Gadgets on Mars

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hey, did you know that the new Mars rover is really cool? Its eyes see crazy different colors! It shoots out a helicopter drone! It can vaporize rocks with a laser! Plus, Perseverance traveled more than 292 million miles through space, so that makes it just about the best gadget ever.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers joins us to talk about all the wild tech built into Perseverance and what the big deal about Mars is anyway. Then a very special guest crashes the show to talk about cheese.

Show Notes:

Read Adam’s story about the cameras on the Perseverance rover. Watch the video of the landing and read about it here. Read more about the LA musician who helped design the microphones on the rover here. Read Gilad Edelman on the health benefits of cheese. Preorder Adam’s book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, here.

Recommendations:

Adam recommends granite tile drill bits for drilling through metal. Lauren recommends Vigorous Innovations massage gun. Mike recommends the tech news website Rest of World. Gilad Edelman recommends cheese, of course.

Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Gilad Edelman is @GiladEdelman. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

WIRED Brand Lab is a creative studio from the publisher of WIRED. The WIRED newsroom is not involved in the creation of Brand Lab content.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike.
0:01.0	Lauren.
0:02.0	Mike, if a billionaire offered you a ticket on a spaceship to Mars right now, would you take it?
0:07.0	Uh, yes. I would say if it was a free ticket and if it was a round trip ticket, I would take it.
0:18.0	I think the second part might not be a guarantee at this point, but we do know that we can send car-sized robots to Mars.
0:24.6	And it's pretty wild. And that's what we're going to talk about on today's show.
0:32.6	Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. And I'm Michael
0:39.2	Kalori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And today we are tapping our science desk. We're joined by
0:44.1	Wired Senior correspondent Adam Rogers, who has been covering all things coronavirus, color
0:50.3	spectrums, and today, super cool Mars Rovers. Hey Adam. Hello,, that's right. If you can't send a person, send a Dalek. That's right. That's the rule. So by now, you likely all know that on February 18th, NASA landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars. Its mission is to hunt for signs of alien life
1:13.0	and generally just collect as much information as possible and send it back to us here, a little
1:17.4	old earth. And to do that, it's been outfitted with this array of high-tech gear. And this is
1:23.3	going to allow us to learn about this planet in profound ways. So we're going to do today's show
1:29.0	a little bit out of order. We're going to talk about some of the tech that this rover is
1:33.2	equipped with first. And then later we'll talk about the broader implications of this mission
1:37.8	to Mars and why we even want to go there in the first place. So Adam, let's start with a couple
1:43.0	notable things about this rover. One, it's collecting audio. So Adam, let's start with a couple notable things about this rover.
1:45.0	One, it's collecting audio. And two, you just wrote a story on Wired.com this week about the cameras
1:51.0	on Perseverance and how they actually perceive imagery much differently than we do. Tell us about
1:56.8	this and why this is significant for this mission. Well, there's something almost philosophical that you have to address if you're going to send
2:04.5	not people to explore another planet, but robots, which is you're trying to acquire
2:11.2	like sensory information.
	...

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