To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Behind the Scenes of Space TV

"I'm a doctor, not a nightlight."

Robert Picardo, Voyager audition

Day Two of Planetfest '21 starts later, and I only attended two of the sessions being offered, although they turned out to be two of the most interesting talks from the two-day event.

A Conversation: Behind the Scenes of Space TV is exactly what the title says it is: a wide-ranging and entertaining conversation between longtime Planetary Society supporter and member Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor* on Star Trek: Voyager for seven seasons, and Hugo-award winning writer, director and producer Brannon Braga, who began his career as an intern on Star Trek: The Next Generation and eventually became one of the show's co-producers. He continued producing and writing for Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise, and co-wrote the scripts for Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact.

The chat begins with the degree to which Star Trek has found its inspiration in science. Braga's goal as a writer was to avoid a formulaic approach to writing for Star Trek, leading him into an ongoing search for high concept science fiction ideas and themes for the scripts.

He cites the Tuvix episode from Voyager, in which the characters of Tuvok the Vulcan science officer and Neelix the Talaxian are fused in a transporter accident, and how it "started as a ludicrous concept and became something quite profound, and quite controversial."

Braga views Voyager as almost being an anthology show with an ongoing cast of characters: "Each story had its own rhythm - some stories were told backward, some were told in circles." He prefers this approach, and likes the idea of "one story well told" - for example, the journey of the Doctor's character throughout the seven seasons of Voyager.**

An audience member raises the question of Star Trek's future being "an unrealistic utopian dream", but both Picardo and Braga disagree with this characterization.

Braga acknowledges that the show never looks at how its vision of the future was achieved, but doesn't consider Star Trek to be utopian. "But it does depict a future without war, crime or starvation or any of the other earthbound issues that we deal with. I hope that we can vanquish those problems and get to a future where diversity is a strength, not a divisive issue."

Picardo agrees, describing Star Trek as "a positive future", which Braga echoes by calling it, "Optimistic! It’s a future that we can achieve!", and points out that there was an essential optimism to the program across all the versions of the franchise.

That hopeful view of the future may have played a part in the degree to which Star Trek has inspired people to become scientists - as with the Star Trek convention attendee who thanked Braga for her childhood, and then explained how she had been inspired by Star Trek to become a biologist, particularly by Voyager - "that was her Star Trek".

Picardo adds that, "I've had the same experience. A number of people who have gone into medicine over the years have told me that they were inspired by my character."  

Picardo was invited to join the Planetary Society in the late 90s after attending an event celebrating Ray Bradbury's 70th birthday, at which a number of actors did readings from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Picardo was asked to become an advisor, and was asked to spearhead some of their educational challenges for young people. He became involved in the innovative Red Rover project, where schools exchanged rovers that they had constructed out of Lego™, which would then explore the other school's version of Mars and vice versa.

He also helped to promote NASA's 1999 Mars Millennium program, a challenge for students to create a 2030 Martian village for one hundred inhabitants, and managed to convince Rick Berman, Voyager's Executive Producer,  to allow him to do a PSA from the Voyager set. Years later, he received a thank-you letter through the Planetary Society from a PhD. at JPL who had originally become interested in space exploration because of that announcement and her subsequent work on the project, finally ending up working on the Curiousity mission. "And that makes me as proud of my relationship with Star Trek as anything else."

An audience member follows with a question as whether either of the speakers had been fans of space and science fiction before their involvement with Star Trek. 

Braga was already a science fiction reader more than a Star Trek person before he started working on Star Trek, and has been a huge science fiction reader his entire life. "I love science fiction!" 

Picardo characterizes himself as having read "quite a bit" of science fiction as a young man, but wasn't a Star Trek fan originally.  He was first asked about being a Star Trek fan before his work on Voyager at a Star Trek convention, and after a "deer in the headlights" moment, decided that "If I lie now, I'll have to lie forever."

Braga interjects, "Star Trek fans were nerds. We were the horror people, they thought we were nerds. Dungeons & Dragons players thought we were both nerds, they were the REAL nerds.

"But the thing is, once you work on Star Trek, you become a fan for life. It's in your DNA forever. It really changes you."

Picardo agrees, and mentions watching Lost in Space and having a crush on Angela Cartwright: "Star Trek, I guess the women seemed too old for me at 14.  But I missed all of Star Trek the first time around. I remember ridiculing friends of mine from Yale who'd sit down and watch Star Trek reruns in the afternoon - they got the last laugh on me."

After being cast in Voyager, Picardo was sent a package of ten Next Generation episodes to watch . "I was stunned by the quality of the storytelling, the variety in the stories, and I got really jazzed to start the job, and I felt very lucky to get it.

"The longer you work on it from the inside and you meet the people that love it, that it's influenced their lives, either as great entertainment and high ethical standards, or, it's inspired them to pursue careers in science and technology and engineering, and that's very gratifying."

Braga adds that "Science fiction and science have a symbiotic relationship," mentioning Leo Szilard, who conceived the idea of nuclear chain reaction and the concept of the atomic bomb based on an idea from The World Set Free, a novel by H. G. Wells.

Braga's most famous Star Trek episodes came from his interest in quantum physics, ideas that were new in the 90s and seemed radical at the time, that he used in episodes.  Picardo observes that, "the people that love Star Trek, and are very sciency people themselves, are very complimentary that Star Trek is based in real science and extends it to an incredible degree."

He then cites a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, when asked if he preferred the science in Star Trek or the science in Star Wars, replied, "Star Wars - what science?"

Braga explains that the shows always had a science consultant, but admits that he would always try to "tell the story first and then fit the science in, could this be plausible? But we were very studious about making sure the science was good."

The session ends with a series of audience questions.  Braga answers a question about science fiction authors by saying that he's "a huge fan of H. G. Wells, who invented time travel stories, invisibility stories, alien invasion stories, the guy invented every science fiction genre.***

"And his books are amazing, and beautifully written." 

Another attendee asks how Voyager has affected their relationship with other people.  Picardo talks about the blessing and the curse of his children being associated with such a distinctive last name, and  about introducing his Star Trek character to his children, and having to explain what acting was and why Voyager couldn't come and pick him up to go to work.  (Interestingly, both of his children have ended up in post production, one in VFX after being mentored by Voyager episode director John Bruno.)

Braga ends the session with a simple statement: "In thinking about it for the question, it just hit me that my three best friends are people I met because of my work on Star Trek."

- Sid

* Not the British one with the blue time travel box, the other Doctor, the emergency hologram one. Ironically, Picardo originally planned a medical career in real life, and attended classes at Yale - acting was just a sideline.

** You could easily make a case that there's no journey for the characters in the original Star Trek, but I think that those characters were never intended to have a journey - their strength comes from their archetypal nature. 

*** I love H. G. Wells as well, but I have to disagree with one thing - to the best of my knowledge, Wells never wrote about robots or androids.

 

To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Beyond Mars

 

"My first wish would be for Mars to blow up so we can look at the rest of the solar system."

Joseph O'Rourke
Assistant Professor ASU School of
Earth and Space Exploration

The theme of the Planetary Society's Planetfest '21 conference is the exploration of Mars, but Beyond Mars: Exploring Other Worlds, the third session on my conference calendar, provides some balance for the event's focus on Mars by looking at other opportunities for exploration and investigation in the solar system.

Dipak Srinivasan, Engineer and Civil Space External Engagements Lead at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, opens the discussion with a simple statement:

"If there's water, there's life."

On that basis, the solar systems has multiple locations that offer the possibility of life. Europa, the fourth largest moon of Jupiter, is an ice world, and Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has ten times as much water as Earth. Srinivasan is currently involved in missions aimed at exploring both of these satellites: the Europa Clipper mission, and the Dragonfly mission to Titan.

Srinivasan explains that Clipper, scheduled for launch in 2024, will not be looking for life as such, but rather looking for conditions that would support life: water, the right chemical conditions, some form of energy, such as heat, and time - "life needs time to happen". He considers that the discovery of life on Europa would be "transformative".

He points out that there is a period of time when earth "had no biology, just chemistry" and suggests that Titan may be on the verge of same transition that Earth underwent billions of years in the past. Methane is to Titan as water is to Earth, with both clouds and lakes of methane, and Srinivasan sees the flying rotor-driven Dragonfly probe as the best option for exploring in Titan's combination of low gravity and dense atmosphere.

Interestingly, Maitrayee Bose, Arizona State University Assistant Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and Brett Denevi*, John Hopkins Planetary Geologist are looking for the same thing in two very different places: the history of our solar system.

Bose is studying small bodies like asteroids and comets, ranging in size from 10 meters to 500 kilometer - as she says, "The best things come in small packages." (Although I'm not convinced that a 500 kilometer piece of space rock counts as a small package.)

These small bodies tell us much about the history of our solar system, how planets form and why they look the way they do. They were the first objects that formed and then accreted to form the larger bodies that became planets.These ancient rocks retain a record of the conditions in the early solar system, and the processes and collisions that took place. 

Bose comments, "They're so diverse, and each one is telling us a story of its own, a key piece in the evolution of our solar system. They also help to answer the question of why Earth is so special, why does it have so much surface water compared to the other planets, how earth got its water, why it retained it, what different kinds of small bodies may have provided that water?"

Denevi is conducting her search for the history of the solar system on the Moon.  There are multiple lunar missions coming up in the near future, the first ones since 1972, with seven robotic landers currently planned between now and 2024, two of which will launch later this year.

These robotic probes will be investigating some of the questions that have been on hold over the last 50 years, and learning more about how the Earth and Moon were shaped by impact events early in their history.  Denevi explains that the Moon is a better candidate for this process for a very simple reason: "On Earth, we live on this beautiful geologically active world but the problem with that - at least it's a problem for weird planetary geologists like me - is that the Earth's surface is constantly being refreshed by plate tectonics and weathering, so we can't look back into its very earliest history, and on the Moon we don't have those annoying issues."

In Denevi's opinion, the Moon offers crucial information regarding what was happening in the solar system approximately 4 billion years in the past, the point at which life began to emerge on Earth.  The Moon shows evidence of massive impact events taking place, such as the one that created the Mare Imbrium crater, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system. Similar events on Earth's surface would have been catastrophic, vapourizing oceans and sterilizing the surface down to a hundred meters. Precise information from the Moon's craters will help to understand how those impacts would have affected the Earth.

Joe O'Rourke, Assistant Professor at the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration, serves on the Steering Committee for NASA’s Venus EXploration and Analysis Group. He's both surprised and disappointed that Venus has been somewhat ignored in terms of missions - in his opinion, it's odd that Titan and Europa are receiving more attention. (He's not wrong, there have been multiple Russian landings on Venus, compared to a single multiprobe mission by NASA almost 45 years ago in 1978.) O'Rourke considers Venus to offer the same opportunities for exploration and research as Mars, including the possibility of surface water in its distant past.  

Future Venus missions under consideration are VERITAS, proposed for a 2026 launch date, that would undertake high definition global radar mapping of the Venusian surface, and DAVINCI, an atmospheric probe that would make a surface landing as well.**

The group had a full wish list for future missions: Io, Triton, Ceres, the Saturn Trojan points, the planned Viper lunar missions, and, of course, Joe O'Rourke's fervent desire that Mars would just blow up and get out of the way.

- Sid

* Denevi has an asteroid named after her, which certainly gives her an edge in terms of street cred.

 

** There are obviously two very different naming conventions in play here. VERITAS stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy, and DAVINCI is Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging.  Dragonfly is apparently just a cool name for a flying planetary probe.

 

To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Mars Mind Meld

"The rovers are our proxies - their shadows on Mars are our shadows."

Bethany Ehlmann
Planetary Society president;
Professor of Planetary Science
and Associate Director, Keck Institute
for Space Studies, Caltech

Since its inception in 1980, the Planetary Society has staged ten Planetfests to commemorate significant milestones in space exploration, starting with the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn in 1981, and then of Neptune in 1989, where Chuck Berry performed Johnny B. Goode in recognition of the song's inclusion on the gold record album attached to both of the Voyager probes.* Subsequent Planetfests have recognized events such as the unsuccessful Mars Polar landing in 1999, the Spirit rover's safe touchdown on Mars in 2004, and Curiousity's in 2012.

The most recent Planetfest, in honour of NASA's Perseverance Mars probe, took place this last weekend via Zoom. (I was a little surprised by the timing, in that if they'd waited another week, we could have been celebrating the probe's arrival on the red planet, but the organizers may well have decided that an unsuccessful landing would have put a damper on the event.)

The two-day celebration of Martian exploration featured an eclectic array of speakers, including an impressive selection of planetary scientists, engineers and NASA representatives; well-known science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir; and Star Trek: Voyager actor and space exploration advocate Robert Picardo in conversation with producer, director and writer Brannon Braga, best known for his work on three television series and two movies in the Star Trek franchise.

This varied group of speakers, united by their shared passion and commitment to both the present and the future of space exploration, covered a wide range of fascinating, informative and insightful topics over the two days of the event.

After an introduction by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, Planetary Society president Bethany Ehlmann delivers the keynote speech for the weekend - Mars Mind Meld: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mars. Her presentation provides a broad overview of Martian exploration, and looks at the questions that probes such as Perseverance will help to answer.

For Ehlmann, the most important question is: what happened to Mars that eliminated water and possibly life? Although there are only a few weeks of the Martian year when the environment allows liquid water to exist, Mars is covered with evidence of water - as Ehlmann points out, "the plumbing of Mars is exposed" - there is visible erosion of the surface by water, clay substrates, formations like those found around geothermal springs on Earth, and so on, all pointing to a time in the past when Mars may well have been more habitable than it is now. 

Provided all goes well on the 18th, Perseverance's extended mission on the surface of Mars will take it up the Midway delta that feeds into the Jezero Crater landing site**, allowing it to explore successive layers of Martian history as it proceeds up out of crater and moves a billion years further back in time.

In addition, the probe is not only an explorer, but a cacher, with the ability to store drilled samples from the various exposed strata for eventual return to Earth. It's hoped that these samples, each about the size of a piece of chalk, will allow scientists on Earth to answer questions about Martian climate, Martian change, and Martian life.  They're playing the long game on the process:  the current strategy for sample return involves a three year wait.

The eventual exploration of Mars by humans will immeasurably accelerate the process of scientific investigation, but until then, the robotic rovers act as proxies in our place - as Ehlmann eloquently puts it, "their shadows are our shadows".

- Sid

* It also included a needle, cartridge, and symbolic instructions on how to play the record - which, at this point in time, a lot of people on Earth would also need.

** I was charmed to see that she had a Post-It™ tab on the Martian globe in her office to indicate the Perseverance landing site.