The six-year-old space agency with hopes for Mars

Host: Nick Howe

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, a trip to Mars from the United Arab Emirates…

Host: Shamini Bundell

And how spreading rocks on farmland could combat climate change. I’m Shamini Bundell.

Host: Nick Howe

And I’m Nick Howe.

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Host: Nick Howe

First up, 2020 will probably go down in the history books for a number of reasons. But for physicists and astronomers, it will also be known as the year of Mars. Lizzie Gibney has been reporting on the three missions headed to Mars this year, and back in February, she took a trip to the home of one of those missions – a space agency that a few years ago barely even existed.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

This year, you’re going to hear a lot about Mars. Several space agencies around the world are launching missions to the red planet. It may surprise you to hear that the United Arab Emirates is one of them. A team here is planning to launch an orbiter that will study the Martian atmosphere. What makes this mission remarkable is that it’s coming from a space agency that is just six years old. The UAE nor any other Arab nation has ever launched a planetary mission before. I’ve come to the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai to hear more about this audacious mission. First up, I spoke to Sarah Al Amiri, deputy project manager and science lead for the mission. When I first heard about this mission, my impression was, ‘That sounds crazy.’

Interviewee: Sarah Al Amiri

You wouldn’t be the only one. We do get that a lot because one, we’re a new country that has entered into the space race and it was something that was audacious, but for us it’s a necessity.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

So, the UAE is going to Mars. Where did the idea first come from?

Interviewee: Sarah Al Amiri

So, the idea of going to Mars started at a ministerial retreat towards the end of 2013, where the government relooks at the general strategy and direction that the government is going down and sets its priorities and objectives, and it was in that retreat that His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is the Prime Minister of UAE and also the ruler of Dubai, discussed the idea of going to Mars as a means by which we can challenge the development of science and technology skills across the board and elevate that and be a country and a nation who is able to design and develop complex systems, and it was from there that the team at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre was tasked with looking at how do we get to Mars, how to design and develop a mission there, how are you going to develop the capabilities around that and, most importantly, how are you going to get there before 2 December 2021? Of course, 2 December 2021 is the 50^th anniversary of the creation of the UAE as a nation.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And how ambitious was this plan? How much experience had the UAE already in going to space?

Interviewee: Sarah Al Amiri

So, the UAE has been a user of space systems since the 80s, and we’ve transitioned into designing and developing spacecrafts in 2006. So, late 2013 to the beginning of 2014 was sort of a mid-point of the journey for us in sort of developing Earth observation satellites and it was at that point that we took the experience that we had from Earth observation, built on it with knowledge partners, and moved towards developing this Hope probe.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And so, what will the Hope probe do at Mars?

Interviewee: Sarah Al Amiri

So, the Hope probe, for the very first time, will give us a full understanding of the weather of Mars and that occurs in the lower atmosphere of Mars. We will be studying most of the major constituents within the lower atmosphere to better understand what happens to water vapour there, what happens to the dust storms. And more importantly, what we also want to look at is atmospheric loss – the loss of hydrogen and oxygen from the top of the Martian atmosphere – and this allows us to have a more holistic understanding of the planet and how it has lost its atmosphere and also the dynamics of the atmosphere as a whole. Now, why is that different? Why is it novel than other missions because we all know about what makes up the atmosphere of Mars? We know about the temperatures. But prior to this, missions have looked at it not throughout entire days, so looked at it during two time slots of the day, either 2am or 2pm. And for us, we’ll be able to cover all of Mars during all times of the day throughout an entire year, and give us a full understanding of what really happens and what are the dynamics that occur on that planet. It was very important for us to fit in to an area of science that was not relevant to the UAE only but it was relevant to the global science community, and that allowed us to send a mission for the very first time that was not only a declaration of the UAE arriving to Mars, but rather a mission that has global impact and has global outcomes and addresses some of the questions that scientists have posed about Mars but don’t have a mission that’s going there to address that.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And what have some of the impacts of the mission been? I don’t believe there were many planetary scientists here maybe five or six years ago.

Interviewee: Sarah Al Amiri

So, when we started with this mission, even at the centre, we didn’t have a space science department. We didn’t have researchers that were working in this area. We definitely did not have scientists that have been developed to handle that, and what this has stimulated is one, an interest for people to enter into natural sciences, especially physics and mathematics, and expanded the career options and opportunities that were there. Now, you see more roles coming up that are based on research.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

One of the key hopes of the mission is to encourage young Emirates into science, and when the mission first started, the team behind it actually had an average age of 27 themselves. I spoke to another member of this young team, Omran Sharaf, who’s the project director. He was able to tell me more about the mission’s goals and also show me a glimpse of the spacecraft itself. I think that is the Hope probe itself that I can just see through two sets of windows.

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

Yes, that’s the Hope probe.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

As I peered through the windows, I could see the Hope probe, though it was actually wrapped up for transport, looking like a huge present. But beneath the silvery covering, the probe consists of a hexagonal orbiter about the size of an SUV. It’s got a big dish on top to communicate with Earth and wide solar panels to charge its batteries. Omran explained to me some of the many protective features on-board the craft.

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

We have a spacecraft that’s covered in ESD wrapping, especially to protect it from any environmental contamination, and underneath the HAPS you can see the MLIs which is used for thermal control.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

You’re not taking any chances with this probe.

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

No. 50% of the missions that have been to Mars have failed. Mars is difficult, Mars is challenging, and Mars is risky, so we had to learn from somewhere. So, based on the requirements that were given to us, which was one of them to learn from others and not start from scratch, we were able to identify the University of Colorado at Boulder to work with us on the mission and be our main know-how transfer partner, and the university was the right kind of partner. It had the right kind of mindset and the right team culture that was able to help us move forward.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And how did that collaboration work? Was it a case of one university doing one instrument and another doing another instrument, or what kind of a relationship was it?

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

So, one of the ways that helped us also expedite and speed the process of delivering the mission concept was the fact in which we actually had the experts from different organisations and partners. That happened through collaboration. We had teams from different organisations integrated with each other. So, the team functioned as an Emirates Mars mission team. It didn’t function as separate entities or separate organisations, and that was the important side of the project that helped us move forward fast, built on the experiences of others, facilitates knowledge transfer and know-how transfer, and have everyone speak the same language and march towards a common goal.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

What were the main requirements then when the government asked you go to Mars? What were the main things they wanted from this mission?

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

So, we received a few important requirements from the Prime Minister himself. The first requirement was we need to reach Mars before 2 December 2021 because of the 50^th anniversary. We want to celebrate with a very big achievement. The second requirement was build it, don’t buy it. The third requirement was to learn from others, don’t start from scratch, and the science has to be novel. And the last requirement was we need to create a big shift in different sectors in the UAE to help create the ecosystem required to build a sustainable science and technology sector in the UAE that will help strengthen in our space economy, a competitive, innovative and creative knowledge-based economy.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

Missions to Mars generally are pretty risky and about 50% of them historically have failed. What do you think the chances are that the team will pull this off?

Interviewee: Omran Sharaf

So, as a team, we are optimistic about the mission and looking forward for February 2021 when we reach Mars.

Host: Nick Howe

That was Omran Sharaf, project manager of the UAE’s Hope Mars Mission. You also heard from Sarah Al Amiri, the mission’s science lead. For more about this mission, we’ll put a link to an article Lizzie has written all about it, along with some links with info about others Mars missions happening this year.

Host: Shamini Bundell

Later on, we’ll be finding out about the geoengineering technique that fights climate change with rocks. Before that, though, it’s time for the Research Highlights with Dan Fox.

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Dan Fox

Pluto lost its status as a planet back in 2006, and the bad luck hasn’t stopped as now its atmosphere appears to be collapsing. Out on the chilly fringes of the Solar System, Pluto’s thin atmosphere is created by sunlight warming ice on the dwarf planet’s surface. But since 1989, Pluto has been moving away from the Sun and getting colder. Scientists had expected to see its atmosphere vanish as it froze and fell down to Pluto’s surface, but hadn’t actually observed it happening yet. Now, a team of researchers have probed the dwarf planet’s atmosphere by observing it as it passed in front of a distant star. This allowed the team to measure the atmospheric density. They found that the pressure had dropped by one fifth of what it was back in 2016, a much larger decrease than the 1% change their models had predicted. Read that research in full at Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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Dan Fox

The presence of pre-historic human remains in cave systems in what is now Mexico may finally be explained. The ancient Mesoamericans had delved underground in search of the red pigment ochre. Previously, scientists couldn’t explain what compelled the area’s inhabitants to explore the pitch-black tunnels and chambers. Now, the discovery of vibrant, highly pure ochre, along with evidence of extensive mining, might offer an explanation. New radiocarbon dating of charcoal deposits suggests the mine was active for about 2,000 years before digging ceased 10,000 years ago. Ancient peoples around the world prized ochre for artistic, medicinal and ceremonial purposes, but the lack of above ground archaeological evidence in the Yucatán means researchers do not know how people there used the hard-won pigment. Dig deeper into that research at Science Advances.

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Host: Shamini Bundell

Next up, to battle climate change, reducing emissions is an obvious priority, but some scientists think that to really tackle the issue, we may need to go further, using geoengineering techniques to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Reporter Benjamin Thompson has been finding out about one of these techniques, which uses rocks to trap CO2.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Humanity, I think it’s fair to say, is not doing a great job when it comes to addressing climate change. We keep doing things like pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Getting these emission levels down is vitally important, but that on its own might not be enough.

Interviewee: David Beerling

The bottom line is that even emissions reductions isn’t going to get us out of trouble because the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations breached the safe level, and so in order to kind of address the climate change issue, we’re going to need to reduce emissions but also combine that with large-scale technology that will take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

This is David Beerling from the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation here in the UK. This week in Nature, David and his colleagues are publishing their assessment of one of these technologies, known as enhanced weathering, to see if it’s a viable option for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Now, enhanced weathering works by essentially spreading crushed up basalt rock onto the surface of farmland which, in the presence of rainwater and with a little bit of chemistry, pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, locking it away. To get an idea of whether this approach might work on a large scale as a climate mitigation strategy, David and his colleagues have collected a lot of data. By combining information on things like soil and mineral chemistry, land use and economics, they were able to show the potential of enhanced weathering in different countries in 2050.

Interviewee: David Beerling

We showed that even after you account for CO2 emissions associated with mining, grinding and spreading the rocks, this technique, enhanced weathering, could draw down up to about 2 billion tonnes of CO2 a year if it was applied to major croplands of the world. The world’s highest emitters, so China, India and the US, also have the greatest potential to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using this technique. That’s interesting because China, India and the US are also the three nations that are expected to suffer the most from climate change impact, in terms of sea level rise and threats to coastal cities.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

David says that countries with large areas of farmland and a warm, wet climate have the most potential for capturing carbon using this technique. But promising technologies often succeed or fail by how expensive they are. In this case, David’s modelling suggests that the costs stack up favourably to forecasts.

Interviewee: David Beerling

The Royal Bank reported on prices for carbon removal, and they suggested that if the price for carbon removal was in sort of the US$100-150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050 range then this would promote the deployment of greenhouse gas removal strategies. We found that generally speaking for developing countries, it’s actually quite lower than that. For developed countries, it’s in or just slightly above that range.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

The analysis also shows that costs for enhanced weathering are comparable to those of other proposed carbon capture techniques. David thinks that enhanced weathering could have other advantages too, such as improving crop yield by returning minerals to the soil that are lost as a result of intensive farming methods. Johannes Lehmann from Cornell University in the US has written a News and Views article for Nature about the research. He was impressed but cautions that there’s a way to go just yet.

Interviewee: Johannes Lehmann

I’m very positive about the extent to which they used the available information and come up with a technical potential, but the devil is in the detail now, and I think the conclusion from what they came up with legitimately is that we should fully consider it and intensify our efforts to see how it can be implemented and how effective it can be when it is actually implemented.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

There are, of course, a lot of questions that need to be answered about things like safety and ecological impact, and dialogues that need to be had with governments, regulators and the public. Johannes also thinks that there’s a key group that needs to be engaged – the farmers’ whose land will be used.

Interviewee: Johannes Lehmann

We need to have the farmers in the driver’s seat for these kinds of innovations that directly affect their livelihoods. This is not something where the city dwellers can come and say, ‘We want you to do this to save the planet,’ and it’s on the back of the farmers that have yet another task to perform in addition to food production.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

David also thinks that engagement with farmers is vital, both to bring them on board and to help test whether enhanced weathering actually works in the fields and if it does boost crop yield. This is something that he and his colleagues have been doing and he says that early results are encouraging.

Interviewee: David Beerling

We’re running a field trial in the UK and the farmer there is very excited because we’ve demonstrated carbon capture, and we also have a field site in Illinois and there we’ve been seeing increases in maize yield and also in soybean yield, and our plan is that after a couple more years, once we’re comfortable with the results that we’re getting, we’re going to invite land owners and land managers from the Corn Belt to come and visit the farm and see some of the results so that we can test the temperature, if you like, of the farming community in the US.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Despite these positive results, in reality, David says that enhanced weathering will have to be used as part of a suite of measures to effectively tackle climate change. Even if the technique can remove up to 2 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide a year, that’s really only a drop in the bucket.

Interviewee: David Beerling

I think you have to put it in context. The annual emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere are 40-50 billion tonnes a year, and so this kind of emphasises the point that not only do you have to dial down your emissions and keep them down but you also have to deploy greenhouse gas removal technologies.

Host: Shamini Bundell

That was David Beerling from the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation in the UK. You also heard from Johannes Lehmann from Cornell University in the US. We’ll put a link to David’s paper along with a News and Views article written by Johannes in the show notes.

Host: Nick Howe

Last up, it’s time for our weekly chat about some other non-corona science news highlighted in the Nature Briefing – that’s Nature’s daily pick of science news and stories. Shamini, what have you found this time?

Host: Shamini Bundell

Yeah, so the story I’ve picked this week kind of caught my eye because it’s an unusual one, both for us here on the podcast and in general, and it’s basically that there’s been an outbreak of a disease caused by flesh-eating bacteria in a quite wealthy area of Australia, which is not the kind of place you would expect this sort of tropical disease to crop up.

Host: Nick Howe

This sounds exactly like the last thing we need – another disease – but what’s happened here?

Host: Shamini Bundell

It’s not like a huge outbreak. We’re not talking pandemic levels. And the real reason that this is such an interesting story is that it’s kind of a mystery what is happening here. This disease called Buruli ulcer is pretty well known from areas of Africa, particularly poorer areas, which is why it was such a surprise to find it cropping up in the Australian state of Victoria. Even in Africa, it’s method of transmission isn’t very well known, and it is classically one of those neglected tropical diseases that doesn’t occur in huge numbers and just hasn’t really been studied much. So, on the positive side, the fact that it has just in the last few years suddenly cropped in Australia has meant there’s been a bunch of funding for it to try and find out where it’s come from, how it’s being transmitted. But this article in The Atlantic discusses various projects that are trying to find the source, but it’s not really clear. They don’t really have an answer yet.

Host: Nick Howe

Okay, so we may not have a clear idea of how this is happening, but what are the main theories?

Host: Shamini Bundell

So, in Australia, they’ve been trying to sort of find where is this flesh-eating bacteria coming from, and one of the things they’ve been looking at is local animals. For example, they’ve been collecting possum poo and they found the bacteria in possum poo, so maybe it’s coming from there. They’ve found that it could be transmitted by mosquitos, which might also explain why people tend to get these little ulcers that then grow and become horrible and necrotic, and that’s quite possible. Not that the mosquitos are growing the bacteria like malaria, but just transferring it physically from maybe an infected animal. There was an association with this sort of body of standing water at a golf course where there were loads of cases, so that seems to fit as well. So far, they haven’t really been able to pin down the culprit, and the very frustrating this is also that you’d hope that this research would be useful for targeting this disease in the areas of Africa where it’s causing real problems, but the places that they found the bacteria in Australia, such as mammals and mosquitos, in Africa, when they’ve tested them, they’ve found no traces of the bacterial culprit.

Host: Nick Howe

Well, hopefully they’ll get some sense of how this is being transmitted and tackle it. But for my story this week, I’ve been looking at how flatworms can regrow their eyes.

Host: Shamini Bundell

Cool! I love it when worms regrow things. But I feel like I haven’t heard of anything regrowing eyes before. Aren’t eyes quite complicated?

Host: Nick Howe

They are quite complicated but these particular flatworms – they’re called planarians – are basically nature’s version of the X-Man Wolverine. They can regrow from anything, so if you cut them in half they’ll grow to complete versions of themselves. If you cut their head in half, they’ll grow two heads. If you stick an eye on them from somewhere else, from another flatworm, hopefully, they’ll attach it to themselves and it will be wired into their nervous system, and that’s what this research that was published in Science has been looking at– how exactly you can take an eye from another flatworm and it gets wired into the other one.

Host: Shamini Bundell

That’s actually ridiculous. That’s… how?

Host: Nick Howe

I mean that is the question scientists have been asking for hundreds of years. There’s been a lot of weird experiments done on these things to try and work it out. But in this case, they were particularly looking at how the nervous system regrows, and what they’ve found is specialised kind of cells that essentially act like signposts for the nervous system and channel it into the right direction so the new eye will grow nerves and attach properly into the brain.

Host: Shamini Bundell

So, is this a study about sort of understanding if we can understand their nerves and sort of chemical signalling and stuff, could we recreate this?

Host: Nick Howe

That’s the hope of scientists but obviously, humans are quite a bit more complicated than these little flatworms, but it’s hopeful that something like this could be used. And in many animals, during embryonic development there are very similar kind of cells that seem to guide nervous systems, but after embryonic development they’re lost. In the worms, they seem to be preserved so there’s perhaps something there that could be used for regenerative medicine. But thanks for chatting to me, Shamini, and listeners, we’ll put links to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes. And if you’re interested in more but instead as an email delivered daily then make sure you check out the Nature Briefing and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Host: Shamini Bundell

One more thing before we wrap up. Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough robots in your life, Nick?

Host: Nick Howe

Almost constantly. I want my own Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Host: Shamini Bundell

Well, you can have almost that except it’s a robot that does chemistry – even better –and we’ve got a video out about that. You can check out our YouTube channel and there’s a link in the show notes. And yeah, it’s basically a robot that sort of zooms around doing chemical experiments in a normal lab just built for humans, and there’s some fun sped-up footage of that, so go check that out.

Host: Nick Howe

I’ll definitely do that, but I think that’s all we’ve got time for this week. As always, if you want to get in touch with us then you can reach us on Twitter – we’re @NaturePodcast – or send us an email – we’re podcast@nature.com. I’m Nick Howe.

Host: Shamini Bundell

And I’m Shamini Bundell. Thanks for listening.