own ads and track every conversion in real time same skills you already have brand new results acost acost.com forward slash advertise now we couldn't do a sample return episode or not talk about Mars right we've chatted in previous episodes about pal percy beloved little rover on Mars perseverance right officially that's what NASA call it and perseverance is drilling into the Martian surface to collect samples of rock so the next stage of the mission is to get those samples from Mars back to earth but what are the plans to make that happen and how a scientist protecting these samples from contamination I spoke to Albert Haldeman who is Mars chief engineer at the european space agency one of the objectives of perseverance was to collect samples in view of their then later return to earth and NASA and isa have been setting up a cooperation there have been some delays and changes because of things we've learned as we went through the design and development process the european contributions that we're moving forward with for sure is the earth return orbiter the first spacecraft to do a round trip to Mars from earth the plan now after NASA's recent studies is to put the NASA developed capture containment and return system on top and the earth return orbiter isa's ero will rendezvous with the samples once they reach orbit and they will reach orbit using a NASA developed rocket that NASA will land on the surface and the perseverance herself will deliver the samples that she's guarding in her belly keeping nice and cozy but not too warm actually keeping them rather cool and cold for scientific purposes deliver those to the rocket to the orbiting sample container and launch back to orbit retrieval to earth with the aro can we look at those possible methods of collections what are some of those ideas to get these samples or that first leg of returning these samples back to earth so the first leg is that perseverance continue the scientific collection that's the the main component of the nasa isa cooperation that in fact a sample is not acquired until a particular geologic assessment of a particular rock and area outcrop is done and it's different enough and interesting enough to add to the collection okay so it's all about variety essentially it's about the variety the diversity of the samples and to maximize the diversity of the samples yeah so our intention is to have 30 scientifically selected samples each tube of course contains some atmosphere on top of the rock sample and that's something that's of interest so perseverance is going to drive complete the exploration up on the crater rim where she is now and is acquiring samples as of now a total of 29 tubes have been filled 10 were left on the crater floor at three forks so there are 19 on board and there are 12 remaining tubes to be filled we expect we will fill them and then we'll pick of those 31 on board we'll bring back 30 perseverance herself drives back down to wherever the sample retrieval lander or heavy lander whichever is eventually picked by nasa to land on the surface perseverance herself will deliver the samples using her own robotic arm which currently has a drill and the intention is to bring a different tool and swap it out sort of like on power tools you know that we many of us use in our homes swap the drill bit for a kind of an arm bit and so yeah let's talk about what perseverance is actually doing so how is perseverance collecting these samples and what are the different sort of locations of the Jezero crater and geologically how are they different there's a drill which basically inserts the sample cutting the outside of a cylinder and then snapping off the cylinder into the sample container and each of these tubes is maybe the size of a larger classical cigar tube winch and Churchill size cigar but the cores themselves are a centimeter in diameter and up to eight centimeters long the total sample content we're expecting from the 30 samples is going to be maybe as much as a half a kilo Jezero was picked because of the very interesting geologic context that this crater was filled with water and a lake and there was flowing water moving into the crater creating sedimentary deposits like a delta fan and so that is history of a habitable environment a water rich environment on the Martian surface billions of years ago that we wanted to explore it turned out on landing that what was discovered it was happily more volcanic rocks on the base of the crater one of the objectives of the samples is to figure out how old the different events in Jezero are and how old Mars is and how old the various geologic events on Mars are so we had that first in the first rocks that was exciting then Perseverance went to the fan and really started acquiring some of these sedimentary samples and they are varied showing the evolution of the fan and now Perseverance has headed up to the crater rim the crater rim is where the deeper rocks of Mars the Martian crust have been lifted up because of the impact what we're getting is exposures of deeper older crustal rocks more linked to the origin history and formation of Mars and so those rocks are being acquired now as samples and once that set is completed up on the rim with some variety of the different levels that are represented by those exposures Perseverance will head back down to the crater floor and actually wait for the arrival of the sample retrieval lander so let's imagine that we understand what that collection process looks like how concerned do we have to be about like potential contamination of any craft interfering with these samples so what you've asked there is sort of the lead into the whole theme of planetary protection in fact when you hear the word planetary protection typically people would say oh it's protect the earth from things coming from the outside and that is indeed a critical element of planetary protection but planetary protection also means protecting the pristine nature of your target planet from contamination by earth so that is a big part of how Perseverance was built and how we are designing the sample retrieval lander and how we are designing the earth return orbiter that we do not add contaminants to the samples it is why some tubes will be sealed empty at various times to capture the snapshot of any contaminants that were brought with Perseverance to earth and also to characterize how much any outgassing or degradation of Perseverance's systems might be adding into the sample collection system over time and it's a measure of the conditions of which the samples were collected in I suppose so you know like okay this is what the situation was when these samples were collected and now that we have them when we have them back on earth you can compare okay yes they it has it stayed the same or is there a change there and then I suppose that lets you know if there has been something that sort of changed the conditions that's right that's that's exactly right is he so that's one part of it and then part of it is also we've made very clean systems to go to Mars the samples are inside these tubes sealed hermetic and then we transfer those hermetic samples keeping the outside of the tubes as uncontaminated as possible into the orbiting sample container where we don't want to add any Mars contaminants to the outside of that so that we don't have to worry about them later on in the system we have European experts outside of the European Space Agency as a review panel from various other areas of expertise related to protecting the Earth's biosphere medical experts and so on but what about the other way around you know how much consideration goes into bringing Mars samples back to earth like is there a team that has to think about oh hang on actually what if we find something quite unexpected like what's the safety and I guess this comes back to planetary protection in the way that we originally thought about it what is the process and the sort of considerations that go into bringing something from another planet back to earth so the considerations are first of all what is the expectation of there being a risk so the process of planetary protection is codified if you will by the committee for space research coastbars planetary protection panel which has been extant since the Apollo era since the 1960s to take into consideration everything we know about what life can be or what kinds of chemistry can have effects on life the earth is not unconnected to the rest of the solar system we receive material from the rest of the solar system every day meteoritic material falls onto the earth we need to recognize that in this risk assessment as well we have meteorites on earth that came from Mars that has been demonstrated and assessed and is the scientific consensus based on various lines of evidence they were rocks that were thrown off of Mars by a large impact and then through orbital mechanics made their way to intersect the earth's orbit and land it on earth as entire rock samples some of them many hundreds of grams or more and so things in the middle could have been protected again that has happened over the entire history of the solar system so earth and Mars have dare I say it been sharing spit for billions of years so that should influence our perception of the risk thank you to Albert Haldeman this is the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me astrophysicist Dr Becky Smithurst and science journalist Izzy Clark this month it's all about sample return missions so let's get on to our listener questions we had so many so thank you so much to everyone who sent them in and Robert Kate on email asks what is the Japanese mission to Mars's moon Phobos looking for yeah Kate this is the so-called Martian Moons exploration or MMX mission and it's led by JAXA the Japanese space agency as you rightly say but also with help from the European Space Agency NASA and Canaries as well and it's due to launch next year so 2026 and it will go to the two Martian moons Mars has two fairly small moons one is called Phobos and the even smaller one is DeMos and we've had pictures of them before but only from some distance so things of the Viking orbiters in the 70s took pictures from a distance as they orbited Mars along with the moons but the and two Russian missions attempted to go directly to them but they're both failed so hopefully this is their time lucky and it's quite ambitious it actually involves the close-up imaging you would expect sort of a pseudo orbit around them because the gravity of these moons is not enough to hold them in orbit and then one of them one of the moons Phobos there's going to be an attempt to land a kind of rover on it and you know without much of a gravitational field there's going to be a challenge in itself right crawling along this surface and stopping the thing bouncing back into space but yeah the other aspect of it fits in very nicely with the episode and you know as Becky was saying we can't not talk about Mars and look at the interviews it's to gather a few grams of material maybe up to 10 grams or a bit more of material and bring that back to earth and the science question is whether the moons are bits of Mars that perhaps were blasted off the planet in some some giant collision presumably with you you know an even ridiculously large object or whether they're captured asteroids and if it's the first of those then it could tell us something about how Mars formed and help us with the evidence base for whether it was once conducive to life or not whether it was wetter for example if it's the latter then they might have watering them from elsewhere in the solar system they might be like all these asteroids if they are captured asteroids that have a bit of watering then that would tell us again how common that is so that's the scientific interest in them and we have tried to look at them before okay cool and Becky David Kay on Instagram wants to know are scientists today still studying the moon samples from the Apollo missions or are they too old now yeah definitely I know a few colleagues who are still studying Apollo samples I was actually lucky enough to see one close up once but I can't say where those things are super high security right there under lock and key and yeah there are still you know experiments going on as as Robert said earlier like it's a combination of things really so you've got reanalysis of them with modern techniques and technology that we didn't have back in the you know 60s and 70s and then also like new questions that have only just been thought to ask right because we've done further study of the moon for example with the lunar reconnaissance orbiter LRO and of course that we've sent probes back to the moon as well like with ISRO's Chandrayan missions that Indian space research organization so India Space Agency and you know they've been finding all sorts of things on the moon and you know raising new questions about water on the moon, ice on the moon and things like this and so all of a sudden people go well I wonder if we've seen that in the Apollo missions so it's great that we still have you know so much of that still to do you know scientific experiments on it really is just one of those things that is like a I don't know it's just so great that humanity have that. Yeah absolutely. It gives for future generations. Yeah as well. But I love that they are under you know lock and key spaces week but there also there is a lot of care that's taken into preserving that and making sure that they you know scientists even as technology will continue to develop can still keep studying them. So Robert let's stick with the moon because Jane Lowe also asks we already have 800 pounds I think of moon samples why do we need more? Yeah Jane it does sound like a lot of material doesn't it and as Becky points out securely closely guarded material although it did get distributed around the world actually some of it got given to various despots in the 70s and they got lost but a lot of it is still secure but this stuff only comes from a total of 11 sites and six of those were Apollo missions and they gathered the bulk of it so the astronauts walking around the moon they had big spaces to take them back and then there were you know there have been Chinese, Russian and Indian return missions as well but imagine going to the earth and assuming you knew everything from just standing in 11 places you know it's basically possible to sample the whole diversity of the earth and even on the moon that's true as well you know it's the surface area is huge it's about the same as Africa and we basically sampled it from 11 little points so we haven't for example sent sample return missions to the lunar south pole where we know there's a lot of water ice although India is planning one or most the lunar mountains and only one spacecraft the Chinese mission Changi six that collected samples on the far side but that's the only one so really if you want to understand the world you know those little niche touchdowns and there's little tiny bits of material coming back is just not going to be enough and that's why there's interest in bringing more of the moon back to us all presumably where the Artemis missions get there you know for those go ahead then again the astronauts will be gathering samples on the surface as well for exactly that reason all right thanks Robert and Becky first 59 on instagram has a question about the upcoming Chinese sample return mission so that's launching this year and they say Qianwen two is using a new sample capture technique what is it and how is it different from other missions yeah great question first 59 so previous sample return missions have used like a variety of different techniques right obviously you've got Percy and what I'm dubbing Ron Davos we can call him Ron I know that you're listening petition we'll have so many times if that sample return mission is not called Ron Davos I'm gonna flip some tables anyway so Percy has obviously drilled into the surface of Mars extracted the cores and those we picked up by Ron Davos you know that's a much longer term mission it's not something that's typically done for asteroids for shorter term missions like asteroid collections with the Cyrus Rex and like Hayabusa they use what I like to call the high five technique but was more commonly referred to as touch and go which is where you know you drop down to the asteroid and then you you boop it basically you know you either with a charge that's detonated or just manually like right you you impact the surface to throw up a load of debris and then you just hover up that debris into your sample collection yeah but can I just say that make is it almost has an ominous feel to it like all that mission it's touch and go you're like yeah right yeah it's touch and go it's gonna work I mean is it yeah I guess it is a bit touch and go with how much sample you'd actually collect right you're a little it's a little bit out of your control in that respect so I guess maybe it is a good name but I still quite like the high five sort of like just like I'm still imagining almost like contactless payments you know you just tap this thing yeah exactly um so that's one method of of collecting samples but it you don't have a lot of control over it so what Tianwen 2 will do will be it will do the same thing it will do a touch and go sample collection as well and the asteroid Camo Auea I don't know if that's pronounced correctly it looks to be Hawaiian I apologize to any Hawaiians listening if I've absolutely butchered that um but what Tianwen 2 will do is also try something called the anchor and attach technique which I guess is kind of what it says in the tin right it's going to get close to the surface and then it's going to deploy these robotic arms to drill down into the surface which will then hold it there for a longer amount of time right then you've got a lot more control about both where and what you sample as well and how much of it you can actually collect right and that's going to be the first time that's ever going to have been used for asteroid sample collections so it's going to be interesting to see what happens with Tianwen 2 when it launches later this year in May 2025 it's going to arrive at the asteroid around 2026 and then hopefully return it in 2027 it's interesting because I wonder how much research they have to do into you know what could the surface be like because you don't want to try and attach to something and as soon as you get a drill in there it's just like crumbles and you've got nothing to attach to so yeah and all you've basically done is just nudged yourself back off again by trying to drill right yeah like oh wait there's a touch and go mission after all yeah so that I mean that's why it's because they're going to get their orbit around the asteroid for a while actually pick out you know the same thing that it did right the Cyrus Rex did around Bennu as well right they actually will map the surface out and decide where is the best place to land because Cyrus Rex with a touch and go you are looking for loose surface obviously with anchor and attached technique you're looking at a more sort of like solid stronger surface to be able to to drill into yeah where's Bruce with this when you need me and so thank you to everyone who sent in a question if you want to send us any more questions please do keep them coming you can email podcast at ras.ac.uk or find us on instagram at supermassivepod so Robert let's finish with some stargazing what can we see in the night sky this month yeah well march is the time when the sort of spring stars get you know they join the ones that we can still see in the winter so you've still got Orion in the evening and the Sirius underneath still very very obvious but then you get to see more easily you think that without staying up to late in other words you know things like cancer the crab which is faint but has two beautiful star clusters Messier's 44 and 67 and the first of those is is really special per se but you can see it with your eye and it looks great in binoculars and then further around Leo which is one of the constellations that named for the lion does actually look a bit like a lion you can imagine the mane of the lion at the front of it I tell you think I think it looks a bit like a lion I mean imagination you know yeah astronomers license or artistic license but um and you know us a major is high overhead with the player within that and a good signpost the pole star and and archerus which is a really bright star in booties the herdsmen so all of that is visible um and then for the planets unfortunately Saturn is now behind the sun so completely invisible but it's also a shame because it's the time on the 23rd of March when the rings are exactly edge on and we won't see that again for nearly 15 years so after this they open up again which is from an aesthetic perspective is great but that kind of novelty is seeing it without ring this is really hard to do um but we do get Mercury that's unusual hard to see where we are in the northern hemisphere one of its best evening sky appearances for the first two weeks in March and as ever with mercury quite low in the west after sunset so get one of those apps like Stellarium and look for it you know just about 45 minutes after sunset don't leave it too late don't start too early Venus is really obvious and really really bright and a beautiful crescent in a telescope and it's now pretty much moving between the earth and the sun and that's why we've got that crescent phase and Jupiter is still there easily in Taurus and Mars in Gemini but there are also two other highlights that I've got to mention and one is that on the 14th of March we've got a total lunar eclipse when the moon moves into the shadow of the earth now this takes place for us so it's an early rise of one you need to get up about 10 past five to watch it start and totality starts just as the moon is setting at about just before half six that's just in the UK and Europe though right we have some American listeners who might catch it that's absolutely true if you're in North America and you can look online and see the different times but for us you know from the UK perspective it's it's early start stuff but you're right if you're further over across the Atlantic you get a bit of view the moon might also for us be hard to spot as the sky is brightening but you should still start to see that reddening of the the course by the colour of the earth's shadow as it moves into it and then between 10 a.m. and 12 noon on the 29th of March and again these are UK times you know look them up there's a partial solar eclipse and it's not full not total anywhere in the world so the moon isn't completely blocking out the sun but if you're in I think in eastern Canada about 93% of it is covered so not bad and the UK for us depends where you are but in the southeast it's about 30% is the solar surface is covered and up in the northwest and highlands the islands 45% so a decent bite now the caveat on any solar eclipse is that despite that you know you think to yourself you're losing all this sunlight particularly if you're losing say over 90% of it the sun remains really dangerous to look at without the right protection and ironically when you get a thin crescent of sun left it's worse because your eye your retina is fooled and thinking it's fainter and it opens up but unfortunately the brightness of what's left is still really damaging to your eyes so do not try to look at it without properly certified eclipse glasses that you buy from a good supplier a proper solar filter for the end of a telescope up in Occhia does the big end you know run the IP center again bought from a reputable person don't buy it from you know some random source just it's worth spending the money on something that works but better still if you've never done anything like this before then I would just say look up a local astronomical society in the UK you've got the Federation of Astronomicals scientists fedastro.org.uk has a big list because they can offer you good advice and they might even be running events where you can see it safely because I'm pretty sure the eclipse is actually on a Saturday so you know it's quite well placed that if the weather's good there might well be a few public events and a chance to see it there so do look out for it but please be safe yeah I've already heard from a few colleagues that they're planning to sort of do like a I wouldn't call it a flash mob but just like a surprise as you walk from the station there is some telescopes we're looking at the sun we're not crazy we promise you know like this kind of events that you just might run into on the street but if you want to make sure you do find one I'm sure there's a we can put a resource in the um in the next exactly yeah we should put a link to the Federation of Astronomicals yeah we'll find the fun I'll supply the link thanks everyone well I think that's it for this month and we'll be back next time with actual astronauts yeah we're going to have an episode on astronaut training and returning to the moon and there'll be a bonus episode in the meantime to take on even more of your questions contact us if you try some astronomy at home we'd always love to hear about it it's at supermassivepod on instagram or you can email your questions to podcast.ris.ac.uk and we'll try and cover them in a future episode or a future bonus episode the bonus episodes are definitely becoming some of my favorites is the end I don't know about you but until next time everybody happy stargazing getting ready 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