“Thinking about everything that is about you on another planet, many childhood dreams, is something really unique and special.”
José Antonio Rodríguez Manfredi was overcome with emotion when see the Perseverance robot land on Mars.
And the fact is that NASA’s explorer robot, the most sophisticated ever sent into space, carries an instrument on its body, called MEDA , to which the Spanish engineer and his colleagues dedicated years of creativity and effort.
Rodríguez Manfredi is the principal investigator of MEDA, a meteorological station for Mars whose development was led by the Astrobiology Center , at the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (CSIC-INTA) in Madrid.
MEDA sensors, acronym in Mars environmental dynamics analyzer English, they should work in places with temperatures of 90 Under zero grades. And their data will be key not only to understand the Martian climate, but to design future manned missions to the red planet.
BBC Mundo spoke with José Antonio Rodríguez Manfredi about the challenges of MEDA, the extreme climate of Mars and how studying this planet can help to understand the origin of life on Earth.
How did you feel the 18 February when Perseverance landed?
It has really been an explosion of emotions, though we are very aware that we are in the best hands. NASA colleagues have, as has been evidenced these days, control and mastery over what they do that is very reassuring. But even so, it is inevitable that one has that fear and many things cross your mind, all those moments that we have lived, all the people, all the sacrifice that has been made throughout all these years.
You feel on the one hand that it is the end of the first chapter of all the design and construction that has been really intense, and from there the new adventure of exploring other planets begins.
We are virtually in another world, it is something really exciting, it is a mixture of everything. And thinking about all that there is of you on another planet, many childhood dreams, many vocations behind, is something really unique and special, and that is what brings out many tears and many emotions.
Q What is the MEDA weather station going to measure on Mars?
MEDA is one of the seven instruments carried by the Perseverance rover. The explorer carries as a toolbox, to analyze the soil, mineralogy, rocks, and also carries a similar meteorological station, saving distances, which we can have at home in the garden or at the window.
MEDA is Perseverance’s weather person who will provide you with information about wind, temperature, radiation, humidity, pressure.
And they will also measure the dust …
A very fundamental thing for NASA thinking not only of understanding the planet but also of future manned missions, is the role played by the powder, which is essential. Those very tiny particles of dust that are everywhere on the planet, when the wind begins to blow, they rise and that dust can cover the entire planet at once. The dynamics of the atmosphere, temperature, etc. They depend on that dust. Understanding therefore what the role of that dust is and how it rises from the ground is key, even more so when thinking about the future.
Because imagine a ship with a human crew that is going to land on the planet, that dust will play a very important role. Knowing it is part of the research that MEDA is going to do.
How will MEDA sensors work in conditions so different from Earth, with extreme cold and an atmosphere that is 1% density of the atmosphere terrestrial?
On Mars, the average temperature is of the order of – 65 ° C. Still MEDA has not provided much information, we just went on. But if we go to the Curiosity rover, where another Spanish instrument is, REMS, a weather station, the highest temperature we have measured in summer has been seven, eight degrees Celsius.
You can think : “I put on a coat and it’s enough to survive there”, but in winter we have registered – 90 ° C. And that the Gale crater, where Curiosity landed, is close to the equator, but if we go to the poles we find temperatures of – 150 ° C. The electronics, the devices, have to be able to work at such extreme temperatures.
In addition, the Martian atmosphere has a density of 1% compared to that of the Earth. On Earth, the atmosphere protects us from solar radiation, but on Mars, being scarce and tenuous, all incident and harmful radiation reaches the surface and is capable of causing systems to fail. The development of a technology like this that has just landed is really very complex because it has to be able to survive such extreme conditions. And that’s why it takes us so long.
And what winds did they measure with REMS?
We have measured in some cases winds of about 100 km per hour, but with the exception that as the atmosphere is very thin, these large winds do not have the effect that they have on the Earth. It is not like a wind of 100 km per hour that moves trees here and causes disasters. On Mars, as the atmosphere is not very dense, it is as if we perceive it on the face as a breeze.
What exactly was the role of the Center for Astrobiology in MEDA?
The development of MEDA has been led by the Center for Astrobiology, but we have other centers that have contributed certain elements, and science is done through this entire consortium. There are some 18 partners or partners, mostly in Spain, but also, for example, the Finnish Institute of Meteorology contributed elements. Even NASA also contributes an element that we include within the sensor and then contribute to the mission. It is a bilateral relationship.
MEDA joins the other two previous instruments of missions to Mars that you developed ( REMS in Curiosity and TWINS sensors in Insight ) . You now have a network of three stations, how does this allow you to understand what is happening on the planet in general?
This is very important. Imagine that we only had the weather information in London to try to predict what is happening in Madrid or in Buenos Aires or wherever it may be.
It is impossible, because no matter how tight we have the models, we really do not have sufficient conditions to adjust them to a single point. Ideally, we would like to have thousands or millions of stations spread all over the planet, as it happens here on Earth, so that we can adjust the meteorological model quite well and from there make more precise predictions. On Mars we have three, that is why we say that it is a meteorological mini-network, but there are three and that will help us a lot to adjust the models.
How will MEDA help the objectives Mission 13017 of Perseverance , including looking for signs of past microbial life?
The mission has four main objectives, that search for life, the characterization of the geology of the environment, the collection of samples to bring them to Earth, and the demonstration of technology for future human missions, human preparation. Those are the four great pillars.
MEDA will provide important information when it comes to understanding the current planet, and through models we will be able to study what we call the paleoclimate. In other words, based on the current climate and current geology, try to go back in time to see what that geology might have been like at the time and relate it to the climate in the past.
But essentially MEDA’s involvement will be in preparation for a future human presence. We will have, for example, to design instruments that the dust does not obstruct. A Perseverance instrument, MOXIE, will extract oxygen from CO2 in the atmosphere of Mars and is highly dependent on that dust. MEDA will contribute a lot to future mission design.
When talking about looking for signs of life in the past, what kind of life are you thinking of?
3 ago, 800 millions of years Mars was a planet with a lot of water, with a much denser atmosphere, and rivers flowed and there were oceans. From there there was a climate change, when the planet cooled down.
Since the origin of the Solar System, Earth and Mars went more or less in parallel paths, they were similar, until it occurs this climate change and Mars is already deviating to the current Mars.
So we asked ourselves: what was the life that was on Earth 3 years ago, 800 millions of years, before that change occurred climate on Mars?
Here on Earth there was life, there were no plants and animals of course, there were microorganisms, microscopic beings, that lived in that watery environment. If in similar conditions on Earth there were these forms of life, it is in principle logical to think that perhaps it could have also arisen in a similar environment on another planet and that is what we are looking for. We are looking for the forms of life that we have verified that existed on Earth in those same conditions at that same moment.
Does that mean that maybe on Mars life has not been able to adapt to all these extreme conditions and now it still persists? Well maybe, but that’s another question. We have considered in this mission to start at the beginning, we are going to try to make that comparison with what we know and look for that similar life on Mars. And that is why we go to the Jezero crater, because there were favorable conditions for it to have arisen.
What we are looking for is what we call stromatolites, they are microorganisms that have been fossilized in the geological record as if they were little capitals. Surely you have seen that ice cream that is cream, chocolate, cream, chocolate, well something like that is a stromatolite, it is a structure where those microorganisms are fossilized.
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How could the study of Mars help to understand processes on Earth, such as desertification?
It is also a type of research that can be carried out on the Moon, it is a different environment, but actually the entire process of meteorite impacts that was recorded on the Moon or that we can study on Mars is also applicable to Earth.
There are many processes that are similar and occurred in different bodies. Understanding how these processes were is interesting to know how our own planet has evolved. Regarding this aspect of desertification, Mars had a very abrupt cooling in this climate change, it lost all that heat and all that internal energy. It is not very foreseeable that this could happen on Earth in the near horizon, since it has a very active nucleus, but all these processes also provide us with information about our own geology.
And finally, by Of course, there is the evolution of life. What we can learn from life outside of our planet will also help us understand how life emerged on Earth. There is a gap , a time gap in which we really don’t know how life came about. Assuming the theories that say that life arose on Earth, not that it came from another planet, there was a time when more complex molecules began to form from the inorganic compounds that were in the water, in the atmosphere, and in a At a given moment, the first organic elements begin to form.
But between those first organic molecules and life, there is a time when we really don’t know what happened, how self-organization occurred , the formation of membranes. Understanding how life arose and evolved on other planets can help us understand how all that change took place at that time.
Did you say that MEDA is already on, what happens now, how is the day to day?
Every day we receive the data from all the instruments, and they are all available to all the huge team behind it, but we take care of analyzing our data. The decisions that are made, we are going to measure at that time, we are going to take one photo to another, all that is decided between the entire mission, and we end up coding the program, the orders to send them to Mars and for the instrument to execute them. .
This is done daily, the data is received, it is analyzed that all the instruments, the sensors, that everything is fine, scientific data is generated and based on these data we decide the activities of tomorrow which we reduce to commands that the rover is going to execute and send them to Mars. And so every day, with the three missions.
At first you mentioned childhood dreams. What were those dreams and how did you end up working in astrobiology?
By training I am an engineer, but certainly throughout my professional career at the Astrobiology Center one of the The first things one learns is a language. In our center many disciplines converge: engineering, physics, biology, geology, planetology, many people come together and the first thing you learn is a common language.
An engineer, a physicist, a geologist, has to learn where the common point is to understand the other, and that was essential in my training. There came a time when I no longer think like an engineer, that’s why I describe myself many times as an astrobiologist, because I think it’s a mixture of all that.
When I was little and I looked at the sky maybe when I was eight, nine years old, and I saw those little white dots, I wanted to be part of the missions that explored them. I saw in the cinema, in the movies, the NASA missions, and I wanted to be part of all that. I’ve been lucky because you have to be lucky to find your way, and now I am living a dream, undoubtedly living a huge dream.
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