Michael Watkins is an engineer who took over as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory two years ago after a long career there. | NASA 'At the frontier:' NASA's legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory POLITICO talks to JPL Director Michael Watkins about the lab's historic legacy and plans to keep exploring where no one has gone before.

Much of the knowledge of our solar system-- - and the images of it in our mind's eye -- is thanks to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which emerged out of an Army-funded rocket program at the California Institute of Technology in 1958.

The federally funded research and development center's achievements are legendary. It built the first American satellite -- Explorer 1 -- which carried the first-ever space science instrument. It designed and remotely operated the Viking spacecraft that first landed on the surface of Mars; the Galileo probe of Jupiter and its moons; and Cassini's 14-year journey snapping images around Saturn.


It was also behind the pair of Voyager missions -- the only spacecraft to reach Uranus and Neptune before continuing beyond our solar system.

JPL, with a measly annual budget of $2.5 billion by Washington standards and a team of 6,000 employees, is still operating "at the frontier," in the words of Michael Watkins, an engineer who took over as director two years ago after a long career at the laboratory.

It has just launched or is preparing for a series of monumental robotic journeys into deep space in search of new signs of life -- including on Mars and the ocean world of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. And it eyeing another to Saturn's moon Enceledus.

Watkins sat down with POLITICO Space to talk about what JPL has in store, the projects it is hoping to get funded, how it's beginning to benefit from the growing commercial space industry, and why its work its critical to successfully sending humans to Mars.

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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

For those not as familiar with JPL’s legendary work, tell us what makes it tick?

We are the only federally funded research and development center at NASA. We were a laboratory at Cal Tech building rockets back in the 1930 and 40s, funded mostly by the Army. After Sputnik was launched we were able to very quickly build Explorer 1, the first satellite. That was before NASA existed -- in 1958. Some months later, NASA was created, and we moved over. We have two strands of DNA – one of our strands of DNA is NASA and the other strand of our DNA is Cal Tech, a university. That makes us agile and innovative.

Explorer 1 made us realize we should be building satellites and not rockets. We had a Geiger counter on Explorer 1. That was the first scientific instrument ever launched into space, which helped to discover the Van Allen belts, by virtue of their radiation. And so it really set us on this path of advanced scientific exploration of space. That really means robotic exploration of space because unmanned space travel can get so far out there, you can do so much more with them – at least in the short term, until the technology humans to get there.

That led us to build the first mission to Mars. We have a very strong Mars program. The Voyagers are still working 40 years later. They are now outside the solar system. The Voyagers are still the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. One of the Voyagers flew by them. We followed up on those with Galileo and with Cassini. They changed our view of the solar system, particularly the Galileo satellite {which explored] Europa and Io and the Saturn fly-by.

Those really led us to realize that one of the central aspects of what we’re doing is understanding life in the solar system – even outside the solar system.

It is due to these very efforts that NASA wants to send humans to Mars.

That really is what led to the Mars program. Mars is obviously a place that looks a lot like the earth. It looks like it was habitable – several billion years ago. We continue to have a robust Mars program to further investigate those early days of Mars.

There are other worlds in our solar system that may hold life -- or once did.

With the help of Voyager and Galileo and Cassini we realized there is another replace in the solar system that could have life. And that is these ocean worlds locked underneath the ice at Europa around Jupiter and Enceledus around Saturn.

On Enceledus there are some tidal forces that cracked the ice and there’s actually geysers coming out all the time. Cassini had some great fly-bys and pictures of those. It looks like there is some evidence that there is geothermal activity at the bottom of that ocean. Energy and heat and could be as good a place where life could form as the ocean itself or the surface of the earth.

What are the near- and mid-term mission JPL has planned?

This is part of our super busy period right now. We are launching all kinds of highly diverse missions. There is this whole new window of things to be looking at.

Mars Insight was just launched and is going to land the Monday after Thanksgiving. That is a little bit of a smaller mission. It’s not a rover. It is a highly dedicated mission to study the interior structure and it is something folks have wanted to do for a long time.

That is actually going to look at the interior structure of Mars and the heat flow coming off the core. It is a seismic monitor and it is a heat probe. And that really helps us understand the formation of Mars and history of Mars and may help us understand how Mars changed so much when the magnetic field stopped and it lost a lot of its atmosphere.

That happens to carry two little cube-sats. They are the first planetary cube sats. A lot of the folks are really into these real small satellites now and see a lot of applications for them around the earth. These are the first two deep space ones. We are going to try to fly this little cube sat technology that are built fairly cheaply and fairly small all the way to Mas and see if we can help pioneer new applications of cube sats for planetary exploration. They are really tech demos. We kind of hope they work, as opposed to guarantee they will work.

Next is Mars 2020?

We have Mars 2020 in construction. That is going to actually look at samples so we can bring them back later. It looks a lot like the Mars Curiosity Rover that landed with the sky crane back in 2012 and that got a lot of public interest. We are going to use exactly the same rover, the same technology. But this time instead of just studying the rocks, we’re going to study the rocks on the surface and then we are going to actually keep some isolated inside that tube of metal so that another mission later – the so-called Mars Sample Return – can pick up those metal tubes and bring them back to the earth.

No matter how good we are manipulating the instruments and how advanced they are you can never beat all the laboratories on the earth. It would be like having the moon rocks except this time they are from Mars. You could use all the scientists and all the laboratory technology on the earth to look at those rocks in great, great detail -- and understand what are they telling us about the history of life. Are there any bio-signatures in there? The Mars 2020 rover is going to actually collect those samples so that another mission can take them from that rover and bring them back to the earth. The the idea is now that we’ve nosed around a lot of Mars and taken a look and discovered rocks that formed clearly in water. We know the pH of that water, we know the age of that water. Can we take a much closer look at these rocks now? Do they contain organics? Or did they used to contain organics? Those could have been the building blocks of life.

It is hard mission, right? You have to go there. You have to collect the rocks. You have to send another mission there, collect those samples, put them in a rocket, launch them off the surface of Mars, rendezvous with the spacecraft, bring that spacecraft back to the earth and land it. We are now halfway down that chain [with Mars 20202]. What we’d like to do is continue that chain. We are working very closely with the Science Mission Directorate at [NASA] headquarters to make the second part of that – the ascent vehicle to bring them back – become real by the end of the 2020s.



That’s not funded?

It is not yet funded. It is getting close. It is heavily advocated, I think, by NASA. I think they are hoping to get the mission by the end of the 2020s. Mars 2020 arrives in 2021 and then takes a couple of years to find those samples and then some years later you’d go and actually pick them up. It is still in the pre-funded stage, pre-approved stage.

How might such a mission relate to a crewed mission to Mars? Does that have to come first?

From the engineering perspective, I would say yes. We sent unmanned robotic landers to the moon before we sent the Apollo missions to the moon. And in some sense this is like that. So we are learning about the environment of Mars. We are learning how to land on Mars. We are learning what the conditions on Mars the astronauts would face are like. The engineering legwork that these robotic missions do, I think, is important to helping us to develop the capabilities we need for future human missions.

The robotic mission could go there, get the samples, and bring them back, and a human mission could be quite some time later. You still learn a lot by having done that. They are indirectly linked through maturing engineering technology and maturing our understanding of the environment on Mars, The radiation on Mars. What’s the surface like? Things like that.

The robotic mission that is planned to Jupiter's moon Europa?



We have Europa Clipper [that will be] trying to explore this ocean world of Europa. Under the ice is actually has more water than all of the earth’s oceans. We are talking a lot of water. It may have hydro-thermal vents as well. These are areas astrobiologists are just fascinated with. Could this be a place where life could exist in the solar system? The same with Enceledus around Saturn but we don’t have a mission there yet.

This artist's rendering shows NASA's Europa mission spacecraft, which is being developed for a launch sometime in the 2020s. This view shows the spacecraft configuration, which could change before launch, as of early 2016. | NASA

But with Europa Clipper, we want to start by flying by [Europa] a lot. Landing is hard. We want to first survey the whole moon and take a look at what’s on the surface. There is a lot of evidence that the surface is young, that a geyser is coming up from that ocean. We can take a look at that with our remote sensing instruments. We also have an ice-penetrating radar that will actually go through the ice and tell us exactly how thick that ice is.

Assuming the ocean is salty, which it would almost have to be, the fact that it is moving through Jupiter’s magnetic field allows us to learn quite a bit about the ocean -- just from the magnetic field’s interactions from [the spacecraft's] magnetometer. It is a fantastic suite of instruments and a big spacecraft. One of the big challenges there is to survive the radiation environment around Jupiter. It is a really challenging mission but we think a really high payoff mission because it is going to tell us about these fascinating ocean worlds. That is in the works for launch around 2023.

JPL also explores our own planet.

There is possibly life on Mars, or ancient life on Mars, possibly life in these ocean worlds. But there is certainly life on earth. We also have a very robust earth science program. We just launched a mission called GRACE Follow-On, which studies the water cycle of the earth and does that in a really innovative way building on the GRACE mission 15 years ago. It actually senses the weight of water by the gravitational attraction on the satellite. If is rains in your backyard, your backyard weighs a little more. The satellites will fly over and say, ‘hey your backyard weighs more this month than last month, it must have rained.’

It also does that over the polar ice sheets. Part of Greenland melts or it snows in Greenland and that mass changes. The satellites fly over every month. Did it melt some, did it snow some? Same with Antarctica. When do ocean currents pile up water in different parts of the ocean and change Ocean circulation a little bit? GRACE can see that.”

It was a spectacular success when GRACE first launched. The data became so valuable that we’re launching a follow-on mission. We just launched that on May 22 and hat is in its early check out period and going fantastically.

Has the growth of the commercial space industry had an impact on JPL’s work?

That’s a good question. It is starting to change. It hasn’t changed a huge amount yet. We tend to build spacecraft like the rovers where there is less industrial capability – it is more cutting edge. But we have always worked a lot with the industry. Lockheed Martin in Denver built The Mars Insight spacecraft we just launched. We also work with many other companies – Ball Aerospace, Space Systems Loral. This goes back to the 1970s. As industry gets better and better at building spacecraft we use them. We think that is part of our mission: to help the space industry as much as possible, to utilize them as much as possible. We are using SpaceX launch services quite a bit. In fact, GRACE Follow On launched on a Falcon 9.

These companies have devoted themselves more to the areas where there is a business case. Earth science is the area where we are most looking to them for additional innovation. Small satellites, cubesats, they have a lot of capability and we are happy to use that capability to do science. They see us buying spacecraft from them. I think that is the first area where you are going to see a change – in addition to launch vehicles. There are a lot concepts that would use constellations of satellites. Those new technologies and those new capabilities in industry could potentially break open a new capability in earth observing."

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