Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Mars Mission Begins, a Comet Exits, and the Future of Planetary Science

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

The United Arab Emirates Hope spacecraft has begun its journey to Mars. We’ll join a virtual launch party attended by mission leaders, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, National Air and Space Museum director Ellen Stofan and others. Comet NEOWISE is still putting on a show! Learn more about it from NEOWISE principal investigator Amy Mainzer, NASA planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson and JPL scientist Emily Kramer. Our own Casey Dreier provides an overview of three far-sighted white papers submitted as part of the new planetary science decadal survey. Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0722-2020-hope-mission-comet-neowise-white-papers.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio. With that liftoff from Japan, a new hope began its journey to Mars. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. What a week it was for space fans. We'll celebrate the successful launch of the United Arab Emirates mission to the red planet with members of the HOPE team, NASA Administrator Bridenstine, George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic, Ellen Stofan of the National Air and Space Museum, and others. Then we'll hear from

leaders of the mission that discovered Comet NEOWISE, including NEOWISE Principal Investigator Amy Meinzer and NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. Casey Dreyer also had a big week. The Planetary Society's Senior Space Policy Advisor submitted three inspiring papers to the National Academy's Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Casey will be here to tell us about them. And we've got Bruce Batts waiting for us with even more about how to see that comet and the other wonders lingering above us. Here are just two headlines from the July 17 edition of The Downlink, brought to you each week by the Planetary Society.

Remember that dark green substance on the moon's far side that was inaccurately described as gel-like? Turns out it's probably just glassy rock, but this find by China's U-22 rover is still intriguing. Apollo astronauts found the same sort of deposit on the near side. It might have been formed in the heat of a volcanic eruption or a meteor impact. And by the way, by the time you hear this, it's possible that China's ambitious Mars mission, Tianwen-1, may be on its way to Fourth Rock. Speaking of the Moon and Mars, NASA has just relaxed planetary protection requirements for both bodies.

The agency feared the old standards might have prevented eventual human exploration of the red planet. You can read more at planetary.org slash downlink, where you'll also enjoy a beautiful image of Jupiter's moon Europa captured years ago by Voyager 2. It was Sunday afternoon, July 19th, here on the California coast. I excused myself from my wife's socially distant birthday celebration so that I could join a different sort of party. The online event began about an hour before that launch of an H-2 rocket from the coast of Japan.

His Excellency Yusuf Al-Otaiba, United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the United States, opened the webcast. Good afternoon from Washington. For those of you in the U.S., thank you for joining us on a Sunday afternoon. And thanks to all our friends watching from the UAE and around the world at this very late hour. Today, if all goes well, the UAE will become the first Arab country to launch an interplanetary spacecraft. This day has been years in the making. Many of you are likely familiar with President John F. Kennedy's moonshot speech. That speech inspired the American people to invest in space exploration and ultimately land the first humans on the moon.

In 2014, we announced our own moonshot initiative. Our leadership challenged Emirati scientists and engineers to build a space probe and launch it into orbit around Mars in time for our 50th anniversary. It makes me so proud to see friends and colleagues gathered here today, six years later, to watch that dream become reality. Also awaiting the launch of HOPE was NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Here's some of what he had to say. Long before I was the NASA Administrator, even when I was in the House of Representatives, and you guys came to me and you said, hey, look, we have this big ambition. We just started a new space agency as the United Arab Emirates, and we're in fact going to go to Mars. And I remember

thinking, wow, that's a stretch. And you gave me the timeline. and I remember thinking wow that's that's a stretch and you gave me the timeline and I I remember thinking that this is gonna be a very very difficult challenge and and I don't know that at the time I fully believed that we would be in this moment right now so I just want to say to start congratulations it has been I know not always easy. There's always challenges. This is spaceflight. But what an amazing job the United Arab Emirates has done putting together this mission and getting to this point. We've already seen the United Arab Emirates launch its own domestically produced satellite that is providing remote sensing and imagery on the Earth to understand our changing environment, KhalifaSat, which of course has been a great contributor

to our understanding of our own planet. You've already had your first astronaut on the International Space Station. You've got plans for more astronauts on the International Space Station. The United States of America is very, very excited about having another partner in human spaceflight And of course our big project is to go to the moon the United Arab Emirates

Of course has its own lunar mission that it's launching in 2022 Which is which is going to be amazing? So I think this is a great a great moment not just for the United Arab Emirates But for the United States of America. And in fact, for all of the international partners that are involved in exploring space and sharing information. All of us can do more when we work together

and the United Arab Emirates is a shining example of what can be done when we do in fact work together. So we're grateful for the partnership. We look forward to the launch. Space is one of those areas that unites people. You know, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate and American politics, there's sometimes, no surprise here, there's sometimes divisions. But when it comes to space exploration, it unites people. Republicans and Democrats alike come together and say we need to explore space We need to get the science and the data. They say we need to make discoveries and we need to explore

And it doesn't just bring together parties within the United States It brings together nations of the world in a very unique way I really believe space is an amazing tool of diplomacy. You know, the relationship between Russia and the United States, you know, it's not a secret that it is very strained here terrestrially. But here in November, just a few months, we're gonna celebrate 20 years of living

and working together in space on the International Space Station. That's an amazing accomplishment. And that goes back to 1975. 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz project, where we had Russians and Americans working together in space for the first time. Then the Shuttle-Mir project,

and now the International Space Station project. So look, when it comes to exploration and discovery, it transcends boundaries, and it enables people to work together in ways that oftentimes is not easy. It keeps open a channel of communication. So I really do believe it is an amazing tool of diplomacy for all nations. Administrator Bridenstine was followed by Mike Gold, Acting Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations at NASA.

Let me apologize in advance. This is where I offend all of the engineers. While the technical challenges that we face are certainly important, I believe that the policy, the legal frameworks are of equal importance to the technology. And while I'm extremely excited about the HOPE launch, and again, congratulations on

everything that you and the team have done, one of the launches that I was most excited about was the launch of the United Arab Emirates into the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. You sit next to us. Due to alphabetical order, the UAE and the United States are literally next to each other, which is only appropriate given that we are so close together on policy. New space agencies like yours, the emerging space agencies, it's so important that we come together with the traditional space agencies to create a safe, peaceful, and prosperous world for all of us.

By tackling those policy issues, that's how we do so. UAE has been an incredible partner, not only to us but the entire world. It's what we're trying to accomplish with the Artemis Accords, looking at transparency, safety, interoperability, the public release of scientific data. It's all so important. UAE has been a tremendous partner already there, and we look forward to continuing that policy leadership together into the future. Your daughter, my son, and children from all throughout the world will one day be standing on Mars together to create

that peaceful and prosperous future for all of us. Mike Gold of NASA. Remember, this was all before the successful launch, so you can understand the apprehension in the voice of Sara Al-Amiri. Sara chairs the United Arab Emirates Council of Scientists and is Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, but she's also science lead for what is formally known as the EMM, the Emirates Mars Mission. And on August 1st, she will become president of the UAE Space Agency. A collection of mixed feelings from being terrified to being excited to apprehensive to, I just can't explain the multitude of emotions at the moment, especially reflecting on the large chunk that this has taken from our life. So everyone that has been on the mission, including our partners,

this has been our every living, breathing moment. It has been part of our household, part of our families, part of our workplaces constantly. You get to a point in the mission where there's no such thing as day and night and work days and work weeks and so on. I think it's interesting in retrospect to see if this is going to create a void after launch, especially if the spacecraft is not here and it's on its journey. And let's see what the journey has in store for us.

The webinar was ably moderated by Talal Al-Khaisi of the UAE Space Agency. I first met Talal when he was assigned to the UAE Embassy in Washington. We were closing in on the launch when Talal introduced two more of the EMM Hope Mission team members. I'd like to now turn to two young engineers who actually worked on the project and have spent quite some time in Colorado with our partners, our knowledge partners in the University of Colorado in Boulder. Both Hiamalouchi, who is actually in Japan right now, as you can see, she's sideways on the screen, and she's wearing the Emirates Mars, there you go, and Houd El-Mazmi, who's here with us in Abu Dhabi. Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences on the project, maybe starting with you, Hiyam?

Greetings, everyone. So my name is Hiyam El-Belouchi. I am an assembly integration and testing engineer at the UAE Space Agency. And I had the pleasure to work on the Emirates Mars probe. And it was my first ever space mission. I would like to touch on the point that space is a collaborative work. The collaboration between the UAE Space Agency and the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, as also Japan, really enabled this mission to happen. Knowledge transfer that I got from this mission is just amazing.

Building blocks for economic diversification, which is, you know, like the main objective here. So thank you so much. I'm very excited for the launch. My name is Ferdinand Mazmi. I'm a space science engineer at the UAE Space Agency, and I'm part of the Emirates Mars Mission Science Team. I worked on the science closure of the mission, part of the science closure. I also got to work in Colorado. I got to do my master's while working.

So I got to experience American culture again after my undergrad experience. That was nice. And it was it was a great way for me to connect with scientists from all over the world through this experience. And I wouldn't have been able to do this without the Emirates Mars mission. able to do this without the Emirates Mars mission. I'd like to now turn to a very good friend of the UAE, Mr. George Whitesides, who was the CEO of Virgin Galactic until a few days ago when he now has the coolest name and the coolest title in the space industry, the chief space officer of Virgin Galactic,

to share his experience in dealing with the UAE through the partnership Virgin Galactic and Mubadala Investment Company have. George? Hi Talal and thank you for having us with you and everyone in the UAE space effort. It's such a great honor to be with you all and such an exciting moment. Yes, so our relationship with UAE has been going on for now over a decade when we started a partnership around Virgin Galactic and its aspirations. And it's just been such an incredible pleasure and honestly a joy to watch the growth of the UAE space sector as you pursue a very rational and logical series of steps to increase capacity within the country and to do real things, as the administrator and Mike Gold said, to really do

a very well-planned agenda of real space activity. Our relationship on the Virgin Galactic side relates to potential growth of our business someday to the UAE, and there has been a spaceport or potential spaceport location identified in the UAE, which has all the right parameters for a potential operation, as well as now the new space legal framework that the UAE has created, which enables those activities. And so that's what I mean about putting the blocks in place to really pursue a quite diverse range of activities from science as today to human spaceflight and educational capacity building. It's just been a joy to watch the growth and to be, you know,

a small part of that story has been terrific. And we're grateful to you to all for the role you play as a diplomat within the space community to connect us all to the different things that UAE is working on. I'll close our coverage of the beginning of the EMM Hope Mission with a historical perspective from an old friend of Planetary Radio. Ellen Stofan leads the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The planetary scientist is also a former chief scientist for NASA. For me, the ambassador touched on it in the beginning. This, you know, this whole program, and I've known Talal for now quite a number of years and really watched this probe come to life. And it reminds me of another country 50-some years ago now that in eight and a half years made it from basically no space agency at all to sending people to the moon. And that spirit of Apollo is what I have really watched happening in the UAE. And they will get the same results that we got from Apollo,

inspiring a generation to go out and do the impossible. When you consider the people like Jeff Bezos, for example, who were inspired by Apollo, that's what's going to be happening in the UAE. Every school child is going to be watching Hope and saying, I want to be that first person to step on Mars. As you heard, if all goes well, hope will be inserted into its orbit above Mars in February of 2021. The same month, we'll see the arrival of China's Tianwen-1 and the Perseverance rover

from NASA. What? You still haven't seen Comet NEOWISE? Apologies to our many Southern Hemisphere listeners who don't have this surprising visitor in the sky. As you'll hear when we talk with Bruce, I was finally able to see the comet a few days ago. It's called NEOWISE because it was discovered by that mission, and that mission is led by Principal Investigator Amy Meinzer. Amy has moved from the Jet Propulsion Lab to the University of Arizona, where she is a professor in the school's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Here are excerpts from her participation in a NASA teleconference just days ago. This object was spotted in late March. On March 27th, we saw a series of images of it,

and it was immediately obvious that it was pretty likely that this would be a comet based on the sort of extended emission, the sort of fuzz that we saw surrounding the point-like nucleus of the comet as it moved across the sky against the background stars. But when we first discovered these objects, we know so very little about them. We just see that there's something moving. In this case, we were able to call some friends who were able to contribute follow-up observations of the comet and determined that its orbit would actually take it fairly close to the sun, which immediately becomes pretty exciting for us because when something that's been frozen in deep space for a really long time gets close to the sun, a lot of exciting things can happen.

Amy Meinzer was joined in the telecom by her NEOWISE mission colleague, Emily Kramer. Emily is a co-investigator based at NASA JPL. The comet is about three miles or five kilometers in diameter, which is a reasonably large but roughly average-sized comet. We're getting these spectacular images showing the comet's broad dust tail and ion trail in some cases as well. We should be able to see this comet for another few weeks or so, depending on how bright it stays. Comets are notoriously difficult to predict what's going to happen to them. We're all quite excited to see how this comet progresses.

Because Comet NEOWISE is so bright, we're able to see it a lot more clearly than we do for many other comets. We're able to see it with a lot of different telescopes in different areas. And we're able to use different kinds of observations. We're able to do spectroscopy as well as what we call photometry, which is measuring how bright an object is. We're also able to look at what we call morphology, which means the shape. So comet tails tend to have a different shape as they move around away from the sun. So by studying this nice, bright tail, we'll be able to get a better idea of what's going on in the comet's tail and understand the physics of comets. I would add on to that, too, that one of the reasons we study comets like

this one and why this one is so appreciated because it is so bright is that we really would like to know a lot more about their composition as well as their internal structure and how crumbly they are. We care about this because in the extremely unlikely event that we would find a comet that is headed our way, we would like to know something about its structure and composition so we have a better idea of how to push it out of the way. One of the things we're interested in learning is sort of how crumbly or how strong the comet is on the inside.

Is it fragmented on the inside? Does it break apart more easily when it gets heated up? So one of the things we'll be studying as we look at the dust signature from the object is the sizes of the particles that are coming off of its surface, and can we use that to understand the total mass of the object, as well as how fast it's moving that mass by crumbling apart as it's being heated. A few of us got to ask questions during the comet NEOWISE telecom. I asked Emily Kramer if the up-close-and-personal observations of comet 67P by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft

have affected what we look for from a distance as other comets pass by. It totally has reshaped our understanding of comets when we look them from a distance. One of the really fascinating things that we discovered from the Rosetta mission is that many comets have what we call micro outbursts, where they just let off a little bit of extra puff of activity every now and then. When we're observing from the ground, we might miss these if we're not looking closely for them. Most of the time for comets, they're fairly quiescent. They don't do anything particularly interesting. They get brighter.

They get dimmer. Sometimes they let off a bit of a puff of extra, a fair bit of extra activity. But Rosetta has showed us that these smaller puffs happen pretty frequently. And so we're now able to see that. We're tracking these objects more closely, and we're seeing a wider variety of activities than we had seen before. Also in the telecom was another old friend of our show. Lindley Johnson has led NASA's Planetary Defense Office for years

and has the great title of Planetary Defense Officer. I asked Lindley about the status of plans for years and has the great title of Planetary Defense Officer. I asked Lindley about the status of plans for a dedicated space-based infrared telescope that will search for and characterize near-Earth objects, those asteroids and comets that might threaten our planet. Thanks for the question, Matt. We do have funding now in our Planetary Defense Program budget for a startup of a new space-based infrared telescope, a mission that we are calling the Near-Earth Object Surveillance

Mission. We have funding this year, Congress designated for startup work on instrument development of about $35 million. And there is funding in fiscal year 21 as well, proposed for 21. Of course, the budget for 21 is still with Congress for appropriation. So we are hoping that their negotiations turn out well and we'll continue to have funding available. I closed out my questions for all three of the telecom guests by asking if they had seen Comet NEOWISE with their own eyes. Yes, it's actually been a really big treat. I actually just went and looked at it a couple nights ago.

And it was very low on the horizon, but I spotted it without binoculars. I was able to see it. It's really cool. I have to admit, it's really, really fun to see something that, you know, we see in a space telescope, right? And it looks like fuzzy dots when we first see it, of course. But there's really nothing quite like being able to see it with your own eyes and know that there really is something there. You know, it's very tangible. And that's pretty exciting.

Plus, it's just beautiful. It's very tangible, and that's pretty exciting. Plus, it's just beautiful. It's really fun to look at something like that. I've gotten to go see it a couple times in the morning when it was visible last week. The first one was just from right near Pasadena. We had a fantastic view of it rising up over the mountains. It gave me chills to see that, knowing that our space telescopes discovered that and that there is this object in space that we helped to find.

It was really very exciting. I'm waiting for the cloudy skies down here in Florida to clear in the evening. The last couple of evenings, we've had a big cloud bake of thunderstorms in that part of the sky. So I've got my fingers crossed that here in the next week we'll have clear skies and I'll be able to see it off my front deck here in Florida. NASA's Lindley Johnson joined by NEOWISE Principal Investigator Amy Meinzer and NEOWISE Co-Investigator Emily Kramer for a conversation about comet NEOWISE. A brief break and then I'll return with Casey Dreyer. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core

of our existence, and the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal. To know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us.

Did you hear Alan Stern's latest planetary radio appearance a couple of weeks ago? And you may remember Alan's mention of a paper he was working on. The deadline for submitting that paper was Wednesday, July 15th. My colleague Casey Dreyer was working toward the same drop dead. As you know, Casey is our Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate at the Planetary Society. He also joins me to co-host our monthly Space Policy Edition episodes. I was pretty sure when I read them that you'd also find these papers fascinating, so I invited Casey to join us for an overview.

Casey, welcome back to the show. This is great timing for us to talk about this because we're all about what a huge week last week was, and it was a big week for you too. Count them, three papers that needed to be submitted. First of all, remind us of what the Decadal Survey process is all about and why you were a part of it? The Decadal Survey is kind of a shorthand for this once every 10 years, right, Decadal, 10 years process that NASA kind of requests from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, this kind of independent body in the United States, whose job it is to give scientific advice to government. United States, whose job it is to give scientific advice to government. The decadal survey process is done for every one of NASA's four major science divisions, planetary science, astrophysics, planetary science, and heliophysics. The planetary science decadal survey then that just formally began in March, has the goal of delivering a final paper by the end of 2021 or early 2022. So it's a long

process. The one that we're in now was a very important report that was provided back in 2011. And it basically sets the priority of the entire field. It's meant to be a consensus document. And you know, it's never perfect. But the idea is that the scientific community says in the next 10 years, these are the biggest science questions that we could pursue in planetary science. And then these are the missions that can help us answer those questions. And it helps NASA, it helps the Congress, and helps advocacy organizations like the Planetary Society and others to all kind of get on the same page. Someone really nicely referred this to as the sword and shield of planetary science. The sword in the sense that we can use it to rally behind and like advance and get new

missions like the Europa Clipper mission was a good example of this in the last decadal survey and shield and that we can rally in defense in case budget cuts happen to say these are the most important priorities. These have to happen in the next decade to advance the science. So it's a very impactful and very widely respected process and report. It's technically non-binding, so NASA doesn't have to follow the recommendations. But again, the heft and the weight and the value that everyone places upon it, that is what gives it the inherent kind of respectability and influence

that it has. My understanding is that a lot of submissions as part of the decadal survey process promote specific planetary science missions. In fact, we recently heard about one of these, an argument for a Pluto orbiter that came from Alan Stern and a team he put together just a couple of weeks ago. These three papers that we're going to talk about, you really are doing something very different with these, it seems. Yeah. So as part of the decadal process, one aspect of it is to take community input. And they do this in the form of these formal paper submissions. And so we just had a deadline in July for science-focused papers to promote various individuals' priority sciences and say, you know, make this argument, why is this science really important for the next 10 years? They also have papers for specific missions

to achieve those science goals, and then also broader state of the field input, just kind of general ideas. And the idea is that the committee that writes this final report for the next decadal survey reads through all of these papers and tries to represent or get a good sampling of what the community is feeling about these things. So for the Planetary Society, right, we're not, we're a pro-science organization, but we're not a scientific organization, right? I think Bruce is the only person among us who has a PhD in science. Emily has her master's in planetary science. But the organization itself wants to support the scientific community. So our position that we submitted to the Decadal Survey, we

submitted two official papers on behalf of the society, signed by the board of directors. And they stepped back a little bit from individual missions and tried to make a case about large themes, things that can help set that organizing principle for how do you prioritize from all of these incredible things we can do exploring the solar system, what ways can you try to prioritize these options to maximally return on excitement, potentially revolutionary science, to the basic survival of the human species. That's what the society wanted to contribute was some of the submitting these ideas and thoughts and language to help these committees put together and ultimately, hopefully influence

the final outcome of the report to prioritize these aspects of space exploration that the society and its members really value. Well, let's tackle the first of these papers and themes that you took on, the search for life as a guidepost to scientific revolution, which you are lead author of, along with our CEO, Bill Nye. And significantly, this is co-signed, as is the next paper, by the society's entire board of directors. You point way back to the beginnings of the scientific revolution and say that it largely began with the application of physics beyond Earth and that that's been followed by the

application of chemistry and geology. And am I right in saying that basically you're saying it's now time for biology to take this leap? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I right in saying that basically you're saying it's now time for biology to take this leap? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at the trend, right, which, you know, past results don't guarantee future returns. But if you look at the trend, all of science is this realization that Carl Sagan called them the great demotions of humanity, right? Where we used to think we were the big shot, the whole universe revolved around us. And then we realized, nope, no, we're actually just revolving around the sun. And oh, well, the sun's now revolving around the center of the Milky Way. And oh,

there's no center to the universe and so forth. The idea that's kind of extending this trend, and this is a formulation I always enjoyed from Kevin Hand, who you've had on the show, this formulation that, you know, we've learned in the course of scientific history, who you've had on the show, this formulation that, you know, we've learned in the course of scientific history that what we defined on Earth, what we discovered around us was actually laws that were universal. So physics, motions of things in the sky, the discovery of chemistry, right? The fact that there are these chemical molecules floating around in space that through spectroscopy we can discover and see how those form and what they're doing out there. And then further, the discovery of geology, right, the

motions of things on terrestrial planets, or the alterations that happened to them, when exposed to the surface, was confirmed by sending planetary probes throughout the mid 20th century. And so if you kind of take that trend line, right? Well, everything else seems to apply out there in addition to here on Earth. And that big remaining question, the one science that we only have this data point of one for is biology. Everything we've learned about the universe suggests that there's nothing special in terms of why biology exists on the earth. And so there's a good chance that it's somewhere else out there. And that is functionally what we're arguing in this paper amounts to a scientific revolution waiting to happen. Everything we understand about biology, we're limited to the types of chemistry and structures and processes, metabolisms that

exist from this one common descendant from an ancient, ancient ancestor here on Earth. Now, is that a common form of these convergent factors in terms of evolution? Or if we discover living life somewhere else in the solar system, close enough in the sense that we could analyze it and understand it, would that give us fundamental insights into new ways to approach biology? And we kind of game this out. What if, you know, the maximal beneficial potential for this would be, oh, we understand biology and this opens up this whole new way of making medicines and apply biology and it can really fundamentally reduce human suffering. Maybe. And maybe there's nothing out there. Or maybe there's something out there, but it's not very interesting, ultimately. Either way,

the total outcome, the total potential value is so huge, weighted towards that maximal potential, value is so huge, weighted towards that maximal potential, that even the low likelihood of that incredible benefit should compel us to pursue that incredible benefit if it's there. We should give ourselves the chance to discover this, all things being equal. And that's the kind of the core of this paper, is that the search for life, and unlike a lot of other areas of science in which scientific revolution kind of happens unexpectedly, right, through some fundamental breakthrough or new theory, the search for life, it's a guidepost. It tells us how to do it. Nothing fundamentally new has to happen for us to seriously look for life in our solar system and in solar systems beyond. And that means we actually, that's where the guidepost, it's saying, here, go this way. If it's there, there could be something fundamentally revolutionary to our understanding of the cosmos. And here's how to do it. And very few opportunities in science give us that. I like this line, sort of the central line that

you have here, the search for life should be the unifying goal in the coming decadal survey. You point to previous so-called discontinuities in scientific development, these big jumps. And I mean, if you're looking at steady progress of science, suddenly there is this discontinuity. And you point toward the potential for this to happen in exobiology seems to be what you're talking about here. Do I have this right? Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, because again, we have this data point of one, right? The n equals one problem in terms of how we formulate our understanding of the laws of

biology. We don't have a huge range to use that. So what are we missing beyond the fact maybe there's this weird quirks of biology that happen that are conditional to Earth? So if we double that, if we N equals two, we suddenly have a huge amount of new information. And that's that discontinuity. You know, and we made this kind of obviously very simplified graph,

but just a way to think about it, where you have this kind of process of day in and day out science on these various fields. And you know, we've been fortunate in humanity in the last few hundred years to have relatively steady growth of knowledge about the world around us, the natural world through the application of science. Occasionally, yeah, when you find something like if you found life, that wouldn't be this gradual accumulation of new knowledge, it would be a jump. That's where the discontinuity happens. It's like a step function in our scientific understanding of biology in the cosmos.

That's really only possible through the pursuit of planetary science. Because in order to fully get the value from that, to fully get the amount of knowledge from that, you have to be able to effectively eventually bring it back to Earth or near Earth to study. So you can do in situ stuff, but ultimately you have to have very good sample return and very detailed studies of this, which is impossible with exoplanets and things just beyond Earth

because we just can't get to them. And so, you know, we have these habitable environments that we know of, right? They're just begging us to explore them with Europa and Enceladus and the ancient aspects of Mars and subsurface of Mars. You know, we might as well look. And that's where we say, you know, for the decadal committee, not only we believe we're compelled to pursue this based on that potential, however unlikely outcome, of just

massive societal benefit or just massive increases in knowledge. But it's a very useful way to organize the exploratory structure because the search for life is just so cross-cutting. There's so many different aspects of science involved in it. That's just a very useful way to organize the whole program with this big pursuit that we also note resonates with people. People get it. It's very clearly communicated. It's ambitious. They talk about this idea of life as a planetary phenomenon. You can't dissociate the context of biology from

the natural context in which it came from. And so to understand life as a planetary phenomenon, you have to understand planets. So it allows you to kind of prioritize and figure out what aspects of planetary science, geology, atmospheric science, formation, motion, you know, all the aspects of planetary science still fit in this. But it's just a nice way to think of the program from a holistic perspective as opposed to pursuing bits and pieces of different questions here and there. Ambitious, yes. It sure is an ambitious goal.

But are we talking exclusively about big, expensive flagship missions, Cassinis and curiosities and perseverances? Well, we hope not to be. The other aspect of this paper is we kind of note that for the most part, every life-focused mission that we've done in planetary science has been a flagship mission. That's unsustainable. You can't really pursue that because flagship missions, really, if we're lucky, we get two in a decadal period, right?

They're just expensive, multi-billion dollar missions. So we have to find ways to increase detection, the number of opportunities, I should say, for potential detection. That means doing modest, mid-sized, even discovery style biosignature detection. And the point that we make is, if you can do more small missions, you don't have to have kind of this full suite of exquisitely sensitive life detecting instrumentation. You can focus on one or two biosignatures. And if you show a promising biosignature, then you get that big mission, right, that focuses on the life question.

But we can't, we have to have a way to increase the number of opportunities to detect life in our solar system and again in solar systems beyond. And you do that just by lowering the cost. to detect life in our solar system and, again, in solar systems beyond. And you do that just by lowering the cost. I mean, ideally, you do that by increasing the budget, which we've been doing over the last few years. But, you know, they have to go hand in hand. We could continue this segment with just discussion of this one paper, but there are two more that we want to mention. So let me say now, and we'll probably repeat again, you can read two of these papers at planetary.org. In fact, we'll put the direct link on the show page for this week's episode at planetary.org slash radio. And we'll get to that where you can find the scope of planetary defense activities, programs, strategies,

and relevance in a post-COVID-19 world. Again, you served as a lead author. Bill Nye authored it with you. It's co-signed, again, by the Society's Board of Directors. Okay, what are the parallels between the comprehensive planetary defense program you argue for here and the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic? This is something we've been talking about for a while as not just a learning opportunity, but an opportunity to connect what can be a very abstract idea, which is being hit by a giant space rock, for lack of a better term. Yeah, it's not. The dinosaurs would say it's not that abstract, but okay. Yeah. Well, they wouldn't say much of anything, would they now? Given the chance. But the idea is, so pandemics have similarities to the situation we find ourselves in with near

Earth objects that are potentially hazardous, but are unlikely in the scale of one's lifetime to happen. But just because something is unlikely doesn't mean that it's impossible. Right now, obviously, with the coronavirus raging across the world, and particularly here in the United States, no one would have predicted this six months ago. Or maybe just about six months ago, a year ago, let's say. Eight months ago, a year ago. Eight months ago. This is a low probability, high impact event. You have to have some sort of planning for those because low probability, again, does not mean zero.

The ultimate, I would say, high impact event would be getting hit by a near earth object and having that devastating, you know, as we've gone through many times on this show and on our website, the consequences are very dire for being hit by a particularly large near earth object. People right now, I would say, going through a low probability, high impact event, this is the time to start talking about other ones. Because it's very relevant to say the value of preparation for those are incredibly high. And I drew a parallel in this paper using some early reporting, what's coming out of China and some of the other South Pacific Asian nations that particularly dealt with the SARS virus back in the early 2000s, that they had much more vigorous and prepared systems to deal with viral outbreaks because of similar experiences 20 years ago.

And, you know, you can debate various aspects of those responses. But overall, the spread in a lot of those countries has been a lot less than countries that didn't have outbreaks of SARS in the early 2000s. So there's an opportunity, I think, that tells you that countries that have had these experiences with those low probability, high impact events are more amenable to putting up investments for similar types of preparation. So the public, we claim, is more open to preparing for these types of events after they experience one. they experience one. So we can start to draw again, these parallels to near earth objects, which again, I should say already have very high levels of support when just pulling the public, it's often put as the first or second most important activity NASA could already be doing. I would argue now that those is probably higher in terms of people's expectations.

People in the United States are feeling more likely that a natural disaster is going to happen to them. So there's more uncertainty around these issues. And so there's more, again, political, I would say, willingness to begin to invigorate this program of planetary defense within NASA. Now, we're talking to a science community in this paper. A lot of this is not up to the scientific community. But what we wanted to do was try to give them ways in which to frame this question for how they begin to talk about it within NASA and within for NASA itself out to members of Congress and the White House. Planetary defense has struggled, as we've talked about on this show, over the years to get any sort of funding whatsoever. They've grown by 4,000% in the last 10 years,

but that's basically from nothing up to, you know, a small 150 million or so a year, which is a nice chunk of change for them, but significantly lower than most flight programs. So within the scientific community, we then recommended that they embrace the idea of planetary defense as a pseudo kind of a mixed scientific planetary defense work and endeavor, and they endorse an ongoing flight line. So basically something that the planetary defense program can, you know, become a full fledged NASA program, really, when you start launching things into space, right? So within a space agency, nothing gives you a nice cachet, like having a flight program. So within this flight program, we can start to pursue regular missions that do what you would say with COVID, right? You need to do testing and early

warning systems, right? Which is your, you know, neo surveillance mission types of things for planetary defense. You need to do disaster preparation and planning, right, in the way that we need to do for managing public health in a pandemic. And you need to find, you know, quote unquote, vaccines for neo threats in the form of planetary deflection techniques for asteroids. So you can draw again, a lot of parallels between these two ideas and start to kind of frame this pursuit of planetary defense within this larger expectation of public health and disaster preparation, as we're seeing becoming very relevant from the COVID pandemic. So it's one of the ideas that we tried to, again, submit to the planetary science community. The science

community, again, can embrace this by endorsing the idea of a flight line, which is already beginning to take off at Planetary Defense Program within NASA. And then use that for a lot of other just very immediately practical things, including keeping it small. So having lots of opportunities to experiment with low cost public private partnerships and doing these missions, doing missions of opportunity to the upcoming Apophis flyby in 2029, getting your NEO surveillance mission launched, and then also just, again, demonstrating your relevance to the public by doing perhaps the most important thing a space program can do,

which is help the Earth not get hit by a giant asteroid. And you got a catchy name for the program, Defender. And of course, that telescope that you were talking about, I assume you were talking about, NEO-SM, the new iteration of NEO-CAM that we heard NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, Lindley Johnson, talking about just minutes ago on this program. Just say another word or two about this opportunity

that you see in the asteroid Apophis, which is going to be dropping by, like it or not, in nine years, though it's not going to hit us. Yeah, it's a very close approach. And we weren't sure if it was going to not hit us for a little bit there a few years ago because of its dynamics. But it's like a what, a 300-some meter asteroid. It's relatively large. We know it's coming. And there's been a number of papers submitted on this, notably by Rick Binzel

at MIT and others acknowledging that this is a huge opportunity, a very rare opportunity, both from a scientific perspective, because we know this asteroid's going to be coming by Earth at a very specific point, and also from a public outreach opportunity, because it's going to be visible by something like 2 billion people in the night sky as it swings by in 2029.

Historically, these types of high profile events are opportunities for programs to, again, demonstrate relevance and to take action and to organize around to try to send out, you know, at least one, hopefully more, particularly small missions to go and explore Apophis. And that could be a number of opportunities you can practice marshalling a response for if it was actually going to hit us, how quickly could we send missions there? What types of information can we learn about this asteroid as it swings by Earth, there's a lot of opportunities for seeing how Earth's gravitational field disrupts the structure of Apophis

to show you, tell you, you know, a lot about the interior structure of these types of NEOs. And again, you can use it to just demonstrate that relevance. Like, oh, there's an asteroid that almost hit us.

Well, this is why we're working to find ones plenty in advance. So we always have warning, right? We're never going to be caught by surprise. So Apophis gives you a lot of opportunities for that. We kind of cheekily called it the Defender Program. And we even gave it a belabored acronym, just for fun, in this paper. The point that we're, again, trying to make within just a bureaucratic and institutional place, which governments are and NASA is, that having

a name to something and having a responsibility to fly things into space in a space agency helps, in a sense, establish it as a quote unquote real program. It allows a certain amount of internal coalition building to occur in order to support work like that, which makes it ultimately easier to get resources and grow once you get past a certain kind of minimum threshold size. The problem with, again, planetary defense is that it's such a new concept. It really wasn't seriously thought about in terms of the space community until the 1980s. Even then, as I said, we didn't really get serious funding beyond some telescope time looking for these things until really the 2010s. So just in

the last 10 years, there's no institutional home for something like that by default. NASA was created way before the concept of threatening asteroids that could hurt Earth was really thought about. Certainly aspects of various national defense and other things were all created before this knowledge existed. From a bureaucratic perspective, it struggled to find a home and therefore struggled to find resources and funding because it doesn't have a natural place to slot into. The scientific community, by embracing planetary defense as a part of planetary science, as a part of the civilian aspect of space and NASA, has the opportunity to help give it that home in order to build out the program,

give it a named flight line, and just really establish it as an expected effort, right? A basic part of what the space program does, and really probably the most high profile, to some degree, and most valuable to the public. Planetary Defense, the world you save may be your own, or at least the species you save. These first two papers, both again available at planetary.org, and we will link to them from this week's episode page. The third paper has somewhat different status. It meshes well with the first two, but it comes from another direction and from other collaborators.

You co-authored it somewhat independently of the Planetary Society, though very much as a part of your job. And it enjoys this very impressive collection of co-signers, including several past guests on Planetary Radio. There's a line in it I love, the intrinsic value of planetary science. And I don't want to sound grandiose, but that's a phrase that reminds me of another one. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Well, it's certainly coming out of that small L liberal history. It's a paper about ethics. small l liberal history. It's a paper about ethics. So I was a co author on this paper, the lead author was was Dr. James Schwartz from Wichita State University, who some of our listeners might remember as a guest just a few months ago on the space policy edition of planetary

radio. He had a new book about the value of space science. And the value in this sense being a very specific type of use of that word from the study of ethics from the philosophical perspective. I just thought that book was fascinating. A lot of fresh air basically added into this discussion of why we do things like space science, planetary exploration, and the inherent value of just knowing things about the world around us. It was a real fun opportunity to collaborate with Jim here on this paper to talk about this through the lens of planetary science to a planetary science community to suggest a slightly different perspective of how they can talk about their own science. The paper on the ethics of planetary exploration is a paper that establishes, it kind of does a shorthand version of this,

and you can read Jim's book to get a longer, more in-depth argument for it, but says two things, that planetary science is intrinsically valuable and instrumentally valuable. And those are two words, again, that have specific meanings, but basically that inherent value is just doing, it's worth doing for its own sake, planetary science. And then it's also instrumentally valuable that it has, it increases good of other things, right? It provides a value to you, which is usually how we tend to talk about NASA and space science in general, through things like spin-offs would be an instrumental value. The interesting thing is if you accept that planetary science also has this inherent value, that there's a value to, again, knowing things about the natural world in which we live. And even if you, again, accept the instrumental value, if there's just a value proposition,

then we actually have ethical obligation to do something if it increases good by pursuing that effort. So again, if you accept that for planetary science, then we have an ethical obligation to learn more about our solar system through the pursuit of planetary science. And then the interesting thing, and this was kind of the fun part about this paper, is that there's a consequence of this, which is planetary science is not the only thing happening in the solar system these days. We're on this cusp of this commercial and also reinvigorated human spaceflight efforts, particularly at the moon, going to Mars, and occasionally maybe some of these near-Earth asteroids for future mining when those kind of start to ramp back up again. But those endeavors have a potential to disrupt or, you know, perturb the potential scientific return of those places.

We talk about this a lot with planetary protection. But this is kind of a more fun, expansive version of just like, if you just, again, find science valuable, then anything that can go and disrupt the potential scientific return from Mars or from the polar regions of the moon is bad. You have to be aware of that. You know, we don't say you shouldn't be doing these activities. But what we do say is that the scientific community really needs to think about what

potential disruptions could happen in terms of their scientific return. And these are disruptions that are potentially forever, right? If you disrupt the scientific return, you may lose that knowledge in perpetuity. Yeah, if you contaminate Mars with human microbes and they beat out the, they kill off the Martian microbes, well, so much for biology on Mars. Exactly, right? And so what is our, again, our obligation as a consequence of this situation? And so we proposed in this paper to the decadal community that one of the things they should use in this whole process of prioritizing what science to do in the next 10 years, they should think about this as the priority aspect of what are places that could face disruption in the next 10 to 30 years. We don't really have that many opportunities.

Some of the work that I did with our planetary science data set that we put together and released earlier this year from the Planetary Society, you can look at these historical trends. NASA, on average, sends about eight planetary missions every decadal period. Just eight. So even if you look in the next 30 years, NASA is probably only going to be sending about 25 planetary missions, historical trends uphold. They're going to be balanced through a bunch of different destinations. You only really get a handful that's going to be targeted to those places, like Mars and the moon,

some of those asteroids that could face real perturbations from these other actors. You might want to start thinking about how to prioritize those. So that was kind of this really fun, interesting outcome by using ethics, by using the academic study of ethics as a base to evaluate planetary exploration, you actually come out with a pretty interesting consequence that's really worth considering by the scientific community about how to practically prioritize their missions for the next upcoming 10 to 20 years. Great stuff, Casey. Makes me proud once again, or prouder perhaps I should say, to be both a member and a part of an organization that stands behind, well, these first two papers on planetary science and planetary defense, which are very much under the aegis of the Planetary Society, and this third one that

you've contributed to about the ethics of planetary science and exploring our solar system. Thanks for sharing all this with us. They are all easy, enjoyable reads, and I highly recommend that listeners take a look at them, the first two at planetary.org. And the third, where can they find this one about ethics? We'll link to it here in the show. You can also find it, James Schwartz is the lead author on that, and he's on academia.edu. So if you look him up there, it'll be a very recent post by him. Thank you, Casey. I look forward to talking to, well, it's coming up, the next Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio on the first Friday in August. Thanks, Matt. And thanks for the opportunity to talk about these papers. It was a real joy to put

these together. The society, when we talk about advocating for space, we're doing it at every step of this process. So we're not just talking to Congress, right? We're participating in every level of the scientific debate itself. And we can do that because our members enable us to have the resources to do this. So I really value this opportunity to do this on behalf of our members. I hope people read it. And of course, I welcome comments back on these papers from our listeners. That's Casey Dreyer. He is the Planetary Society's chief advocate and senior space policy advisor. We'll be back with the chief scientist of the society in moments because it's time for What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So we are joined by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

That's Bruce Batts. I think I told you, fourth try, and it wasn't as spectacular as the experience a lot of people have had, but I saw the comet. I saw Comet NEOWISE. Yay! Yeah, a lot of city lights and a lot of haze to look through. And without the binoculars, I never would have seen it. But thank goodness for my little astronomy app on my phone and my binoculars,

because that made it not only possible, but really exciting, very enjoyable. Good. Well, that's a good lead-in, because that's pretty much the deal with the comet, is if you're in a city area, and I did my own suburban observing, it's tough to spot with the naked eye. It depends on how much haze and muck is in the atmosphere, but it's doing that thing where it's getting higher and higher every night in the evening west. This is Comet NEOWISE. You can probably see it, at least for a few more nights with just your eyes,

but it'll be a lot easier if you follow the Matt Kaplan strategy and sweep the area. Preferably check a finder chart before you go out because it does move from night to night. But it is for the next few days in Ursa Major that also houses the asterism, the Big Dipper. It'll be below the Big Dipper. It's dimmer and dimmer, but you can still get it, certainly from a dark site, you're still going to see it, and you can get nice pictures of it. So I had fun. Couldn't see it that well from a suburban environment, but with a camera and longer exposures, it was pretty. Hey, if you want to share one of those pictures, we could put it on the show page.

Sure. Again, they're far more spectacular ones. I did get one with it over JPL, though, so I thought that was cool, since JPL operates the NEOWISE spacecraft that was used to discover Comet NEOWISE, and this was Comet NEOWISE over JPL. It was all very poetic, you might say.

As we heard Amy Meinzer and other people comet NEOWISE, and this was comet NEOWISE over JPL. It was all very poetic, you might say. Yeah. As we heard Amy Meinzer and other people talking about a few minutes ago in today's show. Indeed. And we've got other things up. Even if you have trouble seeing the comet, you can check out super bright Jupiter over in the south in the early evening, and Saturn a little ways to its lower left. And Venus is dominating the pre-dawn east, looking super bright. There's no comet out there right now, or at least not comet NEOWISE, but you can check out Venus looking spectacular.

Been a great week. It has. Good stuff. All right, speaking of week, we move on to this week in space history. 1971, the launch of Apollo 15, successful mission to the moon with humans. And in 1984, Svetlana Svitskaya became the first female space walker. Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten about that. We move on to random space fact. So you may be familiar, Matt, with the Schwarzschild radius, the radius on a non-rotating spherical assumed black hole where the event horizon is. So anything past it, light doesn't escape, information doesn't get out. So Carl Schwarzschild accomplished solving for this and solving the Einstein field equations for general

relativity in 1915 and 16 while he was serving in the German army in World War I and with an autoimmune disease, pemphingus, from which he passed away during 1916. But he got out this whole solution and such. And I want to read this amusing sentence from Wikipedia. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of the Schwarzschild coordinates in the Schwarzschild metric, leads to derivation of the Schwarzschild radius. Way to Schwarzschild metric leads to derivation of the Schwarzschild radius. Way to Schwarzschild. Well done.

Well done. It's very Schwarzschild-y. So let's go on to the trivia contest. I asked you, who is the bond albedo named after? And the bond albedo, as a reminder, planetary scientists love it because it represents the amount of electromagnetic radiation across all parts of the spectrum. So not just visible light. How much gets reflected back from, in this case, a planet at all angles, planet, moon, whatever. So it's what is crucial in determining the radiation balance for a planetary body.

what is crucial in determining the radiation balance for a planetary body, how much radiation gets in compared to what gets reflected, blah, blah, blah. How do we do, Matt? Lots of entertaining and informative responses this week. Here's one from Gene Lewin, not our winner, one of our poets. Three mountains in the Granite State bear this surveyor's name, and work with his progenitor brought astronomical fame. They studied, by telescopic means, Saturn's surrounding heaven, discovering moon Hyperion, also known as Saturn 7. But we're looking for the namesake of the Bond albedo label.

That would be George Philip Bond, not Fleming's Spy of Fable. Creative. I like it. And correct? George Philip Bond? Yes, that is correct. Well, that's going to make Aaron Ring very happy. Aaron is a first-time winner on the show.

He's up in beautiful Stockton, California. I shouldn't laugh there. It's not a bad town. He said, indeed, it was George Bond. He also says, hi, Matt. Hi, Bruce. Love the show. Aaron, we hope you're going to love your beautiful Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Wear it proudly as you walk the streets of Stockton, California. Will you? Stop hating on Central Valley cities from the guy who grew up in Sacramento. Stockton's a lovely place. I mean, you know, it's no Sacramento, but it's delightful. And it's flat and it has a lot of trees. And those two things make me very happy. I knew it was in your backyard as a kid.

And I was hoping you would react to my subtle put down in Stockton and the Central Valley. We got more. It's true, as we heard from Laura Dodd. And you can tell from the poem. Astronomy ran in the Bond family. Father William, cousin Edward Holden also spent a lot of time looking at the night sky. A whole bunch of features in the solar system bear their names. And then there were all the other Bond jokes.

John Guyton in Australia and Mark Little in Northern Ireland both came up with, basically, they could have told us whether or not he had a license to kill, but then they'd have to, you know. John Burstecker in Massachusetts, not licensed to kill, but according to Wikipedia, he was on Her Majesty's Royal Astronomical Society's list of gold medal honorees. I think that actually comes with a license to kill, but it's not well publicized. And an Aston Martin, I think. Benjamin Drought, he certainly killed it as a pioneer of celestial photography. A lot of people came up with the same wonderful ideas this time. Mel Powell's, Andy Squires. We need to find an object with the bond albedo of 0.007.

It'd be much easier to find 0.07. And in fact, that's what happened. Patrick Honan in Vermont said that's a roughly Mercury's bond albedo. Christopher Mills in Virginia, not to be confused with the James Bond libido, which approaches one. From Ian Jackson, when measuring the scattered electromagnetic wavelengths, he perhaps used a spectrograph? No. I know, painful. Let's finish with our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild.

He didn't drive an Aston Martin, didn't crash a plane, he didn't drink martinis that were shaken or champagne, but G.P. Bond's equation simply shows what corresponds to body radiation scattered back as bond, albedo bond. Great bunch of responses this week. Thank you so much, folks. All right. We talked about Carl Schwarzschild,

who solved the Einstein field equations for the geometry of empty space-time around a non-rotating, uncharged, barking, axially symmetric black hole with a quasi-spherical event horizon. Here's your question. Who first solved those equations for all those same conditions except for a rotating black hole? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Oof, you have until the 29th.

That'd be Wednesday, July 29 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and win yourself. We're going to give you the choice again, either a Planetary Society 40th anniversary T-shirt or a vintage Planetary Society T-shirt with our original Clipper Ship logo, partially designed at least by our co-founder, Carl Sagan. Those are both available in the Planetary Society store, planetary.org slash store, or just go to chopshopstore.com because that's where all of our merch is. Good luck with this one. By the way, the Schwarzschild radius, not to be confused with

the Schwarzenegger radius, right? Which is whatever, I think 13 inches around a bicep? No, very, very different. Very different. I'm sorry. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what you'd like to put behind the event horizon of a black hole. Thank you, and good night. How about our old refrigerator, which is about to be replaced? That'd be a good thing to throw behind the event horizon. We can do that. Well, I'm going to get that help from the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts, 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 members who know every week is Space Week. Join them at planetary.org slash membership. And if you can't join us right now, please give Planetary Radio a rating or review in Apple Podcasts or elsewhere. Mark Hilverd is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Stay well, all. Ad Astra.