Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Giant Telescope and Remembering John Glenn

Episode Date: December 13, 2016

Space historian John Logsdon remembers American hero John Glenn. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye was a big fan of the Friendship 7 astronaut—less so the new Star Wars movie. Then we get an update on the Giant Magellan Telescope from Patrick McCarthy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, Planetary Radio Podcast fans. Thank you so much, those of you who responded to my special message last week, by going to planetary.org slash planetary fund and pledging your support of the Society. Many of you did that, and I hope even more of you will do it before December 31st so that we can take advantage of this $100,000 Planetary Fund Matching Challenge that was issued by a generous member. So once again, thank you very much for becoming part of the challenge that we need to meet, many challenges that we need to meet in the coming years, and I hope the rest of you,

or many of the rest of you, will also join in. Once again, it's planetary.org slash planetary fund. Here is this week's special show. A giant telescope and remembering John Glenn, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. All the regulars are here, so stay tuned for Emily, Bill and Bruce, and we'll check in with Patrick McCarthy about the steady progress made toward first light by the giant Magellan telescope. But we must begin by saluting John Glenn. John Logsdon has joined us several times.

He founded and directed the George Washington University Space Policy Institute and is the author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, as well as After Apollo, Richard Nixon, and the American Space Program. John, it's just by coincidence that you happen to be here for a Planetary Society board meeting, and it was only minutes ago that we learned that a real American hero, John Glenn, has passed away. Would you describe him that way? Oh, absolutely. I mean, John Glenn was a consummate public servant of this country. Pilot in the Korean War, through his role as astronaut as the first American to orbit the Earth, through 24 years in the Senate, he dedicated his life to serving this country.

And he was viewed as such a hero after his orbital flight that President Kennedy refused to let him fly again. Not take the second risk, a risk of a second spaceflight, because he was so important as a symbol of American achievement and American excellence at a time where we needed it. After all, the Soviet Union had had two orbital flights before John Glenn went into orbit. And so it was restoration of American confidence that made him such a symbolic hero. What do you think it means or what are your thoughts about the fact that even though he had to wait decades for it, he got to make that second trip? Well, persistence pays off.

I think the country owed it to him. It was a little self-indulgent. But after all, indulgent. But after all, there was a rationale invented of the influence of zero gravity on aging and being at 77 as an ideal subject for that. But it was really a payback for the years of service that John Glenn got to fly again in 1998. You told me that he had quite an influence on you. I'm old. Let's adopt that as a starting point. I'm old enough to have remembered Sputnik, but I don't. I'm old enough to remember John Kennedy's speech to Congress in May of 61 setting the lunar landing goal, but I don't remember that. The first space thing I remember is, first of all, John Glenn's orbital flight. And then I was working in Manhattan, March the 1st,

1962. You could look it up. And I saw Glenn and Vice President Lyndon Johnson parading through the streets of Manhattan. And it struck me, this is exciting stuff, this space stuff. I went back to graduate school that fall. And from the first paper on, I wrote about space. The rest is history. and from the first paper on, I wrote about space. The rest is history. I had the privilege of getting to know John Glenn in the 90s and in the past 20 years or so. And I told him that. It was very gratifying to say, John, you're the reason I had my career.

He may be considered as having had the epitome of the right stuff. Was he pretty much what he appeared to be? I think when you saw John Glenn, it's what you got. I mean, he was clearly an intelligent, risk-taking American citizen, but there was no pretense about him. He said what he wanted to say, a 73 years marriage to the same woman. In a sense, he didn't have all the right stuff. He was not the cowboy kind of risk taker that some of his Mercury 7 colleagues were, but he was something special. Is there anything else that you would want to say about the legacy that he leaves us, and maybe just the legacy of that time and what he represented in that time? Well, the last time I saw John Glenn

was in 2012, a celebration in Columbus, Ohio, for the 50th anniversary of his orbital flight. And the emcee for the evening was Neil Armstrong. Now they're both gone, you know, and the country is poorer for that. John, thank you so much. You're welcome. and knowing the country is poorer for that. John, thank you so much. You're welcome. Space policy expert and historian John Logsdon. Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's senior editor.

Emily, I find it absolutely charming that the wind on Mars has become kind of a pesky problem. It is, me too. It's funny, you know, Curiosity is now at this location that's kind of in among all these sand dunes and they're active sand dunes, which means, of course, there's wind and the wind is blowing sand. And that's really super fun to watch. But it's also created some headaches from the mission. And a much more frightening headache maybe has been resolved. Tell us what's going on with the drill? There have been problems with Curiosity's drill before. There's a recurring problem with a short circuit that happens in the percussion mechanism of the drill, the part that hammers this percussion drill into the ground in order to pulverize it, make a powder, and help the drill penetrate. They were planning to start a test of using the drill in a rotation-only mode where they didn't use that hammer mechanism to avoid the short, the test never got underway because a different part of the drill suddenly developed a problem.

The drill feed mechanism, the part that moves the whole drill forward to touch the rock, just didn't work. And so they stopped doing any drill activities for several days in order to investigate the problem. Don't know what the resolution is yet, except that we do now know that the drill feed mechanism has worked again under normal commands. So at least few, you know, there's not a substantial problem with the drill. It sounds like they'll be able to use it again, but it is still a little bit worrisome to have a new problem that you hadn't encountered before. And I guess we need to remember that this rover is now beyond its warranty, if we can call it that.

And that drill is still very important, but it has done its job well up till now. Yes, that is important to remember with curiosity. It's four years old, which isn't an advance to age for Mars missions by any means, but it's a little old to have everything still working.

And really the only component on the rover that's failed completely so far is something that broke during landing. So it is about time to start expecting some things to go by the wayside. And let's just hope that it's not the drill that fails anytime soon. Yeah. All right. We've saved a few seconds at the end for the science that Curiosity is accomplishing. What's up? Well, they're driving up through the Murray Formation, which is this huge thick stack,

about 180 meters thick of the sedimentary rocks. They've gone up through about 120 meters of it. They're seeing some interesting color changes. The rocks are getting redder or more variable in color from place to place. And all of these bright calcite veins, they're getting more pervasive. There's more of them. It's just really made for these dramatic appearing rocks, especially mixed among all of these dark sand drifts that are coming into Curiosity's view. All right. So that rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, still very much doing its job up there on the red planet. You're going to post all of this and images to go with it today, Monday, December 12th. Yep. That's the plan. So you'll find that at planetary.org.

Just look for Emily's blog. Emily, thanks as always. Thank you, Matt. That's her, the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She's writing a book about Curiosity, too. Up next is Bill Nye, the science guy.

Bill, we've already heard from Planetary Society Board member, space historian John Logsdon about John Glenn, but I wanted to give you a chance to chime in as well, because he certainly deserves more of an homage from a program like this that is all about what he helped get us started on. Well, for me, Matt, our story begins when I was a little kid. I grew up in the city of Washington, D.C., and we all went downtown to watch the astronauts ride down Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a convertible, sitting up on top of the convertible top. It was exciting, all waving, going crazy. The United States is in this thing. The United

States is going to go to the moon. This is going to be fantastic. Somehow, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom going up and down without orbiting was okay. But when we orbited, or the United States orbited a human, just as Yuri Gagarin did, and landed safely, everybody realized that it was possible and everybody was on board. Now, John Glenn was a Marine. He was a Marine pilot. He flew in two different wars. Once people see a war, they think about it differently. But John Glenn went on to become a U.S. senator and a very influential guy. And one of the NASA centers is named after him because he was a pivotal guy. Now, I just saw, by the way, I just saw the latest Star Wars movie. And whom do we feature in that movie?

Fighter pilots, essentially, in the future or in a place far, far away a long time ago. I got it. Anyway, they're fighter pilots. And John Glenn had the right stuff. He was able to athletically handle these G-forces, concentrate on the attitude and orientation of the aircraft or spacecraft. And he was a patriot. He was all that.

He was an American hero. I really admire the guy. We always will. And in comparison, Yuri Gagarin was kind of the same kind of guy, just working for a different government. They were test pilots, fighter pilots who believed in humans' future in space. And one of the astonishing things about Gagarin, apparently he had to parachute out of his capsule on the way down because there was an issue.

Can we say issue on this Radio Go podcast? John Glenn came in with a similar problem. They were concerned about his retro rocket pack not jettisoning. And both of these guys had to keep their cool under these extraordinary circumstances, literally a matter of death and life. And they did, and we admire him. So what's not to love about John Glenn? Those guys influenced me like nothing else.

We have a million stories. But I remember I got this pair of winter gloves that had leather palms, and I just imagined they were like the gloves that pilots wear. And so I could be an astronaut, man. I could be John Glenn. Yeah, sure I could.

Well, instead I'm settling for head of the Planetary Society, and John Glenn was very supportive of us. So thank you all. There are many more heroes in the future from many more nations, but this one guy meant a lot to people like me. I didn't get to watch the parade, but I was right there with you watching those heroes take our first small steps across the cosmos. Thanks, Bill.

Oh, wait. Just in a word, how was the movie? Well, if you like Star Wars, it's all that. You'll never guess what their big problem is. Just take a shot. That star? Could it be the Death Star? I was going to say, is it big and white and spherical?

No, it's gray, dark gray. Oh, okay. Still got a problem with that. There's still, I got to tell say, is it big and white and spherical? No, it's gray, dark gray. Oh, okay. Still got a problem with that. There's still, I got to tell you, Matt, a lot of conflict resolution with gunplay. I just don't know if that's the right model for our people. And then furthermore, look, if you guys, the stormtrooper armor is completely ineffective. Yeah, I've noticed that. Big time wrestling or something.

Lowest bidder, I think. Yeah, I've noticed that. It's like big time wrestling or something. Lowest bidder, I think. Yeah, it's awful. And it's not clear when a blaster kills somebody or when it just burns a hole in their tunic. There's some inconsistencies. Anyway, for me, Matt, everything's fine. Everything's fine. I went to see the movie and I very much enjoyed it.

But that stormtrooper thing just takes me out of it. I just don't believe it. I don't believe that anybody is that poorly trained and that ill-equipped. But that's neither here. And then what else happens? You'll never believe it. But a guy in a black suit shows up who has sort of magical superpowers that they don't reveal till right near the finale.

It could knock me over with a feather. But those people who enjoy these things within an atmosphere with a gravity field. But those of you who enjoy this, you'll love it. You will love it. The special effects are fantastic. And there's one cool idea

about a force field that's really, it's just cool science fiction. I will give you that. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. That's Rogue One, as seen by cool science fiction. I will give you that. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. That's Rogue One as seen by the science guy. Next week, we will discuss whether Han Solo shot first. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt.

He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. I'm ashamed to admit that it has been more than six years since we visited with Patrick McCarthy. A lot has happened since then. As you'll hear, the giant Magellan telescope is well on its way to so-called first light. And it is a giant. Seven exquisitely ground mirrors, each of them more than 50% wider than the 200-inch Hale telescope's mirror, with all seven eventually working together to take us to other worlds and back to the earliest days of our universe. Pat was the long-serving director of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization till July of 2015, when he was named its interim president.

He recently sat down with me in the exhibit hall at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. Last time we visited on Planetary Radio, Giant Magellan Telescope was more than a gleam in your eye, but now it's really a project that's well underway. So welcome back. I look forward to getting a progress report. Great to be back. And I'm happy to say the gleam has gotten a lot bigger because there's a lot more glass now. All right. Not to say that gleam is first light because that's still a ways off. Yes, it is. Tell us, where are things? How are things going

out on that mountain in Chile? Well, there's been a lot of progress. There's progress on the mountain in Chile, there's progress at the Mirror Lab, and there's progress at our partners around the world. But let's start on the mountain. About a year ago, I think it was November 11th of 2015, we had our official groundbreaking ceremony. We had leveled the site a couple of years before that. And in that process, we took off about nine meters off the top of the mountain, simply to make a platform large enough to hold the telescope and enough room to do the construction and support sites and so on. So that took a while. We had a groundbreaking ceremony. It was great. All our partners came, the president of Chile came, the ambassadors from all of our partners. We had 200 people there. We had a very nice time. But the next day we cleaned up and literally got to work. In a sense, we've been very busy.

We've had about 100 people on the mountain working to upgrade the roads, build the support facilities so we can house 250 to 300 construction workers, put in the power lines that we need, bring in the water, the data, all the infrastructure to start the full-scale construction. And I expect in about August of next year, we'll start excavating for the foundations. So we'll be doing a little more blasting. We'll be doing some digging. And then I hope we'll start pouring concrete at the end of 2017

in the height of the Chilean summer for the foundations. The walls will start coming up out of the ground. Instead of taking the mountain down, we'll be building the observatory up. Remind us why this spot in Chile, the Atacama, is such a great place to put wonderful telescopes. Well, the things you want in an observatory site is, first of all, you want it to be dark. You like it to be dry because clouds and water and so on are generally not good for astronomy. And the third criteria is not so obvious to the naked eye, but you want to be in a place where the airflow is smooth,

so the stars don't twinkle so much. You know, twinkling might be romantic, but it's bad for the science because it blurs the image. There's a few places on the Earth that are ideally suited for this. The coastal mountains of California would be great if it weren't for all the people and all their lights. Volcanic mountains in the middle of the ocean like the Hawaiian Mountains or the Hawaiian Volcanoes or the Canary Islands are very good. But it turns out the coastal range in Chile, the Andes, are perfect in the sense that it's extraordinarily dry.

No one lives there, so it's very dark. And the air has flowed over the Pacific for 4,000 miles, and the flow is very smooth, so the images are very sharp. That's why we're in Chile. And to quote Buzz Aldrin, it's a sort of magnificent desolation. I was there for the dedication of the Alma Array, and I'm a fan of the desert. It has a special beauty of its own. It does, and the beauty comes in some sense from it being so sparse, from the minerals in the ground, the open sky, the quiet. I just love going to Las Campanas. It's just a wonderful place to be. It's a long trip, but once you get there, it's just fabulous. When, if all goes well,

will that structure be finished? And I guess even before that, you're still deciding who's going to do that construction. Yes. So surprisingly for a big optical instrument, there's a lot of concrete and steel that has to be made. And we see there's two big construction projects. There's one of building the precision steel structure that holds the optics, what you traditionally call the telescope. And then there's the dome or the building or the enclosure that houses it. So where we are now is we're getting ready to select a company that will take our telescope design, which is pretty mature,

but really take it far enough that they can produce shop drawings to actually cut the parts and then build the whole telescope. So that process will be launched next month. We think we will select the design firm in probably March, April and start the fabrication at the end of 2017. And then it takes about three years, surprisingly fast, to build all that, to assemble it, to test it, to take it apart, to ship it to Chile, and put it back together. So in around 2021, the telescope steel structure will be ready to put together on top of the mountain. But you don't want to do that

just out in the open air and where there might be bad weather occasionally. So we have to build the dome or the enclosure before then. And that's a building that's about 22 stories tall. It has to open up at night, close up during the day, and it has to rotate. So it's got some special engineering challenges. We've got a partner in Tucson, sort of an industrial firm that we work with. It's an architecture and engineering company. They've got the design pretty far advanced. We will start the detailed design with them next year, and then we'll go out to bid, and we'll probably bid the concrete work and the steel work separately and the final assembly. That process we hope will complete in around 2020.

So then the telescope is ready to go in in 2021. And then all's we're missing is optics, right? That's the key part that really makes it a telescope. So let's talk about those optics because the mirrors, something you've been working on for years. It's one of those things that when you build a telescope, the optics are always the hardest part. So that's what you should start with first. There's the funny story of the Italian telescope that was dedicated, and they brought in the prime minister of Italy, and they had this big ceremony, and no one ever looked inside because there was no mirror.

We don't want to do that. We want to actually dedicate our telescope with the mirrors in there. So we started making the first mirror at the University of Arizona several years ago. And the thing that makes our mirrors so challenging is they're asymmetric. The mirror is not centered on its natural axis of symmetry. And the way we describe the difficulty in making a mirror is how far away it is from the best fitting sphere. Because a sphere has the maximum amount of symmetry. It's the easiest thing to polish. When you grind two pieces of glass together, they like to make spheres. Our off-axis mirrors are 14 millimeters away from the nearest fitting sphere. And you might say, well, 14 millimeters, it's half an inch. That's not such a big deal. But we have to polish them to about a 20th of wavelength of

light. And the mirrors are 40,000 wavelengths away from a sphere, so that's pretty hard. So the first one took a little longer than we had hoped, but we learned a lot in the process. We finished it in 2012. Now we have mirror number two that we're polishing on the front surface. Mirror number three, we have prepared on the back surface and put all the hardware on it that has to support the mirror. Mirror number four, we melted in the oven last year, and it's been cleaned out and is just waiting to go. Mirror number five and six are literally a pile of glass and mold material in a warehouse just ready to go in the furnace.

And mirror number seven, we just bought the glass from Japan. So it's kind of like one of those cooking shows. We've got one that just came out of the oven, and we've got one that's just had the icing put on it. And so we have them in all stages, but we're making great progress. There's a great photo on the website of a bunch of you sitting on mirror number four. Yes. Did it make you a little bit nervous? I guess not at that point.

Well, you notice most of us are taking our shoes off. And I figured this was the last time I would ever stand on a GMT mirror. But it was fun, and you get a real clear understanding of the scale when you sit in the middle of the mirror. But you also understand that the mirrors are very solid in one sense. They're very mechanically solid, but the glass is still glass. So you wouldn't want to drop anything on them, but you can stand on them. So they can withstand a lot of force, they just don't like blunt impact. So you have to be careful.

The trials and tribulations you've been through, is this going to lead to other developments in astronomy? Well, that's an interesting question, but let's back up, though, and to understand the history. It's the University of Arizona that makes the mirrors, and they have developed this novel technique of casting the mirror inside a spinning oven, which saves you a vast amount of work and time in terms of removing glass, and it's just, it's a very clever approach, and Professor Roger Angel initiated this. He has made, I think it's about four or five, six and a half meter mirrors, and three eight meter mirrors. The challenge with the GMT mirrors is they're being off-axis.

So that's the new innovation because then it allows you to tile these big mirrors together to make a much larger collecting area. And so the question is, where do you apply that same technology? Well, one area it's being used now is in the solar telescope being built in Hawaii. It's not at Mauna Kea. It's at Haleakala. So that's an off-axis telescope with a single mirror. And the reason you build a solar telescope off-axis is you don't have the diffraction. Like when you see the old rendition of the star of Bethlehem or whatever,

where the star looks like a square or like a point, a cross, you don't like that. That comes from obstructions in front of the mirror. When you're looking at the sun in particular, you don't want that obstruction, so they make the mirror totally off axis. That mirror was almost as hard as the GMT mirror, and it's now finished, again at the University of Arizona. But where does it go? There's no limit to how large you can make a telescope like the GMT simply by adding additional circles of mirrors outside it. At some point you might reach

a practical issue with just how do you build a structure large enough to support them, but we see no limit. You could make a 30 meter, 40 meter, 50 meter telescope simply by building up these very large segments. So what's your approach to adaptive optics? I mean your mirrors, you don't flex those. That's right. Every astronomer would love to be able to do adaptive optics at the primary mirror if you could. That's the most natural place to correct the distortions in the wavefront as light comes through the atmosphere. But that's simply not practical. As you say, they're simply too large and too massive. So it's worth understanding how we approach adaptive optics. So light comes from a star.

As it passes through the atmosphere, the waves get distorted. And the how we approach adaptive optics. So light comes from a star. As it passes through the atmosphere, the waves get distorted. And the way we approach it is we make one of our mirrors flexible, almost like rubber, and we change its shape to match the distortions input by the atmosphere, but exactly the same opposite phase, so they cancel. And I like to say it's like your noise-canceling headphones, which do the same thing. They measure the signal you don't want, which is the noise. They put them into the speakers and exactly out of phase, and it cancels. The challenge is we have to do that at the wavelength of light, not the wavelength of sound. And the atmosphere changes at about a kilohertz timescale.

So we have to have a mirror that changes its shape a thousand times a second and changes it to the precision of a wavelength of light. So what we will do in the GMT is the second mirror, the light comes from the star, hits the big mirrors, goes to a smaller mirror, those mirrors will be flexible. They're about 1 meter in diameter, and yet we make them out of a glass shell that's only 2 millimeters thin. And behind each of those 2 millimeter thin shells,

we have hundreds of voice coils, very much like in a loudspeaker, and they push or pull on the glass, and it deforms just a little bit, and that changes the shape. It cancels out the distortions. Wow. So 2 millimeters. We're talking thinner than a typical window in someone's home. Oh, much thinner, yes. So the whole challenge with them is how do you handle a mirror that's a meter across and only two millimeters thin? And the answer is very, very carefully.

You build special hardware. You don't handle it with your hands. You build special fixtures that allow you to move the mirror, to pick it up. And once it's been polished and coated and is attached to its reference body, it's actually very safe. But it's all in the transport and the assembly. And fortunately, again, at the University of Arizona and at a contractor in Italy, they have learned through practice how to make the mirrors, how to handle them, how to care for them out in the environment of the observatory at night.

And we're building again on the experience of others taking it to the next level by making it adaptive, off-axis, and multiple mirrors working together. What is the reflective coating on these mirrors? Well, you can approach the coating on mirrors a number of ways. The standard coating is aluminum that's deposited in a vacuum. So you put the optics in a sealed chamber, you pump out all the air, you have some aluminum filaments that you run an electric current through, and the aluminum vaporizes and coats everything inside the chamber.

Aluminum is very nice because it's reflective all the way from the ultraviolet, at least to below the atmospheric cutoff from the ozone, out to the visible in the infrared. But it's not as good in the infrared as, say, silver or gold. But gold has that nice color because it doesn't reflect the blue light. And silver is sort of in between. So people have developed hybrid coatings that are optimized either for the visible or for the infrared that have protection on top of them. But we will start with basic aluminum in part because we really want to work in the ultraviolet in the beginning.

And we might migrate to gold or overcoated silver with time. But for now, we're going to start with aluminum. That's Patrick McCarthy, leader of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. He'll tell us more about this mighty instrument in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect.

When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning

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Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Patrick McCarthy is the interim president of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, which has begun construction of a truly monumental astronomical instrument. In the early 2020s, its seven mirrors will begin working together to act as a single reflector nearly 25 meters or over 80 feet across. I know an awful lot of astronomers who cannot wait to get their hands on time at your facility

and this other amazing new generation of telescopes that is only a few years away now. You just had a big meeting up at one of my favorite places on this planet, Asilomar. Talk about that. Yeah. Well, it was a great meeting in that we brought together experts from all over the world in the study of planets around other stars, exoplanets as we call them. And we brought people from not only the GMT community,

but from the 30-meter telescope being built out of the University of California, Caltech and their international partners, and people from Europe working on the European Extremely Large Telescope. And we were all there to talk about how we would use these facilities to characterize, discover, explore planets around other stars. But the buzz at that meeting was really about the new discovery of this planet around Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighborhood,

a star, surprisingly enough, that you cannot see with your naked eye, even though it's the nearest star to the sun. In fact, it's about 100 times fainter than anything you can see with your naked eye. One of those very common red dwarfs. Indeed. Indeed. So there's two, I think, very interesting things about this breakthrough with Proxima Centauri. The first, which I think is perhaps the most profound, is it shows we can find planets around red dwarfs.

They're probably very common if the closest one to us has an Earth-mass planet. Those are, as you say, they're the most common stars. If they commonly have planets, that's where we would find Earth analogs, is around these cooler stars. The fact that our nearest star has an Earth-like planet means it's our best chance to study a terrestrial planet up close, understand its structure, its composition, perhaps even its atmosphere, to look for chemical signatures of biological processes, geological processes. And from my personal point of view, one of the great things is it's right overhead in Chile.

And so we're in the catbird seat of the right place to look at it. And the GMT will have enough angular resolution, thanks to adaptive optics, to cleanly separate the planet from the star, which we cannot do now. Wow. So we are energized by that discovery, and we heard some very interesting scientific and technical talks of how to approach Proxima b with the GMT. So this timing couldn't have been better. What are some of the other kinds of science that you heard up at Asilomar that people would like to get done?

Sure. The Asilomar meeting this year was about exoplanets. So we heard about Proxima Centauri. We heard about studying Jupiter-like planets when they're young, debris disks around stars. But every year we have a science meeting with a different focus. Last year it was about studying the structure of galaxies, how they're assembled, how the dark matter is distributed compared to the stars. Last year it was about studying the structure of galaxies, how they're assembled, how the dark matter is distributed compared to the stars. But one of the most interesting topics was one we covered a few years ago, which is if you look back to the beginning of time,

can you see the first stars and the first galaxies as they form? And when I say the beginning of time, I mean really when the universe was about 100 to 500 million years old. Not the first fraction of a second, but the time when the universe went from being sort of a uniform sea of gas to a highly irregular sea of stars, galaxies, dark matter. And one of the great features of astronomy is we can look back in time because light, while it travels very, very fast, is not infinitely fast. So if you look a light year away, you're seeing one year into the past. That's not a big deal, but when you look a billion light years away or 10 billion light years

or even 13 billion light years away, you're seeing the universe when it was young. And we'd like to look back to cosmic dawn when the first stars formed, the first galaxies, like to look back to cosmic dawn when the first stars form, the first galaxies, and we believe the GMT has the horsepower, the collecting area, the sensitivity to do that, to see those first galaxies. Any other science that you'd want to talk about? Sure. One of the really interesting things we can do is to literally weigh black holes all across the universe. So we know that the Milky Way galaxy has a black hole in the center that's about a million times the mass of the sun. We're pretty confident now that galaxies today commonly have black holes in their center. For some reason, we don't really understand

about one half of one percent of the mass of the center of the galaxy is in that black hole. And we don't know how they grew. Do they grow together? The black hole grow first. So our approach is, well, let's look back in time and trace the evolution of the mass of the black holes and the mass of the galaxies. And we can't do that today because we don't have the angular resolution to separate the effect of the black hole from the effect of the dark matter in the full galaxy. But with the GMT and adaptive optics, once again, we can look at black holes, particularly at the high-mass ones, anywhere in the universe and measure their masses. And then nearby, we can find those very small black holes. And it's kind of the seeds that probably grew to become big black holes today.

We can see the failed ones in nearby galaxies. So I think that's kind of exciting. You look at planets around other stars, first light in the universe, dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. What more could you ask for? You went exactly where I was hoping to go, whether the GMT may help to unveil these twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. I think we can have a big impact in the study of dark matter. I think dark energy is something we have to do in concert with other facilities. And the reason is dark matter has its strongest impact on relatively small scales,

scales of galaxy clusters, individual galaxies. And if the dark matter is not exactly purely dark, if it can radiate just a tiny fraction of its energy away, it will clump up. And we can measure that clumping by looking at the structure of dark matter, particularly in galaxies that are so low mass, they appear to be essentially 100% dark matter dominated. So that's one area of research that is difficult to do today. We think the GMT will excel at that to ask the question, is the dark matter truly dark? Now, dark energy, on the other hand, its effects are really felt on cosmological scales,

really on the very largest scales. And to sense it, to measure it, you need to be able to measure over very large parts of the sky or very large distances. So we know that, in part, dark energy was discovered by looking at the distances to supernovae. We think we can aid with that by measuring the spectra and the redshifts of very distant supernovae, literally to look back at the time when dark energy wasn't important, when the universe was dense enough that dark energy hadn't made such a large effect. But other experiments that look at the structure of the universe, the sound waves and

how they propagate, really need the full sky. And so the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is an example of that. We can help that experiment by calibrating their redshifts, by tracking down signals in the large-scale structure. So I think that's a place where we play a critical supporting and calibrating role. But the dark energy is really an all-sky problem, I think, now. It's a cosmological scale problem rather than a small-scale astrophysics problem. So with that, you've touched on my next question, which is the relationship between an instrument like the GMT and others around the world and off the world, like the James Webb Space Telescope, which, with any luck, is going to come online about the same time.

Yeah, probably sooner than us. Astronomy has now really become a global community. The astronomers today, one of the things that's so refreshing about them is they're not picky at all about using the best tools, whether the tools are owned by their university or owned by their country or built by their friends. They always look globally to find what's the best way to do my science, and it might mean using a whole spectrum of different facilities. And so we now look at our observatories in a much more synergistic way.

How do we work together? How do we leverage our strength compared to the strength of some other facility? And the Webb is a great example in that its sensitivity in the infrared, by virtue of being above the atmosphere, is something that we'll never touch on the ground. It's just not within the range, at least that I can conceive. And so for basic detection discovery, it will be an unprecedented machine. But its angular resolution is limited because it's a six and a half meter telescope. And its spectral sensitivity is limited because it doesn't have

high resolution spectrographs because it doesn't have that very large collecting area. So we have thought a fair amount of how do we work with Webb to utilize its enormous sensitivity and our high angular resolution and our high spectral sensitivity to go after these core problems in astronomy. So this is something I think the young generation will just come to naturally. Clearly, you have to think about all the tools in your toolkit when you think about the problem you want to solve. So thinking and working collaboratively, but also across nations.

And like most projects of the size of the GMT nowadays, yours is very much an international project. Indeed. It used to be that individual people could actually build their own telescopes. Some of the great discoveries came from European wealthy people, noblemen who built a telescope in their backyard like Herschel and discovered binary stars. You discovered a lot of interesting phenomena. Then it went to where a university could afford to build a telescope or a state, the state of

California, or even a country. But now the financial challenges, the technical challenges, logistics, people really think about global collaborations to build these complex machines. It brings the best minds together, the best mix of talent. And so we have reached out and built a consortium of leading U.S. universities and leading institutions in South Korea and Australia and in Brazil and Chile. And we're certainly looking to others who would like to join us because we need the best ideas, the best talent to bring all this together. You mentioned very briefly another of the great telescopes that hopefully we will see constructed someday,

and that's the TMT, the 30-meter telescope, which, of course, has run into some problems that have nothing to do with astronomy or actually getting it built. And I just wonder if you have any thoughts about that sister project. Right. Well, I agree with you completely that it's a great project and we really want to see it built. I'm confident that it will. It's important for astronomy that there be more eyes on the sky so that all the best ideas can get access to the telescope. As I like to tell people, there's only 365 nights a year. And so you really need more facilities to make the science move faster. It's also important, I think, to cover the full sky, to have telescopes in both hemispheres.

They've got a great project. We wish them nothing but success, and we're confident that they will work through their issues, whether it be in Hawaii or somewhere else. whether it be in Hawaii or somewhere else, and we look forward to seeing them on the sky and literally to working together synergistically with them because there's real capabilities there where they have strengths, we have strengths. I hope we can work together. Pat, I cannot wait, just like all those scientists out there, and I'm sure you yourself, for that first light coming through the giant Magellan telescope and opening up new vistas on the universe. Thanks, Matt. We look forward to seeing you on the mountain at the dedication.

Oh, I'd love to join you there. Thank you for the invitation. Take care. Take care. Patrick McCarthy, interim president of the giant Magellan telescope organization. We spoke at October's meeting of the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Before we get to what's up in the sky, you went to that light sail test last week. How'd it go?

It went very well. So we did a full deployment test of the booms, as well as simulating all the key activities that'll happen in space. And it generally went very well, but we found some glitchy stuff, and that's why we test. So now we're looking into the glitchy stuff, but nothing that was mission critical. So very good, but we came out of it as you do with most tests with lessons learned. More to work on. A little bit more, anyway.

And there's a blog about this by our colleague Jason Davis at Planetary.org. On to the night sky. All right. We've got bright planets. We've got Venus in the evening sky, low in the west. Eh, kind of low. If you look to its upper left, much dimmer Mars looking reddish. And if you look shortly after sunset and have a clear view to the horizon,

you might be able to see Mercury to Venus's lower right. Then Jupiter's now coming up around 2, 2, 3 in the morning in the east. And it'll be high up in the east in the pre-dawn. Also, if you're picking this up right after it comes out, you still got the Geminid meteor shower peaking on the 13th and 14th. But also continues to have increased meteors for a while. Unfortunately, there's also a full moon during the peak. So it makes it kind of tough, but there's still more meteors than usual. On to this week in space history. In 1962, Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to

successfully fly by a planet when it flew by Venus and returned data. Quite a milestone, and that was a big year. It was a big year. We move on to Random Space Fact. Yeah, false set on not my strength. John Glenn, of course, as you've discussed on the program, passed away, had an amazing life, had a whole bunch of stuff that he did. John Glenn orbited the Earth three times during his Mercury flight that made him the first American to orbit the Earth, and 135 times during his space shuttle flight 36 years later as the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. Wow, that's a pretty impressive advancement, better than an order of magnitude. Actually, wow, yeah, almost two orders of magnitude.

Yeah, and now they're doing space station. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I ask you how many Soviet Venera, theoretically including Vega landers, which were basically Venera, but we'll be flexible on that, successfully landed on Venus, approximately. How'd we do, Matt? People had a lot of fun with this one, but the numbers were a little pressed. Maybe they were confused by it. We got a lot of people who said that there were eight successful Venera landings. In fact, that is what we got from Mike Player, who was chosen by Random.org. By the way, check out the Random.org website if you want to read about the history and how they actually generate these random numbers. It's really fascinating.

That's who gave us Mike as this week's possible winner. You said within one or two. Now, he only counted the Venera landings, not the Vega landings. Is eight good enough? It's good enough because my impression is that's what was on the website. Didn't have my caveat about Vega. So I'll take eight or ten or even nine if you included Vega, but weren't so sure that one of those was totally successful. Excellent then. Mike,

in Los Angeles, California, you have won that copy of Extronaut, the game of solar system exploration designed by OSIRIS-REx principled investigator Dante Loretta, a guy who actually fights this battle in real life and has that spacecraft headed out to asteroid Bennu. It was named, the game that is, was named by Good Housekeeping as one of the best board games of 2016. And you can read about it in Amazon. Mike Player, you are also going to get a 200-point iTelescope.net astronomy account from iTelescope, the International Network of Nonprofit Telescopes.

We're going to give out another one of those iTelescope accounts to the winner of this next contest, along with a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a Planetary Radio rubber asteroid. But first, we have a few more comments about the Venera probes. Wojtek in the Czech Republic, we hear from him now and then, you add it all up. It's pretty impressive, the numbers. Total of almost four metric tons of space Venera trash delivered to Venus' surface. And that's not counting crashed orbiters. That is a lot of landings, isn't it?

It is. That was really why I asked the question, because you just lose track, especially since there haven't been any for a long time, that there were about 10 successful landings on Venus. Here's one that I hadn't actually thought of, although we all know this, I guess. Nathan Phillip in Knoxville, Tennessee. Fun fact, of all the hard and soft landings we have made throughout the solar

system, we've only got surface images, images from the surface from five objects. Venus, Mars, Titan, Moon, and Earth. Well, now I'm going to have to think about that. But yeah, we haven't landed very many places, so that makes sense. We've impacted a few others. That's true. Yeah, you could even count Jupiter, couldn't you? We'll close with this from Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate. Eight Venera landers touching down on Venus land, starting with the 7th through the 14th

out of hand. Comet Halley saw the backs of Vegas 1s and 2s based upon the same design. I'll count them, but will bruise? I thought you'd like it. Alright, you ready to move on? Sure am. Back to John Glenn, but a different part of his life. For a time during the Korean War, when he was a combat pilot, John Glenn was the wingman of what famous baseball player? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

I should know this one. I know I have read that name. I can't remember. This is a great question, though. Thank you very much. You have until Tuesday, the 20th of December at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer and that fabulous prize package that we talked about. Thank you, sir. We're done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about scratch paper and what you would scratch it with. Thank you, and good night. Boy, if there's anything I hate, it's paper scratches. No, I'm sorry, paper cuts. That's different. Yeah, it is, isn't it? He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society

who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its highly reflective members. Danielle Gunn is our Associate Producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme,

which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies and Godspeed, John Glenn.