Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - 2014: The Year We Landed on a Comet

Episode Date: November 25, 2014

Not just landed. Orbited, too. European Space Agency Senior Science Advisor Mark McCaughrean helps us celebrate the Rosetta orbiter and the Philae lander.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2014, the year we landed on a comet, 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, where today we'll take you to the landing of Philae on Comet 67P as we talk with the European Space Agency's Mark McCorquan. Bruce Betts will help me give away time on a telescope somewhere on our planet, and we'll hear from Casey Dreyer about a couple of upcoming space events in Washington, D.C. Another terrific ESA mission is about to end. For that story, we'll go to a nearly airborne senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, I've talked to you in a lot of interesting places, but I don't think we've ever spoken to you as you were on a plane before. At least you haven't taken off yet. Where are you coming from? Where are you going? I'm coming back from Oslo, Norway, where I was giving a couple of talks at the Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo there. And so you're almost home. And I'd like to talk about this recent piece you did on the 24th,

the day that we're speaking, about Venus Express. It was just last August 5th that we talked to Håkan Svidheim, the project scientist for Venus Express, who told us we could run out of gas any time. Looks like that empty tank is maybe just days or hours away. It could be just days or hours away, but more likely the spacecraft is good for another few months. Every four months or so, it has to perform these periapsis-raised maneuvers to keep its orbit from dipping too low into Venus' atmosphere.

It's in the middle of one of those maneuvers right now. They should have enough fuel to last through this one. If so, the next one in February is going to be the really scary one. You said in your piece that the engineers probably have been fairly conservative in their estimates. Well, of course, engineers are always conservative in their estimates. That's what they do. But the problem is that there's no fuel gauge on spacecraft. It's really kind of impossible to tell how much fuel is left in the tank.

So all they can do is bookkeep. And, you know, they take notes on how much fuel they've used, and they have to make conservative estimates, it's possible there's quite a bit left, but there's really no way of knowing until they just run out. Should we take it as a good deal of optimism here that they have laid out their science plans for all of next year? I don't know about optimism. It's just good planning. The last thing you want to do is have a surprisingly alive spacecraft and nothing to do with it. As long as there's a shred of hope that the spacecraft will still be alive next year, they're going to plan how to use it. All right, Emily, fasten your seatbelt, and we'll talk to you back here next week.

Looking forward to it, Matt. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. She is our senior editor and planetary evangelist at the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We're going to go now to Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. Bill Nye has the week off for that holiday Emily just mentioned. We're celebrating Thanksgiving this week here in the U.S. Casey comes to us from the state of Washington.

Casey, thanks a lot for filling in for Bill Nye today. Sure thing, Matt. Tell us about this thing that Bill is going to be attending, at least one of these events that will be happening next week, hopefully after most people hear this radio program. Yeah, well, the Planetary Society has two fun events going on in Washington, D.C. on the 1st and 2nd of December. And the 2nd of December is the one that Bill's going to be at.

We're going to be at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, right in the middle of Capitol Hill. It's a public event, 2 p.m. in the afternoon. We're going to be talking about the future of solar system exploration, the potential of astrobiology and Mars and Europa. And we're going to have some really exciting guests with us, Kevin Hand from all the way out from JPL, and Michael Meyer, who's the Mars Program Scientist at NASA headquarters, going to join us and Bill to talk about solar system exploration. It should be a lot of fun. Love talking to Kevin Hand. Maybe we should get him back sometime soon.

What's happening the night before? The night before, we're doing something a little more casual and relaxed. We're partnering with the Science Club, or the Space Club, I should say, at the Science Cafe in downtown Washington, D.C. Grab a drink. We will be talking about the same topic, but a little more casually. Solar System Exploration and Astrobiology will have Kevin Hand and also David Grinspoon, the chief of the Library of Congress's National Astrobiology Institute there. I wish I could be there. How will we be able to hear how these things went and maybe share a bit of it?

Well, Matt, unfortunately, we can't webcast any of these events live, but you can go to planetary.org slash events to learn all the information about how you can attend in person if you're in the area. And I'm sure there'll be some reporting after the fact. Oh, definitely. We will be putting pictures and video up online and on youtube.com. I think it's a great opportunity for anybody who has not gone, well, maybe never even been in one of the congressional office buildings. It's a chance to do that. It is a fascinating place to walk around. And I think it's pretty cool that you can, just as a member of the public, walk in and hear a great presentation about what's going on out there in the solar system. Thanks very much, Casey. Sure thing, Matt. Happy to be here.

Casey Dreyer is the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. Listen. That is the sound Philae made barely two weeks ago when it touched down on 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The little lander then made the utmost of its 60 hours of battery-powered life, bringing all its instruments to bear in humanity's first-ever direct contact with a comet. As almost everyone now knows, Philae bounced across the surface, coming to rest in the shadow of a cliff. That cliff prevented sunlight from reaching the craft's solar panels. The European Space Agency team behind Philae and its orbiting mothership, Rosetta, had prepared for this scenario. That team included ESA's senior science advisor, Professor Mark McCorquan.

It was and is Mark's job to take the engineering and science data flowing from the two spacecraft and communicate it to the rest of the world. Mark, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations on an accomplishment that has really, I think, electrified the world. The first ever landing on a comet. Thank you, Matt. It's a it's a it's a really great pleasure to be here today. I think, you know, it's just more than a week now since we've done that. It's a huge team of people here that I'm speaking on behalf of. And most of us are on cloud nine or on comet 67P, whichever you like.

We haven't come down yet. And you told me that you were familiar to some degree with a show here in the States called The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He was on with Jessica Chastain, and they were talking about the movie Interstellar that we've talked about a lot on this show. And what do they get to? Nothing other than, and can you believe it, we've landed on a comet. You know, it's one of our small things we've been running this year. It was in secret, but we came out with it just before landing as a film called Ambition, which some of your listeners may have heard, a short five-minute science fiction film starring Aidan Gillen from Game of Thrones and Aisling Franciosi. It was our aim

from day one to knock Interstellar off its perch. Now, you know, we did a little bit more cheaply than that, but we at least went to Iceland and filmed it there as well. That's good. I hope you got some of those ice clouds, whatever the heck those were. I haven't even seen the film yet, but I shall look out for that. And I know I had some good fish in Iceland anyway. And I will look for ambition as well. We all know now that Philae had to do its work very quickly because it had the misfortune of landing in the shade of that cliff. You had already said to me in a previous conversation, I mean, people are treating Philae like it's dead and gone.

Do you have much hope that we might hear from Philae again? I think there's, you know, there's several levels here. Firstly, Philae was designed to operate for its first 60 hours or so on its primary battery, and it ran all of its experiments in that time. We're looking at the data to see what's come back from that. But, you know, so its primary goal was actually met with the primary battery. We hope that there is a chance that when we move closer to the sun, the intensity of the sunlight will increase by roughly a factor of six between now and that closest point in August next year. So there's a chance that we'll get enough power onto the system to effectively reboot it and get going again. But you know, there's a much bigger

picture, and that is that Philae is a small part, it's an important part, but a small part of the much bigger Rosetta mission. So even if it doesn't come back, Rosetta, the orbiter, will be there to study the comet next year. Of course, and we're going to spend, I think, most of our time talking about Rosetta. But let me ask you the unfair question that I always like to ask scientists at this point in a mission. Can anything be said at this point about the science data returned by Philae? Yeah, I've actually been asked that question a lot, as you can imagine. Not surprised. And it's part of the fact that we've had a mission which is run in real time.

It's been three months since we got there. People watched in real time as the whole thing happened. They kind of expect the science to come out the next day. Cameras are more easily interpretable, perhaps, than spectrometers and plasma data. We know where we landed the first time. We landed in a fairly dusty area, albeit that sound file you played at the beginning actually embeds information that we hit something hard underneath the surface, maybe ice, presumably. And then after bouncing a few times, we ended up in this location where, indeed, it looks very, very structured. It looks like rock, but we were very sure that it isn't.

We've tried to hammer into it. It's got the kind of density of hard ice. We're beginning to sniff molecules there. We know there's organic material, which we expect. But now we'll start to analyze what kind of organics. So, I mean, we're kind of drip feeding stuff out as we're getting it from the scientists spread around Europe. I'll be quite honest. I think there's a little bit of unfulfillment there. People expect us to tell the answers the few days afterwards, whereas typically it will take months or years. I think everybody's trying as hard as they can, but a little bit longer. And we know there's a big conference in California coming up, for example, in two weeks time. And we know people will be dying to say things there.

So we can assure people that the best is yet to come, as is always the case right after this data has been delivered. I imagine that this data will be talked about for perhaps decades to come. Why has it been so important to get this so-called in-situ analysis sitting right on the surface of a comet? in situ analysis, sitting right on the surface of a comet. I mean, even with Rosetta orbiting, why is this such a great advantage over, let's say, a flyby mission like Stardust of a few years ago? Well, if you start with flybys, you know, they've been very successful going all the way back to 1986 and the Giotto mission plus Halley and NASA has had a whole bunch of these missions. And they capture a moment in time. They capture a certain point in the evolution of a comet as it flies around the sun.

So if you like, the unique selling point of Rosetta is that we follow for more than a year, a year and a half, and we'll see the comet burst into life and then subside again. So we see evolution. We see how a comet changes. And when it comes to looking on the surface, of course, we could only, well, I was going to say we can only land in one place. In reality, we landed in several. We can study the comet in great detail from orbit, the whole of the surface of the comet with the orbiter. But you want to tie that to what we'd call ground truth. You want to get down and say, well, if I, imagine I say I can see cheese from up here, but the land is saying, ah, yeah, but it's camembert, right? It's not green.

That extra piece of information lets you bootstrap your other measurements of other cheeses, if you like, around the comet. Sorry, I'm giving your listeners quite the wrong impression about what comets are made of. But it's that bootstrap ability that you get in one location, you know, effectively the ultimate detail. And you can calibrate what you then see from the orbiter. Plus, we think that there's a good chance that material flowing away from the comet will change as it moves away, the ratios of certain gases, the ratio of gas to dust. So while we can see that at 10, 50 kilometers, seeing it at a meter, it could be a different picture indeed. Don't worry about our audience. They know it's all cheddar, actually.

The finest Wisconsin, I'm sure. I'm sure. Or maybe Stilton. Before this becomes a Monty Python routine, I happen to find Rosetta's accomplishment, its ongoing accomplishment, just as stupendous as the landing of Philae on the comet itself. And you've started to say, I mean, really, much of the advantage of orbiting is this fact that you can do this longitudinal study, that you'll be there. Apparently, Rosetta is expected to remain active right through the closest pass to the sun. Yeah, that's true. That's August the 13th next year. Yeah, I think the thing is, by being able to be there over this long period, we can see those

changes. We know that the comet will probably not even look the same in many of its details in 12 months time. So we will follow this. Going back to the lander for a moment, it's kind of obvious in a way in retrospect, but we could only arrive when the comet was close enough to the sun to give us enough power to operate. But once you have that, the comet has enough sunlight falling on it to start getting active. That's the reason we had this very narrow window between arrival and landing. And so in some ways, we landed at kind of the optimally boring point of the comet. There wasn't much material flowing away. But with a factor of six in sunlight, things are going to change dramatically in the next year. The tail is going to build up,

the coma is going to expand, and we're going to see material flowing away, maybe even chunks of material flying past Rosetta. So it really promises to be very exciting next year. Mark McCorquan will tell us more about Rosetta and Philae after a short break. 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.

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Want to hear it again? Sure you do. That's the sound of the European Space Agency's Philae making the first ever landing on a comet. Philae may be down, if not out, but a few kilometers overhead is Rosetta, the first spacecraft to orbit a comet. And the science is flowing. So are spectacular pictures of that magnificently misshapen object that is already beginning to build a tail as it approaches the sun. ESA Senior Scientific Advisor Mark McCorkran is our guest. He has been watching in awe like the rest of us.

I've got a link to even more of my conversation with Mark on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. And if you want a real treat, one that will blow you away, watch Ambition, the short film Mark mentioned. There's a link to it, too. Have there been any surprises already? I mean, I'm thinking of one that I've, in fact, talked with my colleague Emily Lakdawalla about on this show. And it's those areas on the comet that look, for all the world, like sand dunes.

Yeah, when we arrived in August, I think there was a simultaneous joy and panic. I likened it at the time to sort of arriving at scientific Disneyland. This object, so variegated, there's so many different features there. There's crags, there's boulders. How do the boulders get where they are? Are they in situ? Did they evolve out of the underlying matrix, so to speak, or did they roll downhill? But you look at a comet like this, where is down? It's in different directions all the time. So, yeah, the sand dunes or they're not made of sand, but whatever they are, how do they get blown into that shape apparently? And I think one lesson we've all tried to take away is, and I've spoken to Emily at length about this,

it's very easy to or it's almost tempting to use terminology from terrestrial or Martian geology and say, well, that looks like something else. And we all keep pinching ourselves and saying, well, no, you know, that's not snow, because actually we've cranked up the contrast in the image. That stuff isn't white at all. It's jet black. And we always have to step back and say, you know, the appearances can be truly deceptive. But so far, you know, this has exceeded all expectations in terms of what we thought we would see on the surface of the comet at this level. What is just ahead for Rosetta? Well, you know, we're in the planning stage now for all of next year. Rosetta itself has pulled away as part of the maneuver to deliver Philae. It went into a higher orbit. So we'll be going back down

again to 20 kilometers. But as the comet starts getting more active over the coming months, we'll largely be sitting back. We don't want to be right in the dust and gas. People shouldn't be too worried about it. We're not flying fast relative to the comet. So that material is flowing past us rather than screaming past us and going to damage us. We don't want to get the instruments covered in stuff. But we will be doing close flybys. So effectively, rather than going into very low orbit, we're going to be going down on quick excursions as close as eight kilometers from the center of the comet. Because the comet itself is a radius of two kilometers, you know, that means within six kilometers of the surface. So there's going to be some really interesting flyby science done.

And then next year, as we get further into the mission, we'll stand back probably a little bit further. And then right at the end, well, we have to see what we're going to do with Rosetta after the end of the mission as well. My colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, once again, she's given you a lot of credit, shared credit at least, for what appears to be a real improvement in the openness and public outreach he has seen in this mission compared to some previous European Space Agency missions. Is that something that you're proud of? Yes, definitely. But I can make that clear that that's on behalf of a team of people here who've been working extremely hard. We knew Rosetta was a big thing. We knew that it had to be something which we needed to get people engaged in. And in fact, in some ways, it's easy.

You know, it's a fascinating thing. It's a first going to a comet, landing on one. It's an adventure that plays out in real time. But we spend a lot of time thinking about how well, you know, how to do that in the best possible way. And one of the avenues, and Emily knows this well, is through social media, through openness, through transparency. You know, we haven't always managed to do that in the way that everybody would like. I mean, we've got some friends out there who would like us to give them all the data for free. And they,

you know, on the first day, they come back. So we've, you know, we've tried to be as open with people as we can, while at the same time, we have to work with the scientists who have just arrived at the comet, too. We did up our game substantially. It's the first mission of this kind that I've been so closely involved with on the communication side. And my team really stepped up on this one. And indeed, we're hugely appreciative of what's come back in terms of this, you know, the kudos from people saying, good job. You know, it sets the bar now. We have to do that for every mission.

But, you know, we're looking forward to that challenge. And there is so much more to look forward to in this mission. Mark, I hope that we can talk again as Rosetta proceeds in its course toward the sun, accompanying 67P. Of course, we'll keep an eye out, as I know all of you will, on Little Philae. Well, it's been a great pleasure. And indeed, it's a privilege for us to be involved and have everybody watching over our shoulders. And we're really looking forward to everybody following on with us next year. That'd be great. Congratulations again, Mark. And that goes for the entire team there, of course. Mark McCorkran works for the European Space Agency. He is the Senior Scientific

Advisor in the Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration. That means that he is responsible for communicating the science results from ESA's many missions, and most recently, of course, and perhaps most excitingly, this one to orbit and land on a comet. His own research has to do with infrared astronomy, looking at the formation of stars and planetary systems, using all sorts of state-of-the-art ground and space-based telescopes. And, Mark, before you go, I have read that you are quite involved with the development of the James Webb Space Telescope. Must be another one that you're looking forward to.

Oh, enormously. I think, you know, you're not allowed to have any favorites, but JWST I've been working on now personally for 16 years or so, and it's been a long time coming, but we're really making enormous progress, really looking forward to it. It's going to be a major, major deal. So much more to look forward to in and around and even outside of our solar system. We're going to do exactly that with our regular visitor. It's Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Over there on the other end of the Skype line is Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, here to tell us what's up.

You can do that right now. Welcome back. Hey there. Hi there. How are you doing? I'm doing great. As people are going to hear, we had a terrific response to the contest this week. A lot of first-time entrants, but so many people who talk about how much they enjoy the show. And I try to thank folks in email. But for those of you I don't get back to, thank you. We love you, too.

Some nice comments about the Random Space Fact video series as well. Cool. All right. Well, let's get right into what's up. Basically, in planet land, it's Mars and Jupiter. Mars in the early evening in the southwest. Mars and Jupiter. Mars in the early evening in the southwest, and Jupiter now coming up at between 10 and 11 at night, and over in the east looking super bright, as Jupiter always does, and really high up in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It is the 50th anniversary this

week of Mariner 4's launch, the first ever Mars flyby. Yeah, and just months later, we found out that Mars is a completely uninteresting dead planet. Exactly. And then a few years later, we found out, no, it's actually interesting. But there's no vegetation. Well, not yet. Exactly. On to Random Space Fact. I don't know. Should be a Thanksgiving Random Space Fact. I don't know.

It should be a Thanksgiving Random Space Fact, not a Halloween one. I'm trying. Active regions on the sun that include sunspots sometimes can be multiple. An active region on the sun is an area where the magnetic fields are really, really strong. It appears really bright at ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. Invisible light, you get sunspots, areas that are cooler than the surroundings. And active regions are numbered by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, of the U.S. And they're just numbered sequentially. So now we're up in the tens of thousands of sunspots since the

original number one back in the early 70s when they started numbering. And is that numbering accepted around the world? It seems to be, yeah. Very interesting. I wouldn't swear that everywhere truly accepts it. But yes, when one talks active regions on the sun, one uses an AR number. And I was kind of curious what the origin was. So there you go. That's what prompted me to share this glory. And we may come back to this in just a few minutes. Ah, good.

We move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, when, when did the Guiana Space Center become operational? Guiana Space Center in South America used by ESA and CNES, the French Space Agency, and Ariana Spas, the rocket company. And how do we do, Matt? Big response. And I suspect it had a lot to do with our offer of this account from itelescope.net. 200 points, that's worth $200 US, for robotic viewing.

Anywhere in the universe that you decide to point one of their telescopes, and they've got them all over the world, northern and southern hemispheres, this proved to be a very popular prize. We got this response from Daniel Allen, Greer, South Carolina is where he hails from. He said the French Guiana Space Center became operational in 1968. That is correct. Well, congratulations, Daniel. And he adds, the telescope time would be wonderful

because the light pollution is so extreme here on the I-85 corridor between Atlanta and Charlotte. So have fun. Hey, send us any images that you grab there, Daniel, and maybe we'll do something with that. And we're going to give somebody else a chance to win one of these itelescope.net accounts in just a moment. But first, Martin Harjowski, Martin Harjowski, I think it is, from Houston. He said that the first rocket launched from the French Guiana Space Center was on April 9th of that year, 1968.

It was a sounding rocket called Veronique. And he says, despite what all of us Archie fans might want, the second rocket was not Betty. Sugar, sugar. That's humor. Finally, this from Brian Wilson in Colorado. He said, the Guyana Space Center, a.k.a. Centre Spatial Guyanese, which is why I never speak French,

became operational in 68. He said that's the same year that Boeing came out with the 747. Coincidence? You be the judge. That's a random aeronautical fact here. Random aerospace fact here on the show. How about for next time? I skipped one little part of random space fact. Let me share with you that active regions, when they go around and rotate around the sun, which happens in 25 to 29 days-ish, depending on where you are on the sun, and if they make it back around and they're still active, they get a new number.

So here we get to the question. Recently, in fact, still up there is what was the largest active region in the last 24 years. It was that big dark spot on the images of the solar eclipse about a month ago, the partial solar eclipse. It's still up there. It's rotated all the way around. the partial solar eclipse. It's still up there. It's rotated all the way around. What are the two active region numbers that have been assigned to that active region?

The one that was up in the solar eclipse, the one that was bigger than any other active region in 24 years. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Sounds like one that you'll have to dig for a little bit, and you'll need to dig for that and get us your answer by december 2nd it is that would be tuesday morning 8 a.m pacific on the 2nd of december and as i said the prize once again will be this 200 point account with itelescope.net you can check them out at that url see where those telescopes are how big they are they've got all the details. And if you get the account, you'll have some time on any one,

or maybe you can split it up among those scopes and maybe catch a nice image of that spot on the sun that Bruce was talking about. We probably should make sure they have solar telescopes before they sleep over to the sun. They usually make that impossible in any case. So go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about shins. Thank you and good night. Somehow I don't think he means the band of the shins. He means that anatomical part of the body, on me anyway, that seems to attract table legs and things like that.

Exactly. Why isn't there more padding? Really, it's just poor design. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the ambitious members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.