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Interview With Jim Garvin
Aired January 23, 2004 - 14:22 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.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get back to NASA's Jet Propulsion labratary (ph) -- Laboratory. Sorry. I can speak all right. Miles O'Brien, they're feverishly trying to cure the Spirit Rover right now.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Proving once again you're no rocket scientist, Kyra Phillips. That's the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's good to see you here on this day when of course, the news is quite a mixed bag.
The Spirit Rover is alive, not so well. Critical condition is the term that's being used, to use that medical analogy. Will Spirit ever get back to the perfection it had for the first 17 days? Unlikely. Will it die a death on the Martian surface as a result of all this? Also unlikely.
So somewhere in between, there will probably be a mission that is somewhat diminished from its lofty goals. But nevertheless, the engineers here in -- I don't want you to take this the wrong way. They sort of relish these challenge to work around the problems because that is what this is about. And communicating with something 100 million miles away is nothing to take for granted although sometimes we do just that.
Joining me to talk a little bit about this and some of the images we've seen, and he also brought rocks with him, is Dr. Jim Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. It's good to have you with us, Jim.
DR. JIM GARVIN, NASA: Thanks, Miles.
O'BRIEN: We'll get to the rocks in a moment. First I want to take a look at some of these images. If we go to the telestrator, some images just released after the diagnosis was released on Spirit, this is what happened during the landing. So viewers can see it, based on the telemetry, this is how it mounts as it came in. What are we learning from this little bounce sequence hear here?
GARVIN: What we're see seeing is the descent, the perilous decent in the final stages. We fired the retro rockets, slowed ourselves down. The winds were blowing, we corrected through the winds.
Then bounced a country mile, including one extremely exciting bounce inside a crater.
O'BRIEN: That is right in that spot there. That is something that could have been a bad bounce.
GARVIN: Could have been but these are old craters and it gave us a little extra juice. But we survived it and we may be drawn to craters in the next few weeks.
O'BRIEN: Little bit of extra English on that bounce.
Now take a look at this image on the left side of your screen. That's a shot of the Rover that was captured by its own mass cam on Mars. Or is that a model on there?
GARVIN: That is an animation of what would it look like to have our rover on the lander against the real Mars surface.
O'BRIEN: That's that. And then on the right, this is fascinating stuff captured by a satellite, the Mars Global Surveyor with the Mars Observation Camera on it traveling how far above?
GARVIN: Four hundred kilometers, that's 280 miles.
O'BRIEN: Two hundred and eighty miles and they're able to make out the actual spacecraft there. You can see the similarities in shape and all of that. And that is a good thing because that tells you precisely where you are on the planet and that helps you make decisions about where to go.
Now, let's move along here. That's the back shell. And this gives you the big picture. I just want to give people a quick sense of what they've been able to see with this Mars Global Surveyor Camera. Here's the lander Rover site right here. The parachute and the back shell landed here. That's the heat shield over there. All of that helps you decide where to travel, right?
GARVIN: That's right. We have now -- it's like the view of your neighborhood and where you're going to go next. Right now on the screen taken from 280 miles above by an orbiter that's been there for seven years.
O'BRIEN: All right, backlog now with Jim Garvin and his rock. You've got rocks here. If you found that one on Mars, tell me how excited you would be.
GARVIN: Miles, this is the kind of stuff we're looking for. This is the stuff of dreams. This is a limestone laid down in a lake inside a crater here on Earth, from the Reese Crater in Bavaria in Germany.
Inside that lake bed, formed millions of years ago, is the record of life. And this is a fossil of an ancient lake creature, and finding things like this in these kinds of rocks would be the Holy Grail on Mars.
O'BRIEN: So if you saw a Martian fossil, we would be rewriting history books.
GARVIN: Absolutely. We would know we're not alone and wondering who the heck the Martians are.
O'BRIEN: All right, Jim Garvin, thank you very much, the main Martian on this planet, at least for now. And he takes that as compliment.
GARVIN: I do.
O'BRIEN: All right, Jim Garvin is in charges of the Mars Exploration Program as the chief scientist. Thanks very much for being with us.
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 23, 2004 - 14:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get back to NASA's Jet Propulsion labratary (ph) -- Laboratory. Sorry. I can speak all right. Miles O'Brien, they're feverishly trying to cure the Spirit Rover right now.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Proving once again you're no rocket scientist, Kyra Phillips. That's the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's good to see you here on this day when of course, the news is quite a mixed bag.
The Spirit Rover is alive, not so well. Critical condition is the term that's being used, to use that medical analogy. Will Spirit ever get back to the perfection it had for the first 17 days? Unlikely. Will it die a death on the Martian surface as a result of all this? Also unlikely.
So somewhere in between, there will probably be a mission that is somewhat diminished from its lofty goals. But nevertheless, the engineers here in -- I don't want you to take this the wrong way. They sort of relish these challenge to work around the problems because that is what this is about. And communicating with something 100 million miles away is nothing to take for granted although sometimes we do just that.
Joining me to talk a little bit about this and some of the images we've seen, and he also brought rocks with him, is Dr. Jim Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. It's good to have you with us, Jim.
DR. JIM GARVIN, NASA: Thanks, Miles.
O'BRIEN: We'll get to the rocks in a moment. First I want to take a look at some of these images. If we go to the telestrator, some images just released after the diagnosis was released on Spirit, this is what happened during the landing. So viewers can see it, based on the telemetry, this is how it mounts as it came in. What are we learning from this little bounce sequence hear here?
GARVIN: What we're see seeing is the descent, the perilous decent in the final stages. We fired the retro rockets, slowed ourselves down. The winds were blowing, we corrected through the winds.
Then bounced a country mile, including one extremely exciting bounce inside a crater.
O'BRIEN: That is right in that spot there. That is something that could have been a bad bounce.
GARVIN: Could have been but these are old craters and it gave us a little extra juice. But we survived it and we may be drawn to craters in the next few weeks.
O'BRIEN: Little bit of extra English on that bounce.
Now take a look at this image on the left side of your screen. That's a shot of the Rover that was captured by its own mass cam on Mars. Or is that a model on there?
GARVIN: That is an animation of what would it look like to have our rover on the lander against the real Mars surface.
O'BRIEN: That's that. And then on the right, this is fascinating stuff captured by a satellite, the Mars Global Surveyor with the Mars Observation Camera on it traveling how far above?
GARVIN: Four hundred kilometers, that's 280 miles.
O'BRIEN: Two hundred and eighty miles and they're able to make out the actual spacecraft there. You can see the similarities in shape and all of that. And that is a good thing because that tells you precisely where you are on the planet and that helps you make decisions about where to go.
Now, let's move along here. That's the back shell. And this gives you the big picture. I just want to give people a quick sense of what they've been able to see with this Mars Global Surveyor Camera. Here's the lander Rover site right here. The parachute and the back shell landed here. That's the heat shield over there. All of that helps you decide where to travel, right?
GARVIN: That's right. We have now -- it's like the view of your neighborhood and where you're going to go next. Right now on the screen taken from 280 miles above by an orbiter that's been there for seven years.
O'BRIEN: All right, backlog now with Jim Garvin and his rock. You've got rocks here. If you found that one on Mars, tell me how excited you would be.
GARVIN: Miles, this is the kind of stuff we're looking for. This is the stuff of dreams. This is a limestone laid down in a lake inside a crater here on Earth, from the Reese Crater in Bavaria in Germany.
Inside that lake bed, formed millions of years ago, is the record of life. And this is a fossil of an ancient lake creature, and finding things like this in these kinds of rocks would be the Holy Grail on Mars.
O'BRIEN: So if you saw a Martian fossil, we would be rewriting history books.
GARVIN: Absolutely. We would know we're not alone and wondering who the heck the Martians are.
O'BRIEN: All right, Jim Garvin, thank you very much, the main Martian on this planet, at least for now. And he takes that as compliment.
GARVIN: I do.
O'BRIEN: All right, Jim Garvin is in charges of the Mars Exploration Program as the chief scientist. Thanks very much for being with us.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
