Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Big Week for Space Science at the AGU and Beyond

Episode Date: December 16, 2013

The annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union revealed lots of science, some of it astounding. Emily Lakdawalla was there with Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator Casey Dreier, whose news was not quite as good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A very big week for space science. That's 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. A Chinese rover on the moon. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. A Chinese rover on the moon. Plumes of water vapor and Lord knows what else spewing from the surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa. The eerie sounds of our own planet enhanced by a little human activity. And an astounding report from the Curiosity rover on Mars that you may not have heard elsewhere.

We've got all this and more ahead as we extend our usual conversation with Emily Lakdawalla and get a few comments about planetary science policy from Casey Dreyer. Emily and Casey attended last week's gigantic gathering of geo- and planetary scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. We'll begin their reports in a minute, and later Bruce Batts will tell us about a night sky that is full of planets and wonder. We begin with Bill Nye the Science Guy and the big news from China. Bill, big, big week for Space News. I'm hoping you can talk to us a little bit about the exciting news from China via the moon. What news? No, I'm kidding. No, the Chinese Space Administration landed the Jade Rabbit U-2 spacecraft, a rover, on the surface of the moon, drove it out a few meters, seems to be working fine.

So this is another space agency able to land spacecraft on other worlds. This is extraordinary. able to land spacecraft on other worlds. This is extraordinary. Our world, the Earth, is changing because now we have multiple missions going to other worlds beyond low Earth orbit. So congratulations, Chang'e. I'm pronouncing as best I can. Chang'e 3.

Almost as fascinating is how the Chinese chose to cover this. They were very open. It was all live. Yeah, and they had it live. They had it on their television. And when you look at mission control, it looks like mission control for a NASA mission. It looks like the European Space Agency.

A lot of engineers sitting before their consoles monitoring the many, many data that are sent back, we call it telemetry, from the moon. But they sent commands to the spacecraft in real time because the moon is close enough. But this is an enormous first step for the Chinese space effort. This is fantastic. It's including more people around the world. And yeah, you watch it, at least here in the States, we watch it on Chinese television. It's crazy. I'm in a moment or two, I'm going to be talking to our colleague Casey Dreyer about policy things

that he learned and heard at the AGU conference last week. But I've already seen quite a bit of concern about what this may mean, may say, about other space programs, in particular the American, the U.S. space program. As much as we congratulate the Chinese, should this be a little kick in the pants as well? Well, we at the Planetary Society, Matt, would like, if it were, you know, the open letter to the U.S. president that I did, that I wrote and then performed on a video. In fact, I think Matt Kaplan was the camera operator in that shoot.

Oh, that hack? Yeah. He's on the radio every week. It's just – no, that aside, almost 900,000 views as we talk today. Certainly, it's very reasonable that by Isaac Newton's birthday on the 25th of December, it will have a million views. And one cannot help but hope that would influence people to get the world's largest space agency to increase its funding for planetary science,

including the moon in this case as planetary exploration, because although to some the moon's not a planet, it's the same technology or same sort of thing where you fly a spacecraft to another world and lower it gently onto the surface in its gravity field. Quite a feat. Congratulations again to the jade rabbit. And, Bill, a cheche to you. Thank you.

And I look forward to talking to you again next week. Next week. Carry on. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye, the science guy. It may not sound like a lot of people, but when nearly 2,000 Earth and space scientists gather in one place, you can expect to hear about a lot of terrific science and a few jaw-dropping revelations, like the probable detection of geysers on Jupiter's ice-blanketed moon Europa.

Sadly, not all of the sessions at last week's annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union were such a joy. Casey Dreyer is the Planetary Society's Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator. He's often found in Washington, D.C., haunting congressional offices or meeting with policy wonks. So it must have been a nice change of pace to spend the week in San Francisco, or it would have been had the budget news been better. Casey, while we'll be talking to Emily about the science that she experienced at AGU, I did want to save a couple of minutes to talk with you about some of the things you especially deal with, not that you aren't excited about the science. You heard some

things from top NASA scientists who, frankly, in your blog post of December 10th, it sounded like they were trying to put a pretty face on a pretty ugly outlook for planetary science. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So the other day I saw Dr. Ellen Stofan, who is newly the chief scientist of NASA and noted planetary science. She was the PI behind the ill-fated Titan Mary Explorer time mission, which would have landed a boat to float around the sea of Titans. Spectacular mission.

Was not selected. Then you also had Dr. John Grunsfeld, noted Hubble repair astronaut and now serving as the head of NASA's science mission directorate. So basically the boss of all NASA science was there, and they had a media event. And the questions that I asked him, and I was actually happy, the advocate side of me was happy to see. First questions from the other journalists in the room, which pleased my advocate side, about the planetary science budget, which, as we know here in Planetary Radio, has been cut by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years.

You've seen a lot of missions disappear and a lot of missions never appear. And newly, of course, we're seeing scientist research funding begin to get cut. They were very excited. Of course, NASA still has lots of missions flying. These are all missions from about 10 years ago. That's the big problem when the journalists and other people look at NASA now and the scientists talk about current highlights. It takes a long time to put a mission together. So right now, we have a great number of missions across the solar system, lots of great earth science missions, lots of great heliophysics missions. But every one of these directorates almost is facing a drop in number of future missions. We're not making any more of them, or we're making very few. And so they tried to spin it positively and doing the

best they can, because they are representatives of the Obama administration, and to highlight the great science that is happening, which is true. We are getting astounding returns, tons of great science from all over the solar system and beyond with our astrophysics missions. But again, and this is what I kept asking about, was that the future missions just aren't there. And they agreed that the cadence, the number of missions that we can create, the frequency of missions, they're having a real problem filling now. It's kind of like Charles Dickens. It's the best of times, and it's also the worst of times. We have great returns.

We have very few. We're going off a cliff, though, in the next five years. Exactly the kind of thing that got the Planetary Society started more than 30 years ago. It's a shame to hear that this challenge is still there. Before we run out of time, say something about what this means when we are suddenly presented with new data that says, for example, boy, it would be great to have a mission head out to Europa. Yeah, so this is my personal favorite moment of the entire AGU conference was the press

announcement regarding Europa's plumes. I'm a Europa fan. I have been since I was a kid. I want a mission to Europa. I want a big mission to Europa. I want to go look for life and organics and all the other, characterize all the ocean underneath that layer. You said it, man. And the amazing thing to me is that the universe is a pretty harsh place and non-forgiving usually does not give you a

break but we learned last week that the universe gave us a little bit of a help a hand up here because instead of having to land on europa and drill through its icy crust whoever knows how deep to try to access some of that potentially habitable environment of the water it's now spewing it out into space for us. That's a huge favor Europa just gave us here for humanity. And instead of drilling through, all we have to do now is fly through that plume of water. Of course, it won't be the same as drilling in and going down and looking right in that environment. But man, you can learn a lot about the chemistry of that ocean by going through that plume, which you can do with this Europa Clipper mission.

It's a concept that NASA's been working on for nearly five years now, where instead of orbiting Europa, you fly by about 45 times. You can do a Europa flagship mission for about half the cost, about $2 billion instead of $4 billion. The scientific community is so excited. They're reevaluating a bunch of their instrumentation on this concept mission. But of course, just as what you said at the beginning of this segment, there's no money right now

to do this mission. We could start tomorrow where the plans are there. We could start building this tomorrow and have it launched by 2021 and to Europa within a couple of years if we take the SLS. And within 10 years, we could be flying through and sampling these plumes of Europa if we wanted to. Right now, no one wants to put up the money to do that. Well, I suppose there is still time to turn this around, but it's going to take

work and advocacy, not just by folks like you, Casey, but lots of people who may be listening to this program. Thank you so much for joining us once again, and we'll check back with you as there are further developments in this fight for planetary science. Thank you, Matt. Casey Dreyer, he is the Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator for the Planetary Society, and keeps track of all these things and fights the good fight in D.C. and elsewhere.

When we return, when we're back from the break, we'll hear much more about the science from AGU from Emily Lakdawalla. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter.

Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business.

You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. As promised, we're back now to talk some more about AGU, this time with Emily Lakdawalla, the Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, to talk more about

some of the science. With everything going on at this incredibly crowded meeting. Was it hard to find the highlights, Emily? It is, although I have to say that the American Geophysical Union does a great job of helping to select really good science for press briefings. And so this is a meeting where I feel more like a member of the media than at most other meetings where I feel more like one of the scientists. So I went from press briefing to press briefing, and there were a couple, I think two real highlights of this meeting for me. All right. Well, let's talk about what may be one of those.

It already came up from the policy standpoint a few moments ago with Casey Dreyer. But tell us about the science behind this find that is so exciting out there on Europa. Sure. So this is a result that is based on Hubble Space Telescope imaging of Europa, the moon of Jupiter. The announcement is that there may be plumes of water spraying out of Europa's south pole, just like Saturn's moon Enceladus, which, if true, would be incredibly exciting. We already know that Europa is geologically relatively active. It's got a very youthful surface. There's been other arguments that perhaps some of its geologic features have been active quite recently. But the fact of it having geysers spewing stuff out of the

surface would be exciting from an exploration standpoint. Because what that means is that we have material from Europa going out into space where a flyby spacecraft or an orbiting spacecraft could scoop it up and measure it directly. So you don't actually have to go all the way down to the surface to sample Europa. This is kind of what we've seen happen with Cassini running through those plumes at Enceladus, right? Exactly. And you would want exactly the same kind of instrument, basically a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer that could scoop up those particles and tell us what they're made of. Now, I do want to be cautious. All the scientists that I spoke with

about this are extremely excited about it, but they also point out that the putative plume has only been observed once. They tried three observations in 1999, 2012, and again in 2012, and they found the first two, they didn't see any plumes, and the third one they did. And the reason that they cite for this making sense actually goes back again to Enceladus

because Cassini has recently discovered that Enceladus' plumes are about three times more active when the moon is at its apoapsis, its farthest distance from Jupiter, than when it's closest to Jupiter. And the one time that Hubble observed the Europa plumes was when Europa was at its apoapsis, and the other two observations were made when it was near its closest approach to Jupiter. So it makes physical sense, but a lot of scientists that I talked to wanted to be a little bit more circumspect about the result until it had been observed a second time. But it couldn't really be observed a second time until the scientists came forth with this publication and said, now we really need to go

back and look at it again with Hubble. And I know that you've got a blog entry up about that action on Enceladus, that huffing and puffing of the plumes there. Just one more question about this. Is there anything in the models that have been developed that would tell us why this may be happening, where it's happening at the South Pole? Europa's surface has a lot of cracks and fissures, and those are caused by the rhythmic squeezing and relaxing of the surface through its orbit around Jupiter.

Jupiter is a very, very large planet. It exerts very strong forces on moons, and it stretches them from a perfect spherical shape into one that's more like a football or rugby ball shape. As Europa moves closer and farther from Jupiter, it's more squeezed when it's closer to Jupiter and less squeezed when it's farther. And so as the squeeze relaxes, the cracks in Europa could theoretically open up a little bit and allow material to escape. Whereas when it's close to Jupiter, those cracks would be squeezed shut and it couldn't release any material. Now, one thing that they're also not sure about is what material this plume stuff

represents. Could it be Europa's ocean? Well, it's actually not all that likely because Europa's crust is probably quite thick. So it might be something perched closer to the surface. because Europa's crust is probably quite thick, so it might be something perched closer to the surface. It might even be a dry material that's created by friction through the walls of cracks themselves. There's a lot of unknowns about what this is and whether it exists, but it's still a very exciting finding that I hope gets followed up on. Yep, and I hope we go out and take a taste.

Let's move on to another entry that you did based on what you heard at AGU, and this has to do with curiosity and very, very old rocks. That's right. And this was an interesting press briefing to attend and then to see the media results from, because almost all of the other news media were discussing a different result from the meeting. They were talking about the rocks that Curiosity discovered being lake sediments that had a neutral pH, a very good place for life, all of which is quite exciting, but was actually not all that new a result because that kind of stuff had been discussed before. For me, the most exciting result from the Curiosity press briefing was the fact that they did radioisotope age dating on this rock on the

surface of Mars using the sample analysis at Mars or SAM instrument. They did something called potassium-argon dating. That's where a naturally occurring isotope of potassium decays and turns into argon. Now, if you have a rock melt or something, that argon would just escape into the atmosphere. But when potassium gets locked into a rock, the argon atoms are stuck inside the crystal lattice of the minerals inside that rock. And so the argon can't escape. And so this becomes a clock for how long it's been that that rock has been a solid material, or the minerals in the rock have been a solid material. And the answer from the SAM instrument on Curiosity is that the minerals in this rock on the bottom of Gale Crater

are 4.2 billion years old, plus or minus 400 million years. And I want to point out that the older bound on that age limit is the age of the solar system itself. The younger age limit is up to about 3.6 billion years. So we're still talking about a large span of Mars history here. Unfortunately, they can't get it any more precise than that. But it is, however you count it, it's extremely old, and it does at least corroborate other methods of testing the age of the surface of Mars. So we may be looking here at stuff that is from the birth of the solar system. And it's certainly extremely ancient rock, and it is definitely what Curiosity was sent there to study. So it's a fabulous result. It's really wonderful that

they've been able to perform this age date and verify the fact that Curiosity really is looking at incredibly ancient rocks. And one thing that I find interesting is that the SAM instrument was not designed to do radioisotope age dating of rocks. And so this is sort of a stretch getting the instrument to do that. But any source of error that you could imagine would result in them estimating a date that was too young. And so the fact that this date is so old really helps me trust the measurement more than I might otherwise and say, yeah, this rock really is at least 3.6 billion years old and probably a lot older, which really puts it, that's the time in the age of the solar system when life was originating on Earth. It's the end

of the putative late heavy bombardment. It's really, really ancient stuff that we can't study rocks that old on Earth. There's hardly any rock on Earth that old. And the stuff that we do have has been intensely metamorphosed and processed since it formed. So being able to study rocks this old on Mars is just, it's one of the great reasons for going to Mars with a geology mission. One more story, one that, as we speak, you haven't quite written about yet, but you will be perhaps by the time most hear this piece, and that's about a mission to Earth.

That's right, or at least a mission that flew past Earth, and that was the Juno mission that's on its way to Jupiter. It did its Earth flyby back in October. Just as with the Galileo and Cassini missions, the Juno mission wanted to test out their science instruments as much as they could flying by a planet that is nothing at all like Jupiter. And one of the things that they joked about is trying to detect whether there was intelligent life on this planet. And so one of the ways that they did that was to actually coordinate humans all over the Earth to try to send a message to the Juno spacecraft in a way that it could detect. Now, Juno is a mission that's designed to look at magnetic fields and

the plasma environment and things around Jupiter, so that the way that they figured out how to do this was to employ the world's ham radio operators to send a Morse code signal, the word HI to the spacecraft Jupiter. And HI in Morse code is just four dits followed by two dits. They coordinated it with a website that actually instructed the ham operators to hold the key down for a full 30 seconds before releasing it for a full 30 seconds. So this isn't a dit, it's a long sound because the spacecraft actually rotates once every 30 seconds. So this isn't a dit, it's a long sound because the spacecraft actually rotates once every 30 seconds and they didn't want to try to coordinate the hams with the rotation of the spacecraft. So that's how they did it. And then they released last week at AGU, the sonogram,

the sonification of the radio sound that the spacecraft picked up. And it's just precious. It actually picked up the signal of humans broadcasting from planet Earth. We communicated with a passing spacecraft. It was pretty wonderful. And we're going to go out with a little bit of that sound. You'll be able to find it in this piece that Emily will be putting up on the blog at planetary.org very soon. Some of it will remind you if you heard our conversation with the Kronos Quartet about the music that they did that used a lot of these sounds from space, because you also will be listening to the magnetosphere of our planet, our home planet of Earth. Emily, as always, fascinating talking to you,

and I look forward to going back to our regular segment next week. See you then, Matt. Emily is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bruce Batts is coming up in just a few moments with this week's edition of What's Up. Here is Juno and a bunch of shortwave operators saying hello. Moving right along here, it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts.

How are you? Hey, pretty hunky-dory swell. How are you, Matt? I'm okay. I'm okay. It's been a nice weekend. Spent a good piece of it up in the mountains looking at beautiful stars. Venus still incredibly bright in almost daylight.

It is. It is. It's incredibly bright low in the west soon after sunset. Again, not even that low, but it's going to drop really fast over the next two or three weeks. So get your Venus love in now.

That's redundant. Jupiter is coming up early in the evening now, low in the east, so opposite side of the sky. If you have really clear view to both horizons, you can even catch both planets for a little bit at the same time. But more likely, you'll lose Venus and then pick up Jupiter coming up. But Jupiter is getting earlier and earlier in its rise time. And if you look near Jupiter, you can see the Gemini, bright stars, Castor and Pollux

for a little fun, festive collection of bright lights in the sky. As we move later in the evening, around middle of the night, Mars is coming up low in the east, looking reddish, and it'll just keep getting brighter over the next three months or so. And then we've got Saturn now coming up in the pre-dawn in the low in the east. It'll just keep getting higher as time moves along. Very good. Still lots to look at. And they're those pesky stars if you ever get bored. Yeah, there are a few of them. We move on to this week in space history. It was 110 years ago this week that the first powered flight occurred from the Wright brothers. Wow. Seems like only yesterday.

And only seven years later, my Aunt Dora was born. She's still around. It's absolutely amazing to consider that. Twenty-five years ago, two cosmonauts returned from Mir after being on board that space station for more than a year. On to... Random Space Facts! station for more than a year. On to random space facts. Now I'm glad I didn't have Emily do that for us. So the constellation Orion, made up of those silly star things, it has two of the ten

brightest stars in the night sky. It's got Rigel and Betelgeuse both are super giants a funny word loosely translated means big ass but rigel is actually a blue super giant and you can actually see it looks bluish it's hotter and smaller than betelgeuse which is a red super giant which gives a nice orange red look to it so check that out it's over not too far away from the Jupiter-Gemini party going on, early to mid-evening, looking the east or even getting high overhead. Now, say that star again, because I know it as Betelgeuse. Yeah, I don't actually speak the proper Arabic or other languages. So I said Betelgeuse because I'm afraid to say

Betelgeuse. And don't you dare say it again. Okay. Done with silly movie references anyway. It just sounds more scientific. And that's of course the reason we should use. On to the trivia contest. I asked you after our

Comet ISON fun a couple weeks ago, what does ISON stand for? How'd we do, Matt? Unbidden, we had all sorts of listeners submitting what they thought it should stand for, as well as telling us what it actually does stand for. First of all, here's our winner, Etienne Fellman. Etienne, who said it stands for International Scientific Optical Network, the team that discovered it.

Based in Russia, right? It is. It's near Kislovodsk, Russia. Beetlejuice. Anyway, Etienne, we're going to be sending you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. I'm going to run through some of these others really fast because we're running late. Mark Wilson said it should stand for icy snowball orbiting nearby. Dan Price said intense sun-obliterated nucleus.

Maeve Hamrick said, you'll like this, it's so over now. It is so over now. So November. I like Joe Massey's, too. Joe said, ison equals Icarus should have been the object's name. And finally, this one, very creative, from Mark Smith. ISON! Recorded live. I was laughing all over the internet. There was just the ISON, ISOF, ISOM, ISOF. All right. None of those people are going to win anything, but our next winner is going to get that terrific year in space wall calendar. I

got a copy of it last week at the office. It is even more spectacular than last year's. It is. It's stunning. Beautiful pictures, lots of good space facts, and this week in space history. And, oh, yeah, it's also a calendar, strangely. How can somebody win one of those? Well, they need to answer the following question. What is the only planet in the solar system, besides Earth, so we don't get people claiming things related to that, what is the only planet in the solar system to have had a successful soft lander before it had a successful orbiter?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Give us your entry. That may be a little more difficult for you folks to dig up, but you will. I know you will. And they'll get us that answer by Monday the 23rd. That's December 23rd, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky. Think about planetary radio, the word shining and glowing, silvery gloriousness.

Thank you, and good night. Kind of like the Hollywood sign. We should be up there on that hill. He's Bruce Betts, the director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the starry-eyed members of the Society. Clear, star-filled skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова