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American Morning
Mars Rover on a Roll
Aired January 15, 2004 - 08:10 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: To space now. The Mars rover on a roll this morning. Just a little more than three hours ago, NASA scientists were thrilled, obviously, to hear that the Spirit had successfully rolled onto the planet's surface. The maneuver thought to be one of the trickiest of the mission. The rover is now already beaming back pictures while it inches ahead.
This morning, to talk about the rover's latest success is Denton Ebel.
He is the assistant curator of the Hall of Meteorites at the Museum of Natural History right here in New York City.
Nice to see you, Dr. Ebel.
DENTON EBEL, ASSISTANT CURATOR, METEORITES, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Nice to be here.
O'BRIEN: Thanks for being with us.
Obviously everyone is very thrilled. But give me a sense of the pictures that we're going to see in the 10 feet that the rover has already gone between -- and what we've already seen, the rover doing those sort of wide shots around its location.
EBEL: Well, the most -- for the engineers, the best picture of all is looking back to that lander and seeing that we're now actually roving on Mars. And the first thing we'll do is look -- we meaning the team, this team at JPL that's doing this wonderful work -- at the ground near the rover, at the soil, the soil that's been turned, perhaps, a little by the air bags passing over them, and head into the horizon, like Americans have been doing for hundreds of years.
And this horizon, which we're seeing in spectacular images that are much better than anything we've seen on Mars before, from Mars, are -- is showing there are craters, there are lots of different rocks. And, well, what's interesting about rocks?
Well, some of the rocks are rounded, as if they've been sculpted by water, as rocks are on Earth. And to geologists, this is very exciting, because how did they get that way.
O'BRIEN: Well, I was going to ask you that, because when you sort of see it, the videotape that we show, it looks like a flat surface with lots of little rocks on it.
EBEL: That's what it is. O'BRIEN: But you say when geologists -- but the resolution that the geologists can see at the JPL is so much greater than what we can see.
What can they -- what are geologists getting from this?
EBEL: Well, the geologists are seeing colors. They're seeing colors due to iron, content of iron. They may see colors that are due to other minerals such as calcite, which forms hard pan or caliche in the -- in certain parts of the U.S. and which is deposited, in most cases, by water. And we think that the reason it's flat is, in fact, because there was water flowing in here once, lots of water.
When and how much and what was the mineral -- what minerals were dissolved in the water and what could the water have carried with it from the highlands in the southern hemisphere to this crater?
O'BRIEN: Why is that all so relevant? And I know scientists over and over say water, it could be water.
EBEL: Right, water.
O'BRIEN: The question of water, why is it relevant to those of us here on Earth?
EBEL: Everywhere on this planet -- and, after all, this planet is also a very rocky planet and we understand about it, volcanoes, earthquakes, things like that, from studying rocks. In fact, that's our primary information about geologic phenomenon.
But on Earth, wherever we have water, we find life. Kilometers deep in crevices, in rock that's very inhospitable, in the deep ocean where there is no light, yet organisms live on the rocks themselves.
So this is the key, following the water.
O'BRIEN: The rover obviously is not going to bring anything back to Earth.
EBEL: No.
O'BRIEN: But what else will it do outside of taking pictures?
EBEL: Well, you haven't seen a lot of it. In fact, one of the really neat things on this rover is a rat or a rock abrasion tool, which can actually scrape away the surfaces, the dusty surfaces of the rocks and, in fact, can also -- it can also push away soils. And this is manufactured right here in Manhattan by Honeybee Robotics. And this rat will then scrape away rocks and allow spectrometers to obtain very, very high accuracy compositions of the rocks and will also have a micro camera 30 microns per pixel, a very high resolution camera, which can take pictures of the rocks and the soils at very high resolutions.
O'BRIEN: Almost acting like a geologist up there on Mars. EBEL: Acting exactly like a geologist, a super geologist, because it can look at things in the infrared and determine their heat content over time.
O'BRIEN: It'll be interesting to see the pictures that we get now that the rover is actually moving.
EBEL: Actually moving.
O'BRIEN: Dr. Denton Ebel, it's nice to have you.
Thanks for coming in and explaining that for us.
EBEL: Well, it's great to be here.
O'BRIEN: Our pleasure.
EBEL: Thanks a lot.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired January 15, 2004 - 08:10 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: To space now. The Mars rover on a roll this morning. Just a little more than three hours ago, NASA scientists were thrilled, obviously, to hear that the Spirit had successfully rolled onto the planet's surface. The maneuver thought to be one of the trickiest of the mission. The rover is now already beaming back pictures while it inches ahead.
This morning, to talk about the rover's latest success is Denton Ebel.
He is the assistant curator of the Hall of Meteorites at the Museum of Natural History right here in New York City.
Nice to see you, Dr. Ebel.
DENTON EBEL, ASSISTANT CURATOR, METEORITES, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Nice to be here.
O'BRIEN: Thanks for being with us.
Obviously everyone is very thrilled. But give me a sense of the pictures that we're going to see in the 10 feet that the rover has already gone between -- and what we've already seen, the rover doing those sort of wide shots around its location.
EBEL: Well, the most -- for the engineers, the best picture of all is looking back to that lander and seeing that we're now actually roving on Mars. And the first thing we'll do is look -- we meaning the team, this team at JPL that's doing this wonderful work -- at the ground near the rover, at the soil, the soil that's been turned, perhaps, a little by the air bags passing over them, and head into the horizon, like Americans have been doing for hundreds of years.
And this horizon, which we're seeing in spectacular images that are much better than anything we've seen on Mars before, from Mars, are -- is showing there are craters, there are lots of different rocks. And, well, what's interesting about rocks?
Well, some of the rocks are rounded, as if they've been sculpted by water, as rocks are on Earth. And to geologists, this is very exciting, because how did they get that way.
O'BRIEN: Well, I was going to ask you that, because when you sort of see it, the videotape that we show, it looks like a flat surface with lots of little rocks on it.
EBEL: That's what it is. O'BRIEN: But you say when geologists -- but the resolution that the geologists can see at the JPL is so much greater than what we can see.
What can they -- what are geologists getting from this?
EBEL: Well, the geologists are seeing colors. They're seeing colors due to iron, content of iron. They may see colors that are due to other minerals such as calcite, which forms hard pan or caliche in the -- in certain parts of the U.S. and which is deposited, in most cases, by water. And we think that the reason it's flat is, in fact, because there was water flowing in here once, lots of water.
When and how much and what was the mineral -- what minerals were dissolved in the water and what could the water have carried with it from the highlands in the southern hemisphere to this crater?
O'BRIEN: Why is that all so relevant? And I know scientists over and over say water, it could be water.
EBEL: Right, water.
O'BRIEN: The question of water, why is it relevant to those of us here on Earth?
EBEL: Everywhere on this planet -- and, after all, this planet is also a very rocky planet and we understand about it, volcanoes, earthquakes, things like that, from studying rocks. In fact, that's our primary information about geologic phenomenon.
But on Earth, wherever we have water, we find life. Kilometers deep in crevices, in rock that's very inhospitable, in the deep ocean where there is no light, yet organisms live on the rocks themselves.
So this is the key, following the water.
O'BRIEN: The rover obviously is not going to bring anything back to Earth.
EBEL: No.
O'BRIEN: But what else will it do outside of taking pictures?
EBEL: Well, you haven't seen a lot of it. In fact, one of the really neat things on this rover is a rat or a rock abrasion tool, which can actually scrape away the surfaces, the dusty surfaces of the rocks and, in fact, can also -- it can also push away soils. And this is manufactured right here in Manhattan by Honeybee Robotics. And this rat will then scrape away rocks and allow spectrometers to obtain very, very high accuracy compositions of the rocks and will also have a micro camera 30 microns per pixel, a very high resolution camera, which can take pictures of the rocks and the soils at very high resolutions.
O'BRIEN: Almost acting like a geologist up there on Mars. EBEL: Acting exactly like a geologist, a super geologist, because it can look at things in the infrared and determine their heat content over time.
O'BRIEN: It'll be interesting to see the pictures that we get now that the rover is actually moving.
EBEL: Actually moving.
O'BRIEN: Dr. Denton Ebel, it's nice to have you.
Thanks for coming in and explaining that for us.
EBEL: Well, it's great to be here.
O'BRIEN: Our pleasure.
EBEL: Thanks a lot.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
