Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - 2014: The Year in Space

Episode Date: December 30, 2014

Our annual review of the greatest events and accomplishments over the last year features analysis and commentary by Bill Nye the Science Guy, Emily Lakdawalla, Jason Davis, Casey Dreier and Bruce Betts, along with a special new year’s gift of Neil deGrasse Tyson.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Year in Space, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with a special look back this week. 2014 is gone, but its milestones in space will not be forgotten. It was the year we landed on a comet. A new spaceship rocketed into orbit. Another spaceship was lost in a tragic accident. A year of tremendous scientific advances and amazing exploration throughout our solar system and beyond.

It was my great pleasure to once again bring you many of the men and women behind these historic events and accomplishments. My colleagues at the Planetary Society were also very busy. Several of them will join us for a whirlwind tour of the year that was. And later, just before we hear from Bruce Betts, a special treat as we reprise a few moments from my May conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. To get us started, we've got the CEO of the Planetary Society, the world-changing Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, as always, it is a pleasure to talk to you up front in Planetary Radio.

Our last program of the year, and we're looking back at 2014. What comes to mind for you? Well, it's been an exciting year for our advocacy, man. I mean, we went to Washington, D.C. twice, and I think we've really got congressional support at the world's largest space agency for a mission to Europa, the moon of Jupiter that has twice as much seawater as the Earth. And I'm hoping we can come up with, craft some remarkable instrument that can look for signs of life traveling at these very high interplanetary speeds. I mean, it could change the world. And then along that line, Matt, bubbles of methane, I'm calling them bubbles,

burbles of methane on the planet Mars that the most reasonable explanation for is there are microbes under the soil, under the sand on Mars that are given off methane. I mean, that would be extraordinary. It would change the course of human history. And then we have just a great staff. I guess that's the most exciting thing, Matt. The most exciting thing for me about 2014 is the team that we've assembled and the great things we're going to accomplish in 2015. We're going to, dare I say it, Matt, change the world. I look forward to talking to you about those changes to the world, Bill, as we spend another year together doing Planetary Radio. Thank you so much. It has always been a

pleasure. Thank you, Matt. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. We hear from Emily Lakawala nearly every week. Nearly every year, the Planetary Society's senior editor joins us to review the greatest moments in planetary science and exploration over the last 12 months. She's about to do this yet again, but this time she'll be followed by several of her colleagues. I know from your mail that you enjoy my conversations with her as much as I do. Here with her final report for 2014 is the planetary evangelist. Emily, you are the first to bring us a little bit more detailed report.

I don't know if you can say that about a five-minute report. We'll talk about robotic spacecraft, not surprisingly, and the wonderful things happening all over the solar system. Beginning where? Out at a comet?

Absolutely. I don't think there's any question what the highlight of 2014 was for me for robotic planetary exploration. And that was Rosetta's approach to orbit of and then finally landing on the surface of a comet, which finally happened in November. Just a tremendous achievement by the European Space Agency. And the fact is that even though Philae is currently

asleep on the surface of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Rosetta is still there and is returning absolutely fantastic science. I'm looking forward to publications coming out from the mission pretty soon and will be there all next year as the comet heats up and approaches perihelion. Excellent. How about that other comet that approached the red planet? That's right. There is a little bit of excitement for our fleet of seven Mars spacecraft that were all right there as a comet passed by. You know, I think the appearance of the comet wound up disappointing a lot of people. I think there was a lot of artwork out there

that showed the comet like this fireball against space and the rover would see it and it would dominate the sky and that's not at all what happened. However, this comet did pass incredibly close to Mars and this fleet of seven spacecraft all took a tremendous data set that I think it's going to take years for us to see all the fruits of the science that will come from that encounter.

Any other Martian 2014 highlights that are going to stick with you? Oh, absolutely. I think number one among those is the fact that we finally have a new member of the Interplanetary Spacefarers Association, which I just made up, but it should be a club. India is a new member of that club, having sent its Mars orbiter mission into orbit at Mars and returned some fabulous global images of Mars in its first days in orbit. So that was great. And then, of course, Curiosity finally, finally arrived at the base of Mount Sharp, reaching the rocks that the rover was sent to Mars to explore. And I think now is really when the science on that mission is finally beginning for earnest.

And they're just going to start at the bottom and work their way slowly up, reading the rocks like the pages of a book to understand the history of that mountain inside Gale Crater. And of course, as I've said, we will talk more with you and others next week about what we'll be looking forward to in 2015. And I suspect Curiosity and Mount Sharp will be on that list. All right, now, you gave me a very impressive statistic that you are prepared to back up now. There are 25 active missions out there exploring the other worlds of our solar system, and I'm not even counting the sun, so let's see if I can rattle them off for you. We've got Messenger at Mercury, though it's about to crash into that planet. We've got Akatsuki on the way to Venus and Venus Express also about to crash into Venus. A whole host of

spacecraft active at the moon this year, including Artemis, Chang'e 3, LADEE, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Chang'e 5 test vehicle. Out at Mars, there were seven spacecraft active this year, including Opportunity, Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Curiosity, MAVEN, and India's Mars Orbiter Mission. Exploring the smaller bodies, we had ICE, Hayabusa 2, and Procyon that recently launched, Rosetta, and Dawn. And finally, in the outermost reaches of the solar system, we have Juno on its way to Jupiter, Cassini exploring Saturn, New Horizons almost at Pluto, and last but never least, there

are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 headed into interplanetary space. Wow, and there ought to be a partridge in a pear tree in there someplace. There really ought to, but that holiday is over, Matt. Well, wait till next year. Nicely done, Emily, as you have performed for us all year, and I look forward to another bunch of reports coming up over 2015. It's going to be a great year, Matt.

That's senior editor and planetary evangelist Emily Laktawalla. Her blog is at planetary.org, and you can watch for her new video series starting soon. Her 63,000 Twitter followers know her as eLaktawalla. We introduced you to Jason Davis last year. Jason is a digital editor for the Planetary Society, where his beats include Human Spaceflight, the International Space Station, and the Society's LightSail solar sail project.

Those are the topics I asked him to cover for us in his contribution to this year-in-review edition of Planetary Radio. Apparently, a lot of stuff seems to have grouped itself at the end of the just-past-year. Yeah, all of the major events that were pretty big headlines in the year seemed to kind of get packed into the end that had anything to do with human spaceflight and the International Space Station, and commercial spaceflight as well. Let's start with Orion. I'm assuming that almost everybody out there has a pretty good idea of the good news in that area. So Orion went on its first

test flight. For anybody that wasn't paying attention to that one, it was the two-orbit test flight that was a shakedown cruise of all of the spacecraft's critical systems. That went off without a hitch. They have the spacecraft back in Florida. They're going to be doing analysis on that to see how the heat shield performed. But overall, it was a big moment for NASA there at the end of the year in December. And at least a couple of other American, U.S.-made space capsules getting ready to carry humans. Yeah, in September, we got the big news that NASA had picked SpaceX and Boeing to ferry crews to the International Space Station. That's expected right now to start about 2017. So we're about two years out from that.

And then in October and November, we had a couple setbacks in human spaceflight. One was bigger than the other. First, we had the Antares rocket that exploded shortly after leaving the pad, but nobody was hurt in that one. And then we got the tragic news that Spaceship Two, which is Virgin Galactic's test space plane, it broke apart during flight. And their pilot, Mike Alsbury, who works for Scaled Composites, that's the vehicle's manufacturer, he was killed. So that was pretty tragic news in commercial space flight at the end of the year. Are we beginning to learn what caused both of these losses? Yeah, Antares, the investigation centered on one of the engines. Those were Russian-built,

well, actually Soviet-era engines that Orbital Sciences was using on their Antares rocket. It looks like that was the cause of the Antares failure. They're going to be switching out to different engines, so that's their solution to that problem. As far as Spaceship 2, it looked like the feathering system, and this is a system that allows the wings to kind of flip upward and slow the vehicle down as it's coming back through the atmosphere. It looked like the feathering system deployed prematurely when it definitely shouldn't have underpowered flight. And that's what caused the vehicle to break apart. All right. Much more, I'm sure, about both of these and hopefully some successes for both of these companies coming up in 2015, which we may, who knows, we may talk about next week.

But let's jump over now to LightSail and the big happenings with that Planetary Society project. It was a big year for LightSail in September. The day-in-the-life test finally happened. It was a big success. We were on hand for that. The sails were deployed. It was a very neat event to see the sails out there in their full glory for the first time in a couple years. And then the spacecraft went back into further testing. Vibration testing happened in November.

They had a couple problems, corrected those, and the testing actually wrapped up in December. Next year, and maybe we'll talk about this in another week, next year is shaping up to be a big year for our little spacecraft. Now that's a tantalizing hint, and I know we can't say too much about what's coming up, but is it safe to say that LightSail is now certified for flight? Yes, it is ready to go. Cal Poly, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which does all of the integration and testing for us there on the California coast, They have kind of signed off and qualified us for flight, and that will be the first of the two spacecraft for the test flight. So we'll see where we go next year.

Jason, as with everybody else that we're talking to today, you have been writing about these and many, many other topics at planetary.org, and I'm sure you plan to continue, right? Yes, absolutely. We'll be following all of this through the next year. Jason, thanks so much for contributing to this year-in-review show, and I look forward to talking to you, as we've mentioned, next week when we move to what's coming up in 2015. Sounds good, Matt. Thanks for having me. Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis covers human spaceflight and the LightSail project.

You'll find him on Twitter as at Jason R. Davis. I'll be back with Casey Dreyer, Bruce Betts, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here. Thank you for listening to Planetary Radio. The Planetary Society has lots more ways for you to hear the latest news and see the greatest pictures from around our solar system. I lead a growing family of expert bloggers at Planetary.org.

We cover nearly every angle on space exploration. And you can find us all over online, tweeting, and posting to our popular Facebook and Google Plus pages. We're also producing great new videos for our YouTube channel. There's no doubt about it, we really are your place in space. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, planetary radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now

a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now?

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan at the midpoint in our special look back at 2014's greatest moments in space. special look back at 2014's greatest moments in space. Next up in our spectrum of Planetary Society experts is Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreyer. Casey has given us several updates throughout the year, focusing on the fight for support of planetary and other space science in Washington, where he spent much of his time last year. Casey, good to get you back on Planetary Radio for your contribution to this look back at 2014. Could we say that this was the year that Washington got it? Yeah, you know, I really think so. You know, Washington, you know, is a big loaded word, but I think Congress has

been behind us a lot. But I think we're really starting to see planetary science and NASA begin to get more attention from not just Congress, but also in the White House, planetary exploration and Europa starting to get more attention. And I think there's a real consensus forming in the Senate, the House, the White House and NASA, that planetary science needs to be maintained as one of our preeminent programs of exploration at NASA. And I'm hoping that that'll continue into next year. How would you describe the Planetary Society's activity that seems to have helped lead to this conclusion? Well, we put a lot of work into it this year.

This was a year where I was in D.C. just about every six weeks, about eight times throughout the year. We had two major events, one in the Senate, one in the House, with Bill Nye. We had another visit with Bill doing rounds on the Hill just to talk to people about planetary science and NASA and the importance of both of those. We kicked up our efforts for writing op-eds and influential papers. We hired people to help us do original research into the real number-crunching aspects of this stuff to make our arguments stronger. the time of our lobbyists working the ground every day there in Washington, D.C. to really get the word out about planetary science, but also fundamentally to represent Planetary Society

members in these decisions on the Hill. It's been a very exciting year for us. And the results are right there in black and white. You detail the planetary science funding in a really great December 19th blog post at planetary.org. Tell us a little bit about this. Great. December 19th blog post at Planetary.org. Tell us a little bit about this. Fundamentally, we got $1.44 billion for planetary science in 2015. That's about $160 million more than the president requested. That includes money to continue developing a Europa concept mission, money to really kick up development of the Mars 2020 rover to keep opportunity going.

Basically, everything we wanted was passed by Congress to preserve planetary science at NASA in the United States. Now, this is something that we're going to keep pushing for because our goal is $1.5 billion. But Matt, we just got so close. This is a fantastic year. And we're really seeing the results of what happens when we have this real focused, continuous year-round effort pushing planetary science, pushing NASA science, pushing NASA in general in the capital. Planetary Society Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer. Like our other commentators this week, you can find updates and analysis from Casey at planetary.org. He tweets about space policy and funding from at Casey Dreyer. Bruce Betts will soon join this review of 2014, but I've got a special treat for you first.

I really can't pick a favorite topic or guest from 2014's long list of shows, but I sure had a great time talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. We spoke to each other last May while Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, was still being aired. Here are a couple of brief excerpts from our conversation. Neil Tyson, I am so happy to get you back on Planetary Radio. How come I'm not on more often? You don't text me. I'm there waiting for you. You want to be on every week? It's okay with me. I think the boss will say it's okay. By the way, the boss, your buddy, the science guy, he says hello.

And I asked him if he had any questions. He's the CEO, yes. He is. He is the boss, as you were once the president. Bill Nye the CEO. And TSG, the science guy. Thank you for this. May I just say what I have already told you in email? I love

Cosmos. I think it is gorgeous. I think they are using you to the absolute best of your magnificent ability, and I can't wait to watch the rest of the show. Well, thank you. As you know, it's a huge collaboration. Ann Drillian and Steve Soder

were two of the original three writers of the original 1980 series, and they reprised that effort in this series. So you all see me, you know, as host. And when I'm hosting on location, I see the hundred people who are making the product. So it's very different depending on which direction you're looking in. And as an academic, I don't think of myself as a TV person. So so much of what it took to make Cosmos was novel to me. There will come a time in a few weeks, I'm sorry to say, when Cosmos will have run its course, this edition of Cosmos.

Who knows? Maybe there'll be another one someday. Wrong time to ask me about that. Sorry. It's like the woman just gives birth and says, are you ready to have another kid? Yeah, really. I'm thinking we need some time to sort of recover, and then we can have that conversation. Well, other than being an astrophysicist and running the Rose Center, what's going to be keeping you busy as the series ends? Thanks for asking.

There are some writing projects that I fell behind on while we were making the series. And one book is half written, and I have a co-author on that, and two other books. So I want to get back to that. I also want to become a scientist again, rather than just play one on TV. So I have some research projects I'm going to get back into with Two Feet. on TV. So I have some research projects I'm going to get back into with Two Feet. One on the structure of our galaxy and another one on dwarf galaxies that are in the neighborhood of the Milky Way. So those are some longtime loves of mine professionally. Also, I still have a radio program, Star Talk Radio, which is kind of the inversion of the science radio program you know the ones we're

familiar with typically there's a journalist interviewing a scientist and those are time tested and but when you tune in you know what you're tuning in for you're gonna you're gonna say i like science and i want to hear who they're interviewing this week and it's going to be a scientist and science friday comes to mind in that in that. I can think of another show that's kind of like that. Oh, yeah, this one. That's right. Astrophysicist, author and host of Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Those clips came from our Planetary Radio conversation in early May.

Still to come is What's Up and Bruce Betts' contribution to our Year in Review. We wrap up today's special show looking back at 2014 with Bruce Betts, and we're going to get to the regular What's Up segment. But first, I'm hoping that the Director of Science and Technology will take us through some of the highlights that he has in mind regarding planetary society activity. We're not going to hit everything, but let's hit a few things. We had Shoemaker Neo grants, Near Earth Object, and our focus on asteroid threats. People we gave grants to the previous year, a lot of them accomplished their tasks in this year. We had a group in Italy that re-illuminized their telescope mirror, had people in the U.S. who installed new cameras, who even built whole new telescopes and are back to watching

the skies and doing it better, looking for dangerous asteroids and figuring out their orbits and characterizing them. And I bet this will come up again next week because there is another round of these grants going on. But let's move on. How about PlanetVac? Well, in PlanetVac land, we worked with Honeybee Robotics and they completed some vacuum chamber tests after building a prototype of a new sampling system for planetary surfaces that vacuums the surface. It's highly reliable. And there was a master's student at the University of Delft who did some work on perfecting that during this last year,

figured out that swirly PlanetVac works even better. The subtleties of where you point your nozzles when you're sucking and blowing Mars dust or moon dust or asteroid dust. New and improved PlanetVac. Exactly. And if you order now, we'll send you... I don't know what. The crevice tool, probably. I'll be with that one. Yeah, yeah. I will suggest that to Honeybee Robotics. Here's something else that doesn't suck, astrobiology.

In the land of astrobiology, we've continued our optical study searches for intelligence. And then also we got our living interplanetary flight experiment. Life was selected for a study by NASA to figure out whether it could be accommodated on the asteroid redirect mission. Nutshell answer is yes, conceptually. And that would send organisms out to deep space for a few years and then have them return for the first time ever of having a multi-year deep space experiment. Is the Planetary Society still active in the search for other planets? Why, yes, we are, Matt. I'm glad you asked.

The efforts we've sponsored with Deborah Fisher's group at Yale University have gotten more nights thanks to the Planetary Society to observe the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to Earth, and they actually do not see evidence for the planet announced by a different group going around Alpha Centauri, although both groups are working right on the edge of detection, which is why we're sponsoring some other things in the coming year that we'll talk about next year. Ah, yeah. Next week we'll talk about and next year. Both are correct. All right.

Very briefly, talk about some of the outreach activities. All right, very briefly, talk about some of the outreach activities. Well, we collected a half million names that will fly on the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission to a near-Earth asteroid and back to Earth and also stay in space. And then, of course, near and dear to my heart, we've taken random space facts that have been on this show for so long and started making videos about them starring, well, me. And it's fun. Hilarious. They're really very, very me. And it's fun. Hilarious. They're really very, very entertaining. And there's some new ones.

The new ones every week, I think, right? Are you taking a little break right now? No, we're still releasing new ones every Friday. We'll take a short break in a few weeks. All right, we better get on to What's Up, the regular segment, and we're really going to have to race. Planet Craziness, low in the west. You can see Venus looking super bright, getting higher over the coming weeks.

Mercury below it, much dimmer, and they will actually get very close in about three or four weeks in the night sky. Also have Mars low in the west and Jupiter coming up in the east in the somewhat later evening. And then Saturn up in the pre-dawn. On to this week in space history. In 2004, Stardust encountered Comet Wild 2 and sampled its coma, and Spirit landed on Mars. We move on to... Rumble Space Fact! Make it a complete set of 52 for this year.

In 2014, we achieved the most active spacecraft at Mars ever. Seven, with Maven and Mom entering orbit in September 2014. The previous record was six, which happened in 2006 and again in 2008. There were zero back in my graduate student days from 1982 to 1997. No, those weren't all my graduate student days, except for a two-month period in 1989 with the Russian Phobos 88. Lucky seven. Let's find out who's going to be the lucky winner this week of year in space desk and wall calendars. All right.

We asked you, well, first I stated there's a U.S. penny on the Curiosity rover. What year is it? How'd we do, Matt? Lots and lots of answers. Still another week with more than average number of responses. I guess everybody had it right. And it was Robert Lee, who was picked by random.org. I'm really glad that Robert won because he had one of the funniest responses that we got as well. He said it's a 1909 Lincoln VDB Penny that is used as a calibration target for the Mars hand lens imager, MOLLE, on Curiosity. Is he right? Yes, that is correct. Is he right?

Yes, that is correct. 1909, because it was designed when Curiosity was to launch in 2009. There's your little random space fact. We heard from a lot of people that that was the first year that Lincoln pennies were minted. And this one was minted in San Francisco back on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. I love this from Robert. He says about the penny, silly curiosity, didn't it know that Martian parking meters only take quarters?

Oh, the number of times I've wanted to use pennies. I've tried on occasion. We did also get this from Dalton Seals, who said that if NASA wants to keep getting funding, don't they know that they need to quit wasting money this way? But then we got another spin on it from Stephen Porter, who said that he's guessing that that penny is probably worth a whole lot more now. There's an idea.

Put commemorative coins on the Mars 2020 rover sample return containers. Auction them off when they return. That might pay for a whole other mission. Maybe. No, not really. How about next time? In 2014, how many rocket launches were there to orbit with humans on board? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

You have until the 6th. That's Tuesday, January 6th, in the brand new year of 2015 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And you might win a Urine Space wall and desk set calendar. They are terrific.

All right, everybody, go out there. Look up the night sky and think about how arbitrary the timing of January 1st is in our calendar. Thank you and good night. What do you mean? That's some kind of sacrilege, I'm sure. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, closing out the year 2014 with Planetary Radio.

Thank you for another wonderful year of What's Up Guy. I've enjoyed every bit of it. And thank you, Matt, for bringing us the best radio show in the universe. No argument there. Next week, we'll look ahead at the year just begun. 2015 promises many more thrilling events on the final frontier.

I hope you'll stay aboard for this ongoing voyage of exploration and discovery. Thanks very much for listening and sharing the excitement. Planetary Radio is produced by the Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the members of the Society. Clear skies and a very happy new year to all of you.