Future of Exploration: Explorers Panel

ZUBER: Well I'd like to welcome all of you back this afternoon when we continue in this interesting exposition of focusing on, today, what it's like to explore. And we have a very exciting panel discussion for you here this afternoon. I'm Maria Zuber. I'm a professor of geophysics and head of the Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department here at MIT. And I will be moderating and speaking this afternoon.

Buzz Aldrin, we decided that being on a panel with many other astronauts could not possibly give him the opportunity to impart sufficient insight that he has of his career of explorations. So we're delighted that he will be talking more to us this afternoon.

We have Steve Squyres who's the Goldwin Smith professor of astronomy at Cornell University and has done a number of different things. He's a investigator on Mars Odyssey and an investigator on the imaging team of Cassini but is probably best known as principal investigator of the still going on Mars Exploration Rover Mission still going. How many days of the 90 day mission? 2,581.

[LAUGHTER]

So he has something to say about longevity, I'm sure.

And James T. Bellingham, who's the chief technologist of the autonomous ocean sampling network program of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Okay, so we will also be having, at the end of the 10 minute presentations here, we have a video clip from Cady Coleman from the International Space Station, as well, who, obviously, could not be with us personally.

Okay, so people ask me what it's like to be an explorer. And I'll tell you. I feel so blessed to be able to do what I do for a living. And it's just I feel remarkable that I get paid to do it, in fact.

But when people say what's it like, and how do you spend your day, it's actually a little bit worrisome because, what I do, I talk on the phone, I make PowerPoint presentations, and I fly on airplanes. And that's most of my time. But I explore the solar system.

And currently, I'm on five active, robotic exploration missions, which does a great job of filling the hours of a day. And I thought I would just take a couple of minutes here and just talk about one of them and, basically, just show you some pictures. This is for a mission called GRAIL, the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory Mission.

This is a dual spacecraft mission. We're going to have two spacecraft that we'll be launching to the moon. The launch window opens September 8 of this year. Many of you will be invited to the launch. If you'd like to be invited, let me know. We'll put your name on the list.

And this is MIT's first PI ship in full space mission. So I thought I'd tell you just a little bit about it. Okay, so here are the two spacecraft. And actually, in the exposition over where you had lunch today at 5 o'clock, Lockheed Martin kindly sent out some models of the two spacecraft. So you can see them.

They're not quite to scale size. But they're about the size of a dishwasher. So they're a very small spacecraft. And some people like big spacecraft. But like small spacecraft because launch cost per dollar. They're very inexpensive.

So these two spacecraft will be launching to the moon on the same launch vehicle. They will take about four months to get to the moon. They will insert into orbit around the moon on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day of this year keeping with the NASA tradition that all critical things happen on holidays so that people have to work, okay.

And there are reasons why we're actually doing that that are actually quite sensible, which I won't go into. And these two spacecraft, they're going to be in polar orbit around the moon about 50 kilometers above the surface. And they will range to each other. And we will range to them from Earth at different radio frequencies.

And by looking at small variations in the velocity between the two spacecraft, we will determine the gravity field of the moon better than we know the earth's gravity field. So here is a picture. I like hardware, so most of this presentation is hardware.

This is one of the antennae on the spacecraft. And these two spacecraft will arrange to each other and determine if the velocity of one spacecraft with respect to each other to couple of tenths of a micron per second. So what we're doing, actually, isn't very hard. It's just that we need to do it pretty well.

Okay, this is a lot of flight hardware. And actually, what I wanted to do by showing this picture is just to convey the fact that, while this spacecraft is unusual for NASA spacecraft in that it doesn't have a whole suite of instruments-- it just has one instrument per spacecraft-- but that there are a lot of components associated with doing a spacecraft mission and that every single thing here has to be done perfectly for this to work.

So if you want a range to a couple of microns per second, it's very precise. So I want to point out this reaction wheel assembly right here. And it's about this big. And this has given me more problems than you can imagine.

And if you can see this here, this is a picture of the celebration when the reaction wheels from the company were delivered to NASA. And this is Goodrich Ithaca Company in Ithaca, New York. Steve, maybe you know some of these people. But look at how they're dressed.

This was supposed to be a small modification of something that we knew how to do. And it turned out to be a real research project. And we had some outstanding technicians and engineers who had to actually engage in acts of nothing short of heroism in order for this to happen.

So when they made the delivery and these devices worked extremely well, there was a great celebration, which was well deserved. So here are some pictures of two of the spacecraft. The spacecraft are being built out at Lockheed Martin in Denver. So you can see them here full size.

Here's one of them. And here's this one in foreground, and then the other one being worked on in the background. And as I said, they're very small. If you see me bolt out of here tomorrow afternoon, it's because I'm heading out for yet another review. I have, at least, one review a week because these two spacecraft are being delivered to Cape Canaveral in May.

Okay, here are the most important thing that you do in robotics is test, test, test, test, test. And so here are just some pictures of our team testing the variety of complements on the two spacecraft, okay. Here is a picture of the instruments being loaded on a plane out in Pasadena.

And they were flown to Denver to be put on the spacecraft. And this is just a placeholder to say that when the two spacecraft get sent to Cape Canaveral that I'm going to be in the cargo plane with the spacecraft. And my managers were telling me, Maria, you don't have to do this. We can just send them out there. You can meet us in Florida.

And I said, they're my spacecraft. I'm delivering them to Cape Canaveral. And I'm landing on the shuttle landing strip. And no one else is delivering these. And I was talking to Steve Squyres at lunch time. And he said he did the same thing with the Mars Exploration rover. So you tend to feel very attached to these things.

Here's my rocket. I'm very excited to have a job where I can say I bought a rocket. And I bought this one. I got this picture and, actually, on the same day that I got this picture, I got a picture of a fuse board that melted in testing. And I decided to show you this picture because I thought it was a lot more uplifting.

But the fuse board has since been repaired. And we have no issues there but in case you get the false impression that this is simple. Here's our launch pad here. And I just want you to know I have a folder on my computer with about 40 e-mails on it concerning the design and the font of the name of the mission, okay.

It has never happened before that the name of the mission is in the same size font as the name of the rocket, okay. So it took 40 e-mails for this to happen but we persevere. I was unwilling to settle for a smaller font.

So I'm pleased to say one of things I want to talk about is outreach and how what we do is so exciting that it engages students who have talents in critical and analytical thinking, in mathematics, in science, and in technology that these are endeavors that are worth study. And so I'm always thinking about new ways that we can get students involved in exploration.

So I said if I ever won a mission, I was going to do this properly. So I immediately went to Sally Ride, America's first woman in space who devotes her career to getting students involved-- particularly, middle school girls-- keeping them interested in math and science.

And so we have four camera heads on each spacecraft that have no scientific purpose. They are on the spacecraft totally to do outreach where students at schools will be able to program images so they can take their own images of the moon.

And Sally has done something similar with something called Earth Cam on the space station. It's been incredibly successful. But I think the public deserves ownership in space. And kids are awfully smart. And it doesn't take a whole lot to get them motivated to go in and figure out how to run the software so that they can program images to take pictures of the moon.

And I just want to end here with a nice picture of the moon over Cape Cod. And imagine what it's like to be sitting on the beach and to be able to look up at the moon and to know that you have made observations where you have gained understanding of the moon that no one else knows for a short period of time.

It's just an amazing feeling. And it's something that never gets stale. And it drives me. And it motivates me. And it's a wonderful career to have. And I'll end right there. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Okay, now I'm going to ask Steve Squyres to come up.

SQUYRES: Thanks, Maria. And could I have my first slide up? Any time you get invited to participate in an event where the words the future of appear in the title of the event, I think it's wise to approach it with a certain amount of humility and trepidation.

In my normal work, my every day work, I'm used to, as Maria mentioned, working with instrumentation that looks something like this. In order to prepare for today's event, however, I've had to familiarize myself with a different form of instrumentation.

And so what I'm going to try to do for the next 10 minutes here is gaze into that crystal ball and give you, sort of, some thoughts on what the future of space exploration-- I'll be focusing largely but not exclusively on robotic space exploration-- might look like. Now my crystal ball for the next 10 or 20 years is maybe not too cloudy.

One of the things that I've been participating in recently is something called the Decadal Survey, which is something that NASA does every 10 years with their National Research Council to plan the next decade or to a planetary exploration. So the first couple things that I'll be talking about actually come from that the Decadal Survey and are plausibly actually going to happen.

The First of them that I want to mention is the very challenging task of returning rocks from the surface of Mars. We have learned so much about Mars with the spacecraft that we have sent there in the last 10 or 15 years. But we've reached the point where the next big increment in understanding is going to come from bringing rocks back from the surface.

Now to do that, you got to do a bunch of things. And the plan is to actually break it up into three missions. The first mission shown in the upper left is a Rover-- a bit bigger than Spirit and Opportunity-- it would drive around and collect a cache of rocks, and take those rocks, and put them in a container on the martian surface.

The second mission, shown at the right, lands near that cache, picks it up, puts it into the nose cone of a small rocket, and launches into orbit around Mars. A spacecraft the size of a coconut that contains those samples. The third mission shown at lower left goes to Mars, goes into orbit, finds that coconut in space, puts it into a sample return canister, and sends it back to Earth.

This is an incredibly challenging suite of missions. But what it will do is it will return a set of samples that can continue to provide good science about Mars for decades into the future. Another one that all of us in the planetary science community are extremely excited about is Europa.

Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. It's roughly the size of the earth's moon. But it has a crust of ice on the outside. And there is good reason to believe that beneath that crust of ice lies an ocean of liquid water.

So we got two, possibly, accessible oceans in the solar system. One here on earth, the other one on Europa. And one of the missions that we're looking at is a mission that would go and orbit Europa with a number of instruments, including a long wavelength radar that can see through that ice, tell us how deep it is to get to the water, tell us where the thin spots are, tell us where the places where you might go and land.

And the thing that's exciting about Europa is that, of course, with that ocean being present, it's conceivable that down on that sea floor there could be hydrothermal vents, there could be the kind of local environments that support life at the bottom of the earth's oceans.

Another exciting place is Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn. It's a huge thing. It's like the size of the planet Mercury. It has a dense atmosphere of nitrogen. The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Titan is higher than it is in this room.

And it has an active hydrological cycle where it rains, and there are rivers, and there are lakes, except it's not water. It's liquid methane and liquid ethane at the temperatures of 80 or 90 degrees above absolute zero. So it's a fantastic world. And it's the kind of place that you can use rather familiar forms of transport to explore.

You can fly a balloon in the atmosphere of Titan. You can sail a boat in the methane ethane lakes on the surface. You could do submarines down at the bottom of those lakes. So Titan is going to be a fantastic place to explore, as well.

Now once you look further out into the future, that's where my crystal ball grows a little more cloudy. But let me tell you about some of the things I'd like to see happen. I talked earlier about Europa, and the idea that there is an ocean of liquid water, and that we can find where the thin spots are.

Well the obvious thing to do next is to go into that ocean. This is a phenomenally difficult mission. And this is going to happen decades in the future. You have to land. Then, somehow, you have to get through-- I'm going to wave my arms and guess-- about 10 kilometers, maybe, of ice. Maybe you melt your way through it.

And then, when you get down into that water column, you've got 100 kilometers of water between you and the sea floor, which is where the interesting science is. So you need some kind of autonomous, underwater vehicle that can swim down to the bottom of that ocean and, in the vastness of that ocean, find the interesting spots and explore them.

And then, somehow, get the data back. And all of this has to take place on a moon that is embedded deep in the Jovian magnetosphere with a hellaciously difficult charge particle, energetic particle, environment at the surface of Europa. This is a very, very, very tough mission. I hope it happens in the next 50 years.

Here's another one, Enceladus. Enceladus is a fantastic place. It's, again, one of the moons of Saturn, but it's a tiny little thing. It's only 500 kilometers in diameter. And yet, despite its small size and you would expect it's very cold temperature, there are geysers. Literally, geysers of water that are erupting from the south pole of Enceladus. And we know this from the Cassini spacecraft having flown through it.

And it's not just water, okay. There's organic materials being erupted in these things. What is in those vents? What is in those fractures? A mission I'd love to see you can see at the upper left there.

This is the kind of collector system that you might fly if you could fly a spacecraft through the plumes from one of those geysers and then, again, return samples to earth and figure out what's going on inside of Enceladus. Now I talked so far, mostly, about robotic exploration. Obviously, there's a great future for human exploration, as well.

And when you look at it realistically, the three kinds of objects you can see humans going to in the foreseeable future are the moon, asteroids, and Mars. Let me express my personal view on this. And that is that I believe it makes sense to send humans to the places where humans because of their unique capabilities, contribute the most.

And humans contribute most, in my view, in complex environments. The more complicated, the more difficult, the more unpredictable the environment, the more humans add to the mix. And when you look at those three classes of objects-- the moon, asteroids, and Mars-- the one that stands out in terms of its complexity and in terms of its potential for humans to contribute the most is unquestionably Mars.

Mars is far more complex than the moon. Mars is far more complex than asteroids. Mars is the place where humans make the most difference. And so, in my view, the future of human exploration should be focused towards getting to Mars.

Now that doesn't mean that you can't make sensible stopping points along the way. There may be places where you have engineering milestones or development milestones like the moon to show your capabilities before you go onto Mars. But to me, for humans, Mars is clearly the target.

Okay, so now looking way downstream. I'm going to look 150 years into the future now, and maybe more than that. To me, the real frontier is planets around other stars. This spacecraft here is Kepler. This is a spacecraft that is observing a patch of sky in the constellation Cygnus.

Here's the piece of sky that it's looking at. Just a little part of the sky. And what it's doing is it's detecting planets around other stars by looking at the tiny dips in the light curves from these stars when the planet passes in front of the star.

The spacecraft's been up there a little while. They've been staring at stars for a while trying to find planets. And here are the planet candidates just in that tiny patch of the sky. There are lots, and lots, and lots of worlds out there to explore.

And the blue ones among these candidates, those are earth sized. So I think the most exciting thing that we have in the future of exploration is to study these worlds. Initially, it will be from our solar system looking out with ever more advanced telescopes.

But the thing that I look forward to in the very distant future is actually sending spacecraft to planets around other stars. It's going to happen. It will first happen robotically. You can think of a number of technical challenges that are associated with doing something like that.

Certainly, communications is going to be a challenge. Certainly, autonomy of your spacecraft and we're talking about spacecraft that are light years away. Having those spacecraft operate completely autonomously in very poorly understood environments will be key. But the toughest problem, the singular problem that must be solved before we can ever think about traveling to other stars, is propulsion. I heard [INAUDIBLE] mentioned earlier in the discussion before lunch I think that's, quite possibly, going to be the way to go.

And for all you smart, young students at MIT, if you want to make your mark on the future, one thing to think about is how to develop a propulsion system that's going to get us to other stars because that's the thing that excites me most. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ZUBER: Okay, we'll next hear from Buzz Aldrin.

[APPLAUSE]

ALDRIN: Thank you for such a long introduction.

[LAUGHTER]

Whoever is controlling the slides, could you go to the one that show-- oh. I don't know. I point this at you guys out there? All right. I talked about this a little bit earlier.

This is what I call a comparison between the direct landing on the moon and what we actually did. The rocket that Wernher Von Braun wanted was the Nova rocket, nine engines. And on top of that, they'd have a propulsion system and this sizable spacecraft.

The Nova rocket wouldn't be ready in time. So he could split this up between this spacecraft and the TLI stage, trans-lunar injection. The upper stage of the rocket that would send this spacecraft.

And an MIT doctoral candidate who works with Ed Crowley did the size measurements of this just to put a point across that to send a multipurpose-- that is my name for this big monstrosity because a crew would be launched on it. It would go to the moon. It would do its landing, support those activities, then come back and land in the ocean.

No separate, specialized spacecraft at all. John Houbolt based his suggestion. And doggedly, he pursued it and has been my role model, so to speak, for quite a while. He said to the folks at NASA, now, if you specialize this spacecraft and have a lander kind of like this, and put it on one Saturn V along with the command and service module. You only need one Saturn V. So get that. Two Saturn V's for one spacecraft to the moon and back, multi-purpose. Specialized spacecraft, two of them, only needs one Saturn V.

That's a big deal. And I just want to point out that just don't say, well, we went to the moon with lunar-orbit rendezvous. And it was better than earth-orbit rendezvous. The big difference is multipurpose.

And that's exactly what the senate and the congress want us to build, and mandate it that we build a multipurpose from the surface of the Earth to Earth orbit. And then, from Earth orbit all the way to Mars or asteroids or whatever else, and all the way back, and it lands in the ocean.

Of course, we do specialize the lander, whether it's on Phobos or Deimos or the surface of Mars. And not actually for the moons of Mars. We could use an Orion habitat.

Let me just develop a little bit for you engineering folks out there. If we want to send a specialized spacecraft or plural, a long distance with high demands on reliability and long-term life support, we can put all of that in one big, large spacecraft. But now compare that with two medium sized.

About the same size, medium, and we avoid single point failures as much as possible but something happens and knocks out one of those medium vehicles, we still have the other one. Now let's take those two medium, and one gets smaller, and the other one gets bigger until the small one disappears. And you were back where we started from with one big one.

Now somewhere in that trade space is a more optimum. And I don't think it's to the same size. What you'd like to have at either earth or at Mars is a space, an Orion taxi, and you'd like to have an Orion hab, but not an Orion that's a government that lifts off from the surface of the earth, and goes into Earth orbit, and then does some of these others.

That's a government spacecraft. And it's not going to compete well with the civil spacecraft, especially when it's a copy of Apollo that goes all the way to the moon and back because when we go to the moon or, according to the Constellation Program, we were going to go there for, at least, six months. And that spacecraft was going to stay in orbit unmanned until the crew lifts off again, and then they come home.

So it doesn't have a crew in it. Now the Constellation Program, as I see it, originated from a desire to quickly copy what we did in Apollo. But it began to deviate from that when the accident board opened the door-- accident board of Columbia-- by saying separate crew and cargo.

Now we could have just done that and put it on some rocket. But instead, we wanted to put a small rocket. And it's my contention that ATK lied when they said a four segment solid could do the Aries 1 mission.

They had been trying to sell a five segment solid to the Air Force for quite a few years. And the Air Force just wasn't interested. So they said, oh, okay, we can get a command module or an Orion to rendezvous with the lander somewhere in earth orbit. But the Orion is going to have an upper stage on a four segment solid.

Well it wasn't long before that, obviously, wasn't going to work. And they put the five segment solid in there. And even that wasn't enough. When you look at Orion, you should ask the question why is the service module with fuel so small? Well because it doesn't have the capability of putting the lander, and the CSM, or the Orion into lunar orbit.

You got to put the fuel in the lander. And that makes the rocket even bigger. And a land is just gigantic-- not quite this big. All right, now this is kind of a quick unified space vision. Now this is what I presented to the Augustine group.

This is a modification of it. But what it really shows is the ability to, kind of, start out and 2010, '11, and proceed around the clock this way. When we first constructed this, the guy that constructed it knew that orbits go this way.

So he had the thing up here going this way. But that isn't the way a clock goes. So we rearranged it with the potential. This is the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing. And we affirm that we're on the right path. And we do various missions.

The first thing we've got to do is to develop, really, a long-term life support system. We do that at the space station. And then, we have a prototype of the Orion hab. And then, we start flying them along with the Orion taxi.

And we can do that in low earth orbit. And then, we can cycle missions back and forth between the Earth and the moon demonstrating what could be done in a private spacecraft with cycling orbits between Earth and Mars for adventure travel. We're doing that to check out the spacecraft under varying conditions over a period of time.

And then, leaving the hab module at either L1 or L2. Let me move to the next one. Maybe I have to go back this way.

All right, hopefully, you can see this. This was put together about two years ago. And I was hoping that the last five shuttle would be delayed a year between the missions so that we could-- between those year missions of the shuttle going to the station, three months before and three months after, are occupied in getting ready and checking out after the mission lands.

So you have about six months in between. And I felt that the work force could be working on the next lifting body runway lander that would start to fly along here. And this shuttle launch system would be evolved into a direct type, which, at the time I prepared this, is what I felt we probably ought to do. The quickest and the cheapest.

When it began to look like we were also going to study liquid rocket boosters, not being a real friend of solid rockets at all from the very beginning, I kind of changed my approach and wanted to retire the orbiter as soon as possible and transfer over to launch vehicles. And I think a lot of people convinced me that the cost of doing this sort of thing just wasn't going to work.

So we have a test bed at the space station. And then, the first exploration module is more of a prototype. Then, we start flying in Earth Moon cycling orbits around 2017, '18. We retire one of these in lower earth orbit for refueling and another one at L1 and L2.

There's a comet. And I think the next advance mission is a one year orbit where you are on a free return trajectory whenever the engine might cut off. And it's kind of simpler than rendezvousing with an asteroid. And there is this comet that we could fly by, at this term, [? vintanin. ?]

Then, there are two asteroids, 2001 GP2. There are many others that could be in here. And then, Apophis. I'm sure that you know Apophis is the asteroid that, at first tracking, it looked like there was a fair chance that it could impact the earth in 2029 on Friday the 13th of April.

Further refining of the orbit looks like, well, that's probably not the case. But it could also go inside a geosynchronous orbit. And the probability of distance inside geosynchronous has a key hole in it. And if it goes through that keyhole, it's going to raise it's semi major axis from being below earth's orbit, and moving in a catching up way to above Earth's orbit.

And so earth is catching up to it so that, in 2036-- Easter Sunday, April-- this would impact the earth somewhere between northern Japan and down the California coast to around Panama. And the middle of that is, maybe, 200 miles off the coast of California with 150 foot tsunamis.

Now obviously, we don't want that to happen. But we can make up a pass by Apophis in about 2021. The next thing we'd like to do is to land a habitat, an Orion hab on Phobos. And then, check that out while we're sending a human mission to occupy that.

I've selected three year and a half missions of three mission controllers or communicators with the robots that are sent to the surface of Mars in this 1 and 1/2 year period. And then, this crew would go there, come back. The second crew would go and do the same thing, come back.

And the third crew would go there with a lander and land, maybe, a week before the six people come from the earth and make nine people occupying the Mars somewhere between 2031 and 2035. Having these sequence of missions progressively getting more and more ambitious is going to keep the interest of the public.

And I think it'll result in more and more challenging opportunities. Everything in here can be [? slid-- ?] synodic periods of Mars. I'm getting the hook I see. So I'll be happy to answer questions on this and other things like travel to Alpha Centauri. The book being made into a movie is called Encounter With Tiber.

[APPLAUSE]

ZUBER: Great, thank you, Buzz. I'm sure there will be questions about this. So I want to remind people that there will be smiling people sending out index cards for your questions that we'll take. Our next speaker is Jim Bellingham.

BELLINGHAM: To whoever scheduled me to go after this vision for exploring the solar system, I'll talk to you later. I'm going to take you back to Earth. I think you heard, sort of, an introduction to exploration of the oceans from David Mindell this morning.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and give you some sense of what I think are the challenges for the future. In this domain. And I think, to a large degree, this is really shaped by my personal experiences. When I listen to the early exploration of space to the Apollo missions, I listen to it via a squeaky shortwave radio voice of America broadcast in developing countries, mostly different parts of Asia.

So when I came to MIT, I came here having spent about 2/3 of my life overseas. And so I kind of came into this with a very strong sense of exploration. A very strong sense. At the same time, there are enormous challenges that we need to solve as part of those exploration problems.

And I always felt that posing them as either or was, kind of, missing the point. It is true, however, though, that for those of you who are in the audience who are students, you're on a world that is quite a different world than the one that I grew up in. There are 7 billion people on the planet today.

By the 50 year mark here, maybe we'll be coming down from 11 billion. In 2050, it's kind of an optimistic perspective. And I think that really shapes, in effect, how we're going to approach this exploration problem because it's going to shape the problems we take on. So that's what I want to do. I want to talk a little bit about some of the problems I see being posed for us in the future and how exploration is part of the solution.

So first of all, I think that it comes as no surprise to people in this room that the Earth is changing. I think that, in particular, most of the Earth, the least understood part of the earth, is the ocean. So there's a picture of high latitudes. Part of the world that I'm particularly in love with but a part of the world, which is changing most dramatically.

And you're probably familiar with stories of the ice cover and the Arctic gradually disappearing. And just to give you a feeling how little we know about that, where I come from in Bari, we're out in the West coast in Monterey. We have two submersibles-- deep diving, remotely operated vehicles-- that spend about 300 days a year at sea.

A lot of it in the vicinity of Monterey and we've seen about 2% of the sea floor in Monterey Bay. That's probably the best explored patch of sea floor in the world. When you look at the Arctic Ocean, it's basically unknown. Indeed, it's closed to us for a good half of the year.

The other piece of this is that we're industrialized the ocean. So peak oil in the continental US is, perhaps, in the early 70s. North Sea oil has peaked now. And this is just one example. It's maybe an early example of where, as we deplete the terrestrial resources, we turn to these other environments.

And exploration has a connotation, which is linked directly to our prosperity and, indeed, to the prosperity of the world. And this is an issue which, I think, threads across a number of different types of resource. So for example, here, a fishery landings. That upper left hand corner you may not be able to read.

But it's a map of the world. Those colors show the fish landings in 1958. And then, you have down there in the lower right, and the much cooler, much lower numbers fish landings in 1999. And the basic story here is that we're much better at exploiting the environment than we are at understanding it.

And of course, if we don't understand it, we can't really manage it particularly well. And the ocean we really don't understand at all. So as a consequence, rather than calling it risk mitigation, we might really call it, in this case, survival. . Why do I say that?

Well an interesting number is that a little bit less than 20% of the animal protein we eat comes from marine animals. And the economist says that we're doing a job right now of producing about enough food to feed the world. The problem is agricultural production is producing by about half a percent a year while food production is producing about by a half a percent a year.

And you can see here, we're really depleting in unsustainable ways a lot of the resources largely because we don't understand. So what is the challenge? And I thought I would just put this down in black and white because until you put it down, you can't really solve it. So humans are expensive in remote and hostile environments.

And that's true because we require the equipment and consumables to keep us alive. It's expensive to transport us, our equipment, and our expendables. And so if you look at this, to me, the question here isn't whether or not you should send humans to these remote environments. I think that's part of who we are.

We will go. We must go. But the question is, how do we make it affordable to get there? And I think that that's where robotics, in particular, has a particularly large role to play. So I've been building marine robots for quite a while. I

did my early development work here at MIT. That's one of our vehicles there. We called it C Squirt. So I started this back when in the late 80s. And that vehicle could go a few kilometers. It really carried almost nothing in the way of sensors.

And in between that and my current vehicle-- there's a lot of other vehicles, some of them very big and very deep aerated-- but I'm particularly proud of that new system. It has a range of, perhaps, 1,500 kilometers or, perhaps, 4,000 kilometers, which is enough to get from California to Hawaii. And it has all kinds of sophisticated sensors on board.

So the story here is, really, that there is a very rapid rate of change in marine robotics in just a matter of a few decades. And I think that change is going to accelerate. Part of it is that we're learning how to use them much better.

So here I am at MIT. I have to put up, at least, one equation. But being a physicist, most of the term's to zero to simplify it. So this is just to give you a feeling for, when you're working in the ocean environment, what's the energy problem that we're up against?

And we divide our energy use of our vehicles into two terms. How much does it cost to us to move through the water? And of course, it's a very viscous medium. So it actually costs a lot of energy. And then, how much power do we spend on everything else?

Now the propulsion term actually goes as velocity cube. So there's a v cube there. And so you can ask the question of if I want to map a particular patch of ocean and I have to get it done in a certain amount of time, what's the total amount of energy it's going to take me to do that?

And so if I have that one vehicle there and it takes me a time tau, you can see that first equation you won, that defines, in effect, my reference term of how much power it will take. Now the thing is, if I put two vehicles in, what happens is the power-- and by the way, I set hotel load to zero there just because we usually do spend most of our power on propulsion.

But if I set the hotel load to zero, and then I have the speed but double the number of vehicles, basically, what you use is you use a quarter of the energy. So this is the big lessons. And if you go [? all ?] [? in ?] the back room could start this little animation.

This shows circa 2003 how we started running our field programs using larger and larger numbers of robots. So this is a picture of Monterey Bay. There's that cool water, which is upwelling water. Nutrient rich water on the surface.

And under water, now, this is an animation, but this actually happened. Actually, there were more vehicles in the water. Well you have, you have fleets of underwater robots which are all actually going comparatively slow but, collectively, give you this enormous measurement capability in the ocean environment.

So increasingly, we're using these many body methods for observing the ocean. And I think this is part of the larger trend. So Dr. Aldrin talked about specialization. I believe very strongly in specialization of these robotic capabilities. And I think that the frontiers of robotics are increasingly moving to how we use these systems together and what the appropriate specialisations are because we need an infrastructure for energy, for raw materials, for processing.

Perhaps, manufacturing, for transport, for maintenance. Robots become a lot cheaper to develop if you can count on being able to fix them. And that graph there just shows, for one January, where most of the sunlight is. And notice that most of the sunlight in this particular January, well, it occurs over the ocean.

So this is one cues. We have to learn to use the environment better. Now being a technologist, I do spend a lot of time just worrying about what are the general technological trends. And I think this is kind of an interesting graph here because what you can see is you can see that some things are going up tremendously rapidly or exponentially.

And so those are the classic ones. CPU speed, disk capacity, memory costs are all up in there. Other things like battery power aren't increasing so quickly. And so what you can think about it is this is the platform capability here because you're really limited by energy, on board energy.

And then, this is what you can do with the platform because it's, in some senses, a function of what processing power that you can put on it. And so this is my vision. This is what gives me hope for robotics.

Surely, there are non-linearities in here somewhere as we learn how to use this processing to make better robots. But I see in effect to capability per kilogram is going up quite dramatically in the future. And I think it's the job of the people in the room here to make that happen.

So finally, I just want to say that although I've argued here that robots are, in effect, enablers of human exploration and, in effect, human prosperity, I also think it's true that robots give us an opportunity to go to places that we've never been before.

And so I'm reminded of that movie The Fantastic Voyage where people got shrunk down and inserted in the bloodstream of a human being. And I think that, in some senses, robots let us do the same thing. There are some places we simply can't go because we're too big or whatever.

And robots, in effect, give us a way to be there. So I just want to thank, finally, the MIT folks for having put this on and having included me in this event. And with that, I think I'll turn it over to you, Maria.

[APPLAUSE]

ZUBER: OK, Jim. Thanks, very much. OK, in a second here, we're going to roll the video from Cady Coleman who will be reporting to us from the International Space Station. I'll remind you that we've got some folks with index cards here that you can write down questions if you're interested in questions. And we'll pick those up after we hear from Cady.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

-Hello, and welcome to the International Space Station. I'm Cady Coleman, NASA astronaut, MIT graduate from 1983. And this is my world, at least for the past few months and another month.

I'm really happy to be here with you today and to share this place with you. I'm very privileged to live aboard the International Space Station and commute to work here every day. And I love, pretty much, every single minute of it.

I feel very privileged to be here and to be part of this symposium. I'm actually really excited to know that all of you are together. And I had just a few things I wanted to share from this very unique vantage point and the view outside from our Cupola module, which has Windows on all sides and allows us to see marvelous places coming and going.

And also just gives us that perspective of looking down on the earth and realizing we are in an orbiting space. And that, when I look out at the stars and I see so many stars and planets and know that we have a place in the universe. And part of our job is to explore that place. I'll ask you today two things. One, is to congratulate yourselves on being part of exploration. It's part of the human spirit. And if you're in this auditorium, then it's something that you have a passion for. And second, I ask you to realize that, if you're part of the present, then you're part of the future.

Whether it's to continue engineering efforts to explore beyond our earth, or whether it's to educate the younger generation who will then be carrying that torch for us, all of us are part of the future when we're part of the present. And I'll just ask you to enjoy every minute of the symposium.