Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Great Week for Space Exploration

Episode Date: January 23, 2006

Andrew Westphal on what's been found in the Stardust Sample Return Capsule and John Spencer on the New Horizons launch and the upcoming Jupiter flyby.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What a week for space exploration. Relive it with us on Planetary Radio. Third stage is go. Roger. T-minus 45 seconds. Is there anything like the hopeful expectation and excitement of a rocket launch? For as long as I can remember, certainly since my early childhood, I have been spellbound by the grand tradition of the countdown.

Last week it was New Horizons providing the thrill as it prepared to depart on the fastest trip ever to the outer solar system, including Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond. T-minus 18, 15 seconds, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 3, 2, 1. We have ignition and liftoff of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on a decade-long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond. 2 plus 15 seconds. Everything continues to look good

as the Atlas V vehicle climbs away from Florida's east coast. The five solid rocket strap-on boosters are burning just fine, sending the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to the very edge of our solar system. John Spencer was there. We'll learn from this member of the New Horizons science team how it felt to watch that launch. He'll also tell us about the data he hopes the spacecraft will collect as it swings around Jupiter, long before it reaches faraway Pluto. And as the New Horizons mission begins, the Stardust Probe is beginning to open its secrets to scientists.

We'll get a report from Andrew Westfall, who has now made his way from the Nevada desert, where we talked to him last week, to the clean room at the Johnson Space Center. Still not enough? Well, there's this welcome news item. After 56 days of careful work by JPL engineers, Mars rover Opportunity is finally on the move again. The details are in Emily Lakdawalla's weblog at planetary.org. Bruce Betts will be along shortly. He'll give us his personal impressions of the scene at the Kennedy Space Center last week,

along with his regular report on what's up in the night sky and a new space trivia contest. And we'll visit with Emily right now as she finds her way among the moons and rings of Saturn. as she finds her way among the moons and rings of Saturn. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers.

A listener asked, How does the Cassini team keep track of where all the rings and moons are for planning all those flybys? The Cassini team has two good reasons to keep track of where the spacecraft is relative to the vast ring system and the 47 known moons. For one thing, Cassini needs to be close to an object to get good views with its cameras. More importantly, though, Cassini needs to avoid the hazards presented by Saturn's rings as it flies through Saturn's ring plane twice each orbit. Cassini always avoids the main ring system, the broad, flat A, B, and C rings. It also stays away from the twisted spiral of the F ring that orbits just

outside the main rings. A bit more difficult to avoid are the G and E rings. The G ring is a very faint puff of material that lies between the main rings and the orbit of Mimas. Although the G ring is faint, the particles in it are large enough to pose a serious hazard to the spacecraft, so Cassini avoids flying through it, though it may sometimes flirt with the edge. The E ring extends from Mimas all the way out to Titan and is impossible for Cassini to avoid as it explores the moons. Fortunately, the E-ring is made of very tiny particles that do not pose a hazard to the spacecraft. So how do Cassini planners know where the moons are?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Blame the weather for the first scrubbed launch of New Horizons last week, and in a bizarre way we can blame the weather for a second day's delay as well. A storm in Baltimore knocked out power to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, site of mission control for the flight to Pluto. Then came the third day and a picture-perfect launch. Among the happy team members watching the Atlas V climb into the sky was planetary scientist John Spencer, a staff scientist at the Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Studies. John was as excited as anyone, partly because he won't have to wait for the spacecraft to reach Pluto

to begin his research. John Spencer, we've been talking about what a great week it has been for space exploration. Your end of it was, of course, the launch that we heard just moments ago on this program, a replay of the launch of New Horizons for Pluto and beyond. program, a replay of the launch of New Horizons for Pluto and beyond. But I take it that you get to be excited about where New Horizons is going to be in just over a year. That's right. Part of our journey to Pluto is to get a gravitational boost from Jupiter along the way. We're very glad we were able to launch this week because that enabled us

to take this shortcut via Jupiter, and that shaves a few years off our journey time. But while we're in the neighborhood, we're going to be doing a lot of observations of Jupiter. We're very excited to, first of all, use this very nice suite of instruments we have to learn something new about the Jupiter system, which we will certainly be able to do, but also it will give us a really nice dress rehearsal where we get to check everything out in a real situation with real targets and put our entire spacecraft through its paces well in advance of getting to Pluto. New Horizons is going to be able to return some data that perhaps we did not get from

Galileo? That's right. There were things that Galileo could not do very well, partly because it had a broken main antenna, which meant its data rate was very low. We will, for instance, be able to do a good survey of the plumes on the volcanic moon Io, these volcanic plumes that can be several hundred kilometers high, that Galileo was never really able to see very well because of the data rate problems and various other issues. So we're looking forward to doing that. We also, our infrared instrument is in some ways better than the Galileo instrument.

So even though we don't come very close to the moons, we will be able to get better data on, for instance, the heat radiation from the volcanoes on the night side of Io, some parts of Io than was possible with Galileo. We'll also look at the spectrum in more detail than was possible with Galileo, and we'll be looking at Europa to see more about what this mysterious dark stuff is on the surface of Europa that we think is maybe salt that's come out of the ocean beneath the surface of Europa, and hopefully that will tell us a bit more about what that

ocean might be made of. And then we have a nice ultraviolet instrument that we'll be looking at, Jupiter's aurorae and the aurorae of Io, which has its own set of aurorae due to the bombardment of its atmosphere by the magnetosphere of Jupiter. So we're really going to be able to do some very nice stuff. Is the trajectory of New Horizons as it shoots around Jupiter pretty advantageous for this study of the moons? It's not perfect. If we were designing the mission to go to Jupiter and not as a free ride to Pluto,

we would have probably gone closer to the moons. We're going a little bit outside the orbit of Callisto, the largest of the big icy moons of Jupiter. But Callisto is not going to be at the point in its orbit where we're going past, so we won't get terribly close to Callisto. But we will still get a pretty darn good view. It will be, for instance, a few times closer than Cassini got to Jupiter when it did its gravity assist on its way to Saturn in 2000.

So we will be able to get more detailed images than Cassini was able to get, for instance. Take us back a couple of days to that launch. Was that one of the more exciting experiences of your life? Oh, absolutely. As you know, we were delayed a couple of days, and we all gathered one day, and we didn't see anything very much. But the day of the actual launch, it was strange. There was a real air of unreality, maybe because we had failed the previous time to get off the ground and when it finally got down to 30 seconds to go 20 seconds to go 10 seconds to go you just said oh my god this is really going to happen and no i still don't believe it and then suddenly there it was

and just this incredibly bright flame i was not expecting the flame to be so bright we were just bowled over not so much by the spectacle of it, though of course it was spectacular, but just by seeing our baby go and going finally to Pluto, and we were just hugging each other and dancing around, and it was something I'll never forget. Big party that night? Right. We'd had a couple of scheduled post-launch parties the previous night, and we still had the party, we had the food, but they were rather desultory.

And then, yeah, this time it was quite a party. Actually, all we had was pizza for food, because it was kind of an improvised last-minute thing, kind of an improvised last-minute thing, but lots of cheering and awards and speeches by Alan Stern and the launch team who would put the spacecraft up there. I bet it was the best pizza you've ever tasted. I'm cheating a little bit because I knew that there was a pretty good party that night because I was reading your weblog entries, your contributions to my colleague Emily Lakdawalla's weblog at planetary.org

and of course folks can go there and look at the past few and go into the archives and take a look at some of your other contributions as New Horizons prepared to lift off and one following it and I hope we'll be hearing more from you well I'll try and keep you posted

it's been fun making these little summaries and sending them off to Emily. Well, congratulations to you, to all of you. Please say hello to Alan. Tell him we look forward to having him back on the show as well. And good luck with this mission that's going to keep all of you busy for many years to come. Thank you. We're excited to be finally on our way.

John Spencer is a staff scientist at the Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Studies. That's in Boulder, Colorado. And a member of the science team, the very happy science team, is New Horizons, heads for Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond. We'll be right back. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report.

It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Remember Andrew Westfall of Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab? Many of you got the same vicarious thrill I did last week when we listened to Andrew's sighting of the Stardust sample return capsule as it streaked across the desert sky. The interstellar dust grains are going to be, that's going to be, oh, oh, oh, wow, there it goes, whoa, hey, hey, hey, hey, oh my God, it's spectacular.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Oh, my God, it's spectacular. There's a bright luminous trail behind it. It's kind of a yellowish color, and it's slewing across the sky. It's about to go behind a cloud. Leaving the frigid Nevada desert, Andrew made his way to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. In white cleanroom garb, he has joined his Stardust colleagues as they begin to examine the interplanetary and interstellar treasures returned to Earth by the probe. On one side, the aerogel captured bits of comet Vilt 2, while the other stored a handful of infinitesimal fragments of another sort,

interstellar matter that people around the world will help to find through the Stardust at Home project. At least Andrew hopes the fragments are there, since they are far too small to see with the naked eye. I called him while he was taking a break from long sessions in the clean room. So, Andrew, life is good. Oh, it's fantastic. You know, we opened up the canister on Tuesday, and the first view actually was not of the cometary side of the collector, but it was of the interstellar side. Your side.

Of course, it's what we're going to be scanning for the Stardust at Home project. It was instantly obvious that everything was in great shape. There were no missing tiles, no broken tiles. I mean, it looked just like when it took off. Wow. It didn't look like it had been in space for seven years. So, you know, it's amazing. And at first glance, some people looked at it and said,

I don't see any tracks. And, oh, no. But my reaction was, we don't see any tracks. That's great. Yeah. Because we didn't want to see any tracks. We knew that the interstellar tracks would be invisible, except under a microscope.

And if we had seen any big tracks, that might have been bad news, because it would mean that we had seen any big tracks, that might have been bad news, because it would mean that we had some other source of particle tracks that might have swamped us. Which, in your case, would be contamination on that side. That's right. That's right. So we were just incredibly excited, and then later in the day, the whole thing was put up on a vertical stand so that people could see the cometary side.

For the next two or three hours. People were just bouncing off the walls like they were. They were dancing around and just incredibly excited. Of course, I was too. And the huge surprise was that there are some huge impacts in the commentary side. Bigger than expected? Much bigger than expected, yeah. You know, Don Brownlee on that morning, Tuesday morning, before we opened the thing up,

said, you know, we shouldn't be too disappointed if we don't see anything because these tracks may be really small and we won't be able to see them, even on the commentary side. And really don't be too disappointed. In fact, contain your disappointment for a few days. But, of course, as soon as it was opened up, you know, you could see from several feet away that there were these big, big particle impacts. And that was a huge surprise. I hope Don was one of those that was bouncing off the walls after trying to lower your expectations.

Well, he was, of course. In his case, he was pretty close to the collector, so he couldn't bounce too much. So what's happening now? So what's happening now is for the last few days, we've really been, all of us, peering at the cells on the cometary side, looking at the various tracks. We got lucky, actually. You wouldn't think that this doesn't sound very lucky, actually, but it really was.

It turned out that a few flakes of the tiles on the cometary side fell off into the spacecraft capsule. And that's actually really convenient. Nature or engineers or somebody, anyway, conspired to give us these little flakes for us to look at. We didn't even have to extract anything from the tray. So several of us, Christopher Sneed and Hopi Shee and Keiko Nakamura and I, have been looking at these tracks, and under high magnification, they are spectacular. All kinds of different morphologies.

It's going to be really fun to figure out what's going on with these things. Many of them are not like things we've seen before. It's really going to be a lot of fun, and what we were doing today as a science team was picking out two tiles to extract from the tray, to harvest, lot of fun. And what we were doing today as a science team was picking out two tiles to extract from the tray to harvest, as we say. And so those are going to be coming out first thing in the morning. So we're really excited. And as soon as those come out, then we'll be able to see what's in an entire tile and see things much better. It's hard to see things very well when they're still in the tray. But once we have them out, then we can image the tracks that are in

them much better. It's going to be a lot of fun. So it's fair to say then that they're still in the tray, but once we have them out, then we can image the tracks that are in them much better. It's going to be a lot of fun. So it's fair to say, then, that we're just at the beginning of what will probably be years of work. Yeah, that's right. You know, I think we're going to be getting some early science results that are going to be very interesting. This is really, I mean, it's too early, really, to say yet what we're going to find, because

we're just starting on this, taking the first baby steps. There's this six-month preliminary examination period that started when the capsule landed. There are scientists all over the world who are going to be working on this intensively. And as I think it was Lindsay Keller said today, that this is kind of the P.E. for the P.E., that is preliminary examination for the preliminary examination period, trying to figure out how we even approach this problem for the next few months. But, you know, this really is, I think, going to be something that is something for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, so we have to be very careful about preserving it.

I'm actually the chair of the allocation committee for SARDUST after the preliminary examination period. I've thought a lot about this, and so we've got to be careful about making sure that we preserve samples as much as we can, but at the same time, make sure that we get samples to everybody who

is qualified, who can really analyze them. So it's the kind of delicate dance we're going to be playing. Sh shades of Apollo. That's exactly right. Exactly right. That's right. And, you know, who would have thought that so long after Apollo, first of all, that we wouldn't have gone back to the moon yet and gotten new samples.

And so that's a cautionary tale, I think, that we need to be conservative with these. But on the other hand, it's the same kind of thing that only, as I remember, something like 10% of the Apollo samples have ever been looked at in any detail. And most of them are still available for study so many years later. So we're going to have to see how much we have in the stardust, and that's going to influence, of course, how we approach this. So it's really just still the beginning of the adventure. Let me ask you what is probably an unfair question.

Can you even make a guess in the minute or so that we have left at when you're going to start parceling out those little movies for Stardust at Home? Well, I hope that we're going to be able to start scanning the interstellar tray with the automated microscope within the next two weeks. And if we can do that, and I don't see any reason right now why we can't, then I'm expecting that we'll be starting to ask people to help us with searching for the interstellar dust grains in March. Terrific. And so about a month later.

So I think that's about the right time to go. Andrew, we better leave you. I think you've gone someplace to relax a little bit. Where are you now? Oh, I'm on a pier near Johnson Space Center on Nassau Bay, and I'm just decompressing a little bit after spending so much time in the clean room today. And I've got my fiddle, and I'm just going to play fiddle for a while. And, ladies and gentlemen, I did ask him to play the fiddle, but he's not ready.

Maybe if we let him rehearse a little bit more. Andrew, ladies and gentlemen, I did ask him to play the fiddle, but he's not ready. Maybe if we let him rehearse a little bit more. Andrew, maybe the next time we have you on. Maybe next time. Thanks very much, Andrew. I wouldn't want to torture your listeners. Oh, I do a pretty good job of that on my own. Andrew Westfall, thanks again very much for spending a few more minutes with us on Planetary Radio.

Thank you, Matt. Andrew Westfall of UC Berkeley's Space Science Lab and Stardust team member. By the way, Andrew told me more than 80,000 people have already signed up for the Stardust at Home project. You can learn how to join the hunt for interstellar dust particles at planetary.org. I'll be back with Bruce Betts right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. How does the Cassini team know so far in advance where the moons are going to be to plan Cassini's flybys? It's just good old-fashioned mechanics. The orbits of Cassini's major moons and most of the minor ones are very well known and described in detail with mathematical equations.

These equations can be used to generate enormous tables of data that Cassini planners use to time and refine the spacecraft's encounters with the moons. The orbital path is tweaked in an iterative process to bring Cassini as close as possible to moons in encounters called targeted flybys. Once the targeted flybys are fixed in the orbital plan, the tables are examined again for fortuitous close encounters with other moons. Although generally not as close as the planned targeted flybys, these other encounters, called non-targeted flybys, produce important data sets that slowly fill out global maps of all of Saturn's moons.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio with Bruce Batts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And you're on location again. I am indeed. But not at the Kennedy Space Center, where we had hoped you might be to tell us,

actually narrate the launch for us of New Horizons. No, I decided I should leave after the first couple of launch, a couple of days of launch times didn't work out. I figured I should leave so they'd feel comfortable launching. And sure enough, they made it the next day. They sure did. Well, tell me, why were you, and I know a couple of other people were out there, in a Planetary Society entourage? We had myself and then Bill Nye, our vice president, and Neil Tyson, our chairman of the board.

We're all attending the New Horizons launch. It's a mission that the Planetary Society has been involved with for a very long time, and our membership doing grassroots efforts to save it from near extinction multiple times. And it's something we take a lot of interest and pride in, and we also have some active projects going along in New Horizons. So we were all down there to check it out, and we all didn't see the launch. Well, successful effort, though, and that's what really counts, I guess. Tied to the New Horizons launch, the Planetary Society has got a new thing that you can enter.

You can find out more at planetary.org to enter your submission for the Pluto time capsule, a digital time capsule that we are collecting. Because this New Horizons mission, as you know, will take nine years to get to Pluto. So the concept here is you submit an image of something on Earth 2006 that you think is likely to change over the next nine years. We lock it up in a digital time capsule. And then in 2015, we take a look back at Earth 2006. Find out more at planetary.org.

Well, we've got cool planets. You can check out Mars after sunset, high in the south, continues to fade, but still looking like a bright orangish star. You've got Saturn rising right around sunset. It's right about at opposition. And so rises right about sunset, sets right around sunrise. It'll be rising in the east, of course. And later in the evening, you can get a very nice telescope view, look for those rings. And then in the pre-dawn sky, the brightest star-like object up there is going to be Jupiter, looking like a very, very bright object high in the east or close to overhead.

So those are the fun objects to look for in the night sky. Moving on to this week in space history, it is the week where we reflect on the fallen heroes of the American space program, as it is the, hard to believe, but it is the 20th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle disaster. 20 years? Good Lord Challenger shuttle disaster. 20 years? Good Lord. Uh-huh. And going back, pushing, not quite, but pushing 40 years on the Apollo 1 fire.

And then almost making it into the same week will be the Columbia accident. So a very bad week or a little bit over in American space history. But look back and remember right at the moment. So moving on to more less solemn notes, we move on to... Random Space Fact! You know, at Disneyland Space Mountain, there's not a single real space image used. Is that true? I know. Shocking.

You're giving hints to your current location, aren't you? Shocking, but true. Which, you know, I don't know. It hampers that happiest place on Earth thing for me. But I guess they say on Earth, not in the solar system. So, anyway, I'm sorry. I just had to move some large metal objects. Hang on.

I can hear them moving. Okay, good. Moving right along. Yes, right this way, ma'am. Right this way. Right there. Yes. Okay.

Moving on to our trivia contest. What are you, moonlighting? Well, you know, it pays the bills. Alright, moving right along. Moving right along to our trivia contest, of which we had none the last time around. Hang on, I need to empty the trash.

Okay. We had none in the show that was corresponding this week because we ran a certified used show a couple weeks ago. But we do have a trivia question for you for next time around, and that involves Saturn. Saturn and its moons. Right about now, two of Saturn's moons, doing a strange dance they do, are trading orbits, as odd as that sounds.

About every four years, they switch orbits. They grow closer and then farther apart. One becomes the inner moon, the other becomes farther out. What are the names of those two moons that switch orbits around? And to enter this, you can go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to email us your answer. And if you would, go ahead and tell us where you hear us, where do you listen to us. We're on about 50 stations out there right now, and we're curious where all people are listening to us.

And be sure to mail that entry to us by 2 p.m. Pacific time, Monday, the 30th of January. January 30, 2 p.m. Pacific. And, you know, I think we should once again give away another one of our spectacular new Explorer's Guide to Mars posters. So why don't we make that the prize this time around? That's fine by me. Do you have any other news for us before we say goodnight? Not really. No.

But I will tell everyone to go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about ducks. Thank you, and goodnight. He's Bruce Betts. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here on What's Up. And, Bruce, after the successful launch of New Horizons and the successful return and cracking open of the Stardust Sample Return Capsule, where do you go?

After those things happen, Matt, I'm going to Disneyland. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. As always, we welcome your comments and questions. Write to planetaryradio at planetary.org. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.