Learn all about the Odysseus Moon landing mission, plus the latest in the search for life — or traces of past life — on Mars.
Watch the live-streamed conversation with Matteo Borri on Thursday, February 23rd at 12 pm PST/8 pm UTC.
Live Mindplex Podcast with Matteo Borri
Thursday, February 23rd at 12pm PST / 8pm UTC
Welcome back to the Mindplex Podcast and our new weekly live format!
Watch the recording of the live podcast with special guest roboticist and inventor Matteo Borri, who has many specialties including autonomous robots, 3d printing, lasers, Mars Rover development, and is an all around space expert generally. But perhaps he is best known for inventing a prototype for a laser capable of detecting chlorophyll that was included in the NASA Mars Perseverance Rover.
2024 is already an incredible year for space and Matteo has all the juicy details behind the scenes about all the latest space news you have been hearing about.
Feel free to ask your own questions about space or anything else. Matteo doesn’t know about everything, but even when he says he doesn’t know about something, he will often have interesting thoughts about it — so you have nothing to lose by asking.
Episode 23 ALIEN LIFE
We will start off with a brief rundown of yesterday’s Odysseus Moon landing by Intuitive Machines, which is not only the first US moon landing in 50 years and the first commercial moon landing ever, but it is also the first time that liquid methane and liquid oxygen have been used for a lunar lander rocket motor, which, as Matteo points out, is interesting because those are all gases that are easy to make with an automated factory.
Next we will cover the very exciting news that NASA’s rover Perseverance has confirmed the presence of ancient lake sediments in Mars’ Jezero Crater. Ground-penetrating radar observations by the rover’s RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Exploration) radar system have provided substantial evidence that water once filled the basin, meaning there is a potential for life to have existed there.
The research, led by teams from UCLA and the University of Oslo, showcased cross-sectional views of rock layers demonstrating sediment deposits from a river that fed into the crater. This discovery reinforces previous suggestions that Mars was once warmer, wetter, and could have hosted microbial life.
Samples collected by Perseverance will allow for further examination of Jezero’s sediments, providing valuable insights into Mars’ geological and potential biological history. If fossil bacteria can be detected, it would be a huge discovery, as it would be proof that bacterial life existed on the planet long ago.
Lisa interviewed Matteo about underground lakes on Mars way back in 2018, and his interview reads like it came out today — although, in 2018, he was only hypothesizing that there were probably lakes — in the hopes we might be able to confirm it in the future. The existence of these lakes — and even an ocean the larger than the Artic Ocean on Earth, has now been confirmed.
Matteo’s Chlorophyll Detecting Laser (On the Mars Perseverance Rover)
Matteo’s technique for detecting chlorophyll, called Chlofluorescence, is now in use on the Perseverance Rover to search for signs of life on Mars.
Matteo developed a method for detecting chlorophyll inspired by one of his old college experiments, using a simple filter and laser to detect the fluorescent frequency of chlorophyll. (Chlorophyll is considered a sign of potential life.) The method involves detecting the fluorescent light emitted by chlorophyll when it is exposed to sunlight.
There were a few challenges with false positives associated with the detection process, as well as the practical considerations that had to be taken into account when actually deploying the laser on the rover.
Matteo always emphasizes that he only designed a prototype and his actual prototype never made it to Mars — which was a teeny bit of a letdown for Lisa when she found that out. She had come over to watch him pack it up, and they had both touched their fingers on the prototype and held their breath for a moment — before he closed up the box and sent it to NASA.
“I was hoping that maybe we had touched something that one day would actually be on Mars,” she remembers. “But it’s still exciting knowing that his prototype was implemented on the actual Mars Perseverance Rover.”
More exciting space stories that we will be covering:
- How Perseverance’s “Ingenuity” helicopter conducted surveyor missions for the rover, scoping out good locations ahead of time for areas that might have bountiful samples. (And how it worked much better and longer than originally predicted, although it did finally “die.”)
- The first NASA OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security — Regolith Explorer) — the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from the Bennu asteroid. (Japan was the first to obtain a sample from a astroid Ryugu back in 2019, using a completely different subsurface technique to obtain the sample.)
- The details about how the OSIRIS-REx mission used a pressure gradient to create a temporary artificial atmosphere around a section of the asteroid to get a sample from its surface.
- How NASA OSIRIS-REx returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, to drop off material from asteroid Bennu but instead of landing, continued on to a new mission, OSIRIS-APEX, to explore asteroid Apophis. (Since Asteroid Apophis isn’t going to hit us after all, we have an opportunity to send a probe to study it more closely.)
- Anything else you care to ask Matteo!
Episode 23’s Featured Guest: Matteo Borri
Matteo Borri is an inventor and engineer in San Rafael, California who is currently working with NASA and the Mars Society. He invented a chlorophyll detecting laser prototype design that was included on NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover.
Matteo and his company, Robots Everywhere LLC provides expertise in lasers, antbots, drones, 3d laser cutting, 3d printing, solar panel and battery tech and more, and has implemented autonomous vehicles and home manufacturing tools all over the world.
Matteo has many videos demonstrating many things on his Robots Everywhere YouTube channel.
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