Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A New Era For SETI Research: More on the Breakthrough Initiatives

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

We follow last week’s conversation with Ann Druyan about the $100 million funding of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by visiting with two of the scientists who will do the work: Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley and Karen O’Neil of the Green Bank Telescope.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Breaking through to E.T. this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We continue our exploration of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative this week, the project that will put $100 million toward answering the greatest of all questions in science. Are we alone? This time we'll hear from Dan Wertheimer of the SETI at Home Project and radio astronomer Karen O'Neill at the Green Bank Telescope.

The whole regular gang is also back, beginning with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome back from vacation. Thank you very much. Lots of catching up to do, and I guess you've got that on the website with one of your regular what's-up contributions. Bruce doesn't own that. So let's begin with, how about the moon? Anything happening with lunar missions we should know about? Yeah, you know, there's a lunar reconnaissance orbiter is still active.

The U-2 rover is, against all odds, still communicating with Earth. But there's actually a lunar mission that we didn't know we had. The DISCOVER mission, which is designed to study solar activity and also to gaze at Earth, caught the moon passing in front of Earth's disk. And oh my God, is it an amazing animation. What's the latest from Mars? Well, we have both rovers doing really active science stops right now. Opportunity has reached Marathon Valley, which is the spot they spotted from orbit that contains clay minerals. So they're super excited to be there, even though the rover is having memory problems. And then there's better news over at the Curiosity site where they actually are able to start using the drill again. And they successfully drilled at a site named Buckskin. They found, as usual, that Mars is red on the outside and gray on the inside.

And they're doing a lot more work in this field site. They're finding really interesting relationships between the different kinds of rocks there. So they're going to be there for another couple weeks, probably. Let's now head out to Rosetta. What's the news from there? Well, Rosetta is getting really exciting because the comet is very nearly at perihelion. That happens on August 13th. And the closer you take a comet to the sun, the more active it gets. It does make things a little tough for Rosetta. They have to stand off from the comet to get away from all that dust jetting, but it's exactly the thing they went there to study. So they're very excited about that. A little amount of concern on the mission is that the Philae lander is not talking to the orbiter again, but hopefully we'll hear from it again in another week or so. Just needs a little more sunlight, let's hope anyway.

Fingers crossed. There's much more in the entry at the website. Just look for it at planetary.org. She is back and doing what she does best. We've got time. Any news at all from way out toward the end of the solar system? Pluto. Well, New Horizons is still moving away from Pluto,

but we have no new images from it, and that is as planned. They're returning more data from different instruments instruments and image transmission will resume again in mid September. So stay tuned for that. Much more to look forward to from there and from all over the solar system. Emily, I look forward to talking with you about all of it. Me too, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Up next is Bill Nye, the science guy, coming to us from Japan. Bill, it's been way too long. Welcome back. It's so good to be back, Matt. Very exciting. You know,

the small satellite conference is going on right now. LightSail has a chance to be voted Mission of the Year. Which is quite exciting. There are, and we will put up the link where people can vote. A lot of you out there may be too late for this. What else could people possibly have to do? Go to the small sat conference survey monkey and vote. What else could they possibly have going on? Now, they can also go to sail.planetary.org slash vote

and it will take them to the ballot. What I have to say, now, of course, LightSail, you are a bit biased, so am I, but I love the collection of these little spacecraft. I know, look at them all. There's all these CubeSats that flew in the last year that were designed by all kinds of different people. It just shows you the goal of this program, creating the standard, was to democratize space. And when you look at that list of spacecraft, really, I guess we're doing that. It's really something.

People flying telescopes, flying all kinds of instruments, station keeping, deorbiting, all sorts of things. And of course, LightSail's in there. And what is so appealing to me about LightSail is that it's the technology that could take us beyond the moon and far out into deep space using the sun. You wouldn't have to carry fuel. So it's really exciting. Thanks, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, back on Planetary Radio.

We're going to pick up that topic from last week that we talked with Andrew Ian about, this time with a couple of the direct beneficiaries of the Breakthrough Initiatives, Dan Wer July 20th, the anniversary of humankind's first steps on a body other than Earth. Last week, Ann Druyan of Cosmos Studios told us about her hopes for this tremendous expansion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This time we'll talk with two of the scientists who will conduct that expanded search. Dan Wertheimer of UC Berkeley is the co-founder and chief scientist of the great SETI at Home project. It has been relying on the kindness of strangers' computers for 16 years, sifting through terabytes of data looking for a signal from the stars. He also oversees other SETI projects,

efforts that have almost always wondered whether they will have the funds to continue the search. That is about to change, thanks to the Breakthrough Listen project and $100 million put up by Russian scientist, entrepreneur, and billionaire Yuri Milner. I recently reached Dan in China via Skype. Dan, it is great to welcome you back to Planetary Radio. It's been too long, and also to be able to congratulate you on this amazing windfall for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Thanks, Matt. It's crazy. It's beyond my wildest dreams.

It's going to be a spectacular SETI program. What is the Breakthrough Listen funding going to accomplish for you, or rather for the activities that you're involved with at UC Berkeley and elsewhere? It's going to be a huge, very comprehensive program over 10 years. We plan to spend $100 million over 10 years, $10 million a year. And we're going to be starting with three telescopes, two radio telescopes and also an optical telescope. The two radio telescopes, one in the south is the Parks Observatory in Australia. And then the other radio telescope is the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

radio telescope is the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Then we're also going to be doing optical SETI, not just looking for radio signals from ET, but also looking for laser signals from ET. And we're going to be starting at Lick Observatory in California near Berkeley, where I work. About these radio telescopes, and we're also going to be talking to your colleague, Karen O'Neill, who is the director of that Green Bank Telescope. Why is it so special to be able to use these two giant dishes, one in the northern, one in the southern hemisphere? Well, you want to do both hemispheres. There's interesting stars and galaxies to look at in both places. The center of the galaxy you can only pretty much see from the south.

The nearest stars, Alpha Centauri, you can only see from the south. And then the Green Bank Telescope also has a number of different objects we want to look at, nearby stars and planets. We're going to be doing a search of 100,000 stars. We're also going to look at the galactic plane. We're going to look at nearby galaxies. So we have a huge list of things we want to look at over the next 10 years. Things are getting more and more interesting, right? I mean, it's not just what the funding will enable, but thanks to instruments like the Kepler spacecraft, we're getting a lot better at knowing where to look, aren't we? That's right. So not only is this a lot of money, but the technology changes very rapidly.

The telescopes get better. The receivers get better. And the thing that really gets better fast is the computing power. The more computing power you have, the better job you can do of sorting through all the different frequencies and signal types. What we did 10 years ago is now laughable. We're doing SETI a thousand times better than we did 10 years ago. The capabilities double every year. So that means 20 years ago was even more laughable. That was a million times worse than what we're doing now. So even though I'm really proud of what we're doing 20 or 30 years ago,

those are teeny comparison to what we're doing now. We can do in an hour what we used to do in a few years. That's amazing. It sounds like you're outpacing Moore's Law. Well, it's a combination of these different factors. So Moore's Law is a doubling every three years. That's computing power. But also the telescopes are getting better and the receivers are getting more sensitive.

And there are these multi-beam receivers and these things called phased array feeds, which allow us to look at many places in the sky simultaneously. So all of those technologies combined. And also SETI at home, we're asking volunteers to help us analyze the data. And the volunteers are continually upgrading their computers. They buy a new computer every few years. So we take advantage of all those technologies. And that's what gives us a factor or two every year. Now I'm going to come back to SETI at home because that, of course, is what we have talked about several times in the past. But you guys are the pioneers or among the pioneers in developing the algorithms to take all of this data that floods in and process it.

Is this new funding going to benefit that kind of processing, the development of the algorithms you use as well? Yeah. So we are going to be developing instrumentation algorithms and everything will be open source. So we will share the software, the hardware, the data also, all the data that we take at the telescopes, everything we record will be available to the scientific community, and we'll be analyzing it by the public. We're hoping that that data will be rich enough that other people can go look through it, not just for ET, but figure out what these exotic objects called fast radio bursts are, maybe find some new pulsars. So we're hoping that other science besides SETI science can be

done with this data. That is a good time to talk more about SETI at home. Still going strong, right? Yeah, we've had 9 million people sign up for SETI at home. It's one of the largest supercomputers. It's made the search way more sensitive than we could possibly do with our own computers at our own laboratories. So we're very grateful to SETI at Home participants. I also like to talk about the role that you guys played with SETI at Home in sort of pioneering these approaches to distributed computing. I mean, it really has been a revolution in a number of fields. That's right. We started with just the SETI at home project, but then we generalized our software, and now there are about 100 different projects

that use our software. So if you have a computer at home, not only can you help us analyze SETI data, but you can allocate your computer. You can say, I want 30% of my spare computing cycles to look for malaria drugs or cancer drugs or HIV drugs or do global warming climate modeling research. And you can choose the projects that you're most interested in. We call it the democratization of scientific computing. We got away from talking about that third observatory that you're going to be working with, the Lick, and the optical search that it will be doing. Tell us about that. So for early times, we've been thinking about radio signals because Earthlings send off a lot of radio and television. You should be careful what

you say if your show is broadcast because it'll go out through the ionosphere, out into space, traveling at the speed of light. In the early TV shows, I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan have gone past 10,000 stars. So you could ask the question, okay, Earth is sending off all this radio, television, radar signals out into space. What if ET is out there and they have something that we could detect, maybe something like our television? So that was kind of the early thing that people have been doing. And they've been doing that for a hundred years. The early pioneers of radio, Tesla, Marconi, did radio searches. There was a search in the Navy in 1924, looked for signals from Mars.

Then Charlie Towns discovered the laser in 1960, and Charlie suggested that we look for laser signals. And at the time, lasers were little dinky things. They were like laser pointers. And we said, Charlie, you're crazy. But he turned out to be right. Now, lasers are incredibly powerful. And you could communicate across the galaxy with laser signals, you know, 100,000 light

years across, send a huge amount of information. So we think lasers might be a good way to communicate, especially for directed kind of communication. Maybe they know about us. Maybe they've seen oxygen in our atmosphere. Or maybe they've seen our early TV shows. Then they might point a laser in our direction. My philosophy on SETI is you want to do a lot of different SETI experiments.

It's really hard to predict what an advanced civilization might be doing. Are they doing radio? Are they doing lasers? Is it infrared? What kind of signals? So our strategy is to try a variety of SETI experiments. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And so we are looking for laser signals, different kinds of laser signals. We got a couple of different experiments for that. We're also looking for infrared signals. Maybe they're using an infrared laser. Lasers, radio frequencies. Should we be looking someday for neutrinos?

So the best physics that we know and astronomy that we know is that electromagnetic waves are the best way to communicate with another civilization. So electromagnetic waves include infrared, light waves, radio waves, x-rays. They travel at the speed of light, faster than anything else that we know of. And they're very easy to generate. Anybody can build a transmitter and they're pretty easy to receive. We think that's the best technology. However, if you look at Earthling's history, you know, we've been on Earth maybe a few hundred thousand years. We've only had science for 500 years. We've only had radio 100 years. There may be something better than electromagnetic communication, faster than speed of light or something that's better than that.

So we know there's some new physics that we don't understand because we don't understand about the dark energy. We don't understand about dark matter. That means that there could be something better than electromagnetic communication, maybe that goes faster than the speed of light. If you watch Star Trek, you know about subspace communication and tachyons. But we don't know about that. So I think the best thing to do is do what you know how to do. If you had told Christopher Columbus 500 years ago, you know, don't sail to India looking for spices. If you just wait 500 years, there'll be airplanes,

make your job a lot easier. That's true, but Columbus found something interesting. So you got to do what you know how to do. But I'm optimistic in the long run that earthlings will be able to figure out if extraterrestrials are out there. I think right now we are just an emerging civilization. We're just getting in the game where we're learning how we might develop the technology to communicate with ET. But the technology is changing fast. So I think right now we'd be lucky to find them. It's a huge search space where to point the telescope, what signal, what frequency, what time. And we can't do it all. But because the technology is growing so fast, capabilities are doubling every year. I'm optimistic in the long run, maybe not in my lifetime,

but maybe my students or my students' students in the next generation or two, Earthlings will find another civilization if they're out there. Dan, hopefully you're right, and this search will continue for many, many years to come. But you are one of those who's been at this for quite a long time. You've devoted a good part of a life to this. I'm also wondering about the pioneers who were in this even before you and how you feel about the fact that people like Frank Drake are still in the game and, in fact, very involved with the Breakthrough Listen Project.

That's right. There are sort of four key people. Frank is one of the key guys. He's great to work with. We've been working with Frank for a long time. He's got a lot of clever ideas about where to look, and he's extremely experienced and still going strong. He is, incidentally, my academic grandfather.

So I got my PhD from Don Backer. Don Backer got his PhD from Frank Drake. Anyway, we're working closely with Frank on this. It's great to work with Frank. Humans have been asking this question for hundreds of thousands of years. Are we alone? Is anybody out there? Our generation, or maybe the next one, has really a chance of answering this.

We're developing the technology, the science, the capabilities, the telescopes, where we might be able to detect signals from ET and learn this question, are we alone? And I think it's profound either way. If we find out that there are advanced civilizations billions of years ahead of us, then we could learn a lot. We could get on the galactic internet. Phil Morrison called SETI the archaeology of our future. So we can learn about what's in our future.

We can learn how civilizations stopped killing each other and got through that bottleneck. It's also profound the other way. If we learn that we are alone, that's profound. That means that life is incredibly precious, and we better take really good care of life on this planet. Very well put, Dan. Thank you so much, and congratulations once again on playing such an important role in the next 10 years of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which are going to be magnificently expanded by this new funding part of the Breakthrough Listen project.

Listen, did you have any idea that you would still be doing this kind of stuff in 2015 or maybe 2025, be doing this kind of stuff in 2015 or maybe 2025, back then when you were doing homebrew computers with unknown people like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak? Yeah, I might have been rich, like Yuri Milner, who's funding this huge Listen project. Back when I was in the homebrew computer club, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs built the Apple. My computer was probably as good or maybe better, but I didn't think about selling it. I was thinking about using it to do SETI. Anyway, I didn't get rich, but I am leading a great, enjoyable project. It's really fun.

I'm having a good life. It's a very rich legacy, and who knows? We might just get to say hello to E.T. I'm just wondering if that first message will be, send more I Love Lucy. Yeah, or maybe The Simpsons. I'm not sure which. Okay, I'll go for the latter. Thanks very much, Dan. Okay, my pleasure. Dan Wertheimer, he is the chief scientist, principal investigator for SETI at Home and

several radio and optical SETI programs running out of UC Berkeley. We've talked to him many times, and it is exciting to talk to him again at the dawn of really what amounts to a new era in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Before we go, what are you doing in China? Well, they're building a huge radio telescope, the world's largest radio telescope here in China. It's going to be 500 meters across compared to the Arecibo dish, which is what we use now for SETI, 300 meters across. So it's going to be a great machine for SETI. So I'm in China. We just looked at the machine, the instrument, the telescope yesterday. We've been working with them to figure out how to develop the new kind of signal processing

instruments and look for pulsars and fast radio bursts. And I'm excited about working with them to do SETI on this huge new telescope. When we return, we'll go to the other side of the continent to talk with Karen O'Neill, director of the Mammoth Green Bank Telescope. This is Planetary Radio. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's director of advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice? It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts, including a journey

to Europa and the Opportunity rover on Mars. I need you to join me and stand up for space. Sign our petition to Congress today at planetary.org slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious.

See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new random space fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetary society. You can subscribe to join our growing community, and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

You heard Dan Wertheimer mention the Green Bank Telescope in the first half of our show. The woman in charge of this behemoth, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, is Karen O'Neill. Actually, Karen runs the entire Green Bank site, a collection of radio telescopes set in a gorgeous West Virginia valley, a valley in which strict radio silence is observed, so leave your mobile phone at home. Strict radio silence is observed, so leave your mobile phone at home. Fortunately, there's no restriction on the hardwired Internet, so Karen was able to join me via Skype not long ago.

I find it absolutely shocking that this magnificent instrument was ever in jeopardy, but apparently you were. I mean, there was this recommendation that the GBT, the Richard Seabird Green Bank Telescope, lose its funding. What does this new funding for SETI mean for the overall operation of the GBT? Does it mean you're more secure? Absolutely. So we're incredibly excited to be a part of this whole initiative, and the funding that's coming in from it will certainly be helping the GBT. We're looking at a variety of different operational models into the long term. And to have

organizations such as the Breakthrough Initiatives want to join us, want to help fund our telescope, and want to help fund it for science is really exciting for us. And we think it'll go a long ways towards helping secure the long-term future of the facility. What does this funding mean for the other sorts of science, the other observing that the GBT will be doing over the next 10 years? Well, certainly this means that 20% of the time of the telescope will be being used for this Breakthrough Initiatives, Breakthrough Listen project. And the exciting thing about that is the data that's coming in not only will be used for the SETI search, but it's also going to be made available for any astronomer that wishes to use it to look for other phenomena, such as radio bursts or pulsars or anything else you can do with the data.

It does mean, though, that we have 20% less time available for general proposals on the telescope. general proposals on the telescope. But that's simply going to be what the telescope looks like moving towards the future. As the funding from the National Science Foundation is reduced, it just naturally will happen the less time will be available for open proposals. So it sounds like the net in this deal is certainly of much greater benefit than any harm it does to other science the telescope might do. Talk about the GBT and why it is that people like Dan Wertheimer, also on today's show, are so excited about the capabilities it brings to SETI. The GBT is an absolutely amazing telescope. So it's a 100 meter diameter radio telescope

that's fully steerable. That means we can see 85 percent of the celestial sphere, 85 percent of the sky with our telescope. The 100 meter diameter dish means it's incredibly sensitive, so we can pick up signals that are very, very faint. And then you add to that that the GBT's frequency range is highly flexible, so we observe from as low as about 0.1 gigahertz all the way up to about 110 gigahertz, so a very wide frequency range that we can use for all sorts of science, and we can also take advantage of that for the SETI search. So high sensitivity, incredible sky coverage, and very wide frequency range

make us a darn good telescope, I think, for this type of search. For this type of search and for so many other kinds of things that radio telescopes are used for. And you've also worked in tandem, in partnership, with other instruments around the world, haven't you? I mean, I'm thinking very much of the ALMA array that I visited a couple of years ago. Yes, so the GBT is used both in and of itself as a great science instrument, and then we're used in a whole variety of different ways in conjunction with other telescopes. So, for example, with ALMA, what will happen is data will be taken with ALMA to get this incredible high-resolution data that ALMA can provide. And then the GBT data can be combined with that to give you the high sensitivity that the GBT can provide.

And so you put the two together, and you really get these amazing images that give you both high spatial resolution as well as incredibly high sensitivity. And it's one of our favorite ways to work because you just get this amazing data coming out between the combination of the telescopes. We do the same working with, of course, the VLA and a lot of the VLBA data, too, that will come in and provide the sensitivity side behind their amazing resolution. Yeah, the VLA, the Very Large Array, and then the Very Large Baseline Array, the one that I think spans most of the planet, right? That's correct. And, in fact, if you take advantage of, for example, the RadioAstron satellite

that's been launched by the Russians a few years ago, we can actually include some of outer space in that long baseline array. I know you've also spent time working at another even more famous radio telescope, the one at Arecibo. What's the difference between that scope and what you have there in West Virginia? So the Arecibo telescope is certainly larger than the GBT. So it's nine times the area, three times the diameter of the GBT, and that allows it to be far more sensitive at similar frequencies. So if you're looking at, say, the 21 centimeter line, so 21 centimeter wavelength

line of hydrogen, Arecibo is going to be more sensitive. It'll take less time to reach the same sensitivity as the GBT. At the same time, though, the GBT has a lot of flexibility in terms of its ability to point across the sky. Arecibo can only capture that sky that happens to pass overhead. The GBT can point much more flexibly. The GBT covers a much wider frequency range, and the GBT has what we call an unblocked aperture. That means that there's no hardware, there's no steel hanging over the telescope where all the photons are coming in and getting collected, and that allows us to have a very high dynamic range and a very clean beam, so you can kind of map the sky to a

fairly high precision with the GBT in ways that's difficult with some of the more traditional telescope designs like Arecibo. You also have a form of, well, I guess if we compared it to an optical telescope, in that realm we call it adaptive optics. Isn't there some technology at the GBT that sort of does the same thing? Yeah, the GBT is a really neat design. So all of the panels on the surface itself have little actuator motors that can go up and down. And then that allows us to actually reshape the surface of the telescope as we're observing. And so at the lower frequencies, you're really just looking at what we call gravitational deformation. So as you tip the dish, gravity pulls on it slightly differently, and we try to keep the shape down to that perfect parabola. But once you get to the high frequencies,

once you get certainly up into the 3-millimeter-long wavelengths, the surface itself, as it heats up and cools down, the steel of that structure, of course, stretches in different ways and naturally distorts the dish. And so we have a system in place that measures the temperature all around the telescope and uses that information to continuously reshape the dish. And so we have a system in place that measures the temperature all around the telescope and uses that information to continuously reshape the dish to give us that perfect parabola. So the end result is that in benign conditions, the telescope across the entire 2.3 acres of the dish, the whole 100 meter diameter of the dish, has a RMS. So it meets that parabola to within

250 microns or about 5 nanohairs. Wow. So it's absolutely fantastic. Are there other sorts of technology that you're looking forward to over the next 10 years that are going to improve the functioning of the GBT even further, perhaps enabled by this funding from the Breakthrough Initiative? Absolutely. So we've been working across the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at a technology that we call radio cameras. So the traditional radio telescope has

a single pixel on the sky, akin to having just one pixel on your digital camera. So you can imagine if you wanted to take a picture of a room with a digital camera with a single pixel, you would have to take more than 2,000 pictures in every single direction. It would take a very long time. That's what a traditional radio telescope is like. You get that one pixel on the sky. When you want to map the sky, then it takes a long time. You have to sit there and take individual images across the sky. So we've been working on a variety of different technologies,

both traditional, what we call traditional feed horn designs, but also exploring with our university partners, volometer arrays, as well as these phased array feed systems. And so there's been a lot of development work worldwide on these different radio camera systems. And we have a few up on the telescope right now and more in the development lab over in Charlottesville. So as we move forward to the future, we'll be getting these new radio cameras on the telescope. And that'll just increase the sensitivity of the searches we're able to do with the telescope. I can certainly imagine that the Breakthrough Listen initiative will want to take advantage

of these new systems, and certainly many other astronomers will as well. You're a scientist, obviously, as well as the administrator of the Green Bank site. I've read a little bit about your research that you do with distant galaxies. I don't know, is that redundant? All galaxies are distant to some degree, right? But SETI, it has been criticized in the past as just barely science. Now, people who listen to this show regularly know that I differ with that. But I just wonder about your feelings about taking on such a major role

in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yeah, it's a funny thing. You know, if you want to always ensure that you get papers out, then you have to stick to what we would call the low-risk kind of guaranteed science. And then you get good science. It's good, solid, wonderful science. But you can't do all your science that way. You've got to be willing to take a risk occasionally.

You've got to be willing to say, look, you know, the chance of this detection might be small, but if we get it, it's going to be fantastic. And SETI is the most extreme end of that. You know, yes, our chances are very remote. Not only does there have to be intelligent life out there, but we have to be able to detect it using one of our techniques, and that's a hard thing. But, man, if we did, it would be amazing. In that case, you've really just got to decide that it's worth the risk.

When the reward is that huge, the risk has got to be worth taking. As my boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy, says, a discovery that we are not alone would change the worlds. He usually says that. Absolutely. I can't believe that I've been to Charlottesville a couple of times and haven't made the trip out your way. My father, I'll drop in, was a University of Virginia graduate. Very proud of that area.

You are in such a beautiful setting, and it seems like the perfect combination of nature and science. You get a lot of visitors, don't you? We do. We do quite well. We're in a fairly rural county for the eastern United States. There's all of about 8,000 people in our entire county, a fairly large county. And we bring in more than 50,000 visitors. A lot of those are general public, but lots of students as well. We have a huge number of student programs here on site to try to get kids excited about science. And those kids may be five years old and they

may be 50 years old. Very much enjoy working with the public and trying to share what we do with the public. And it's a beautiful setting. It's a great place to come visit us, go ride the Cass Railroad, go up to Snowshoe and visit some of the other nice areas in the county. You've just made the Chamber of Commerce very proud. Karen, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us here at Planetary Radio and being part of this celebration of what we are looking forward to over the next 10 years. And congratulations on the participation of your facility and particularly the Green Bank Telescope in the Breakthrough Listen project. Thank you. It's very exciting to be part of the project and I'm happy

to be able to talk about it and share it with all your listeners. We've been talking with Karen O'Neill. She is the director of the Green Bank site. It's not just the big GBT, the Richard C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, but an array of radio telescopes there. It has played a tremendous role in the history of radio astronomy, really just of astronomy. And in in part thanks to the Breakthrough Listen funding, will continue to do that for at least another decade. She is there as the director on behalf of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the NRAO. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

And in a few moments, he will help me reveal the winners of the Name the Lunar Rover contest. Welcome back. It's very exciting, Matt. I know. It's a marketing tour de force. It is indeed. I know. It's a marketing tour de force. It is indeed. Speaking of tours de force, tour de forces?

Anyway, Perseid meteor shower going on, Matt. It peaks August 12th and 13th, and it's super cool this year because there's basically no moon. It's right around new moon. So if you're at a dark site, you have a good chance of seeing 60 to 100 meteors per hour. Even if you miss the peak, August 12th, 13th, there'll still be increased meteor activity for a few days afterwards. So go out, stare at the sky, and look for streaks of light as bits of dust burn up in the atmosphere. We also have Saturn being the only really easy to see planet up there right now in the south in the early evening. And Mars will be getting easier to see in the pre-dawn east. It's still quite low at the moment. We move on to this week in space history. It was 10 years ago that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched and it it's been doing successful, great science, and still is at Mars. Yeah, lots of science, but probably highest visibility, it's the HiRISE camera, the one that continues to give us those truly amazing close-ups of the Martian surface.

Quite a mission. On to... Was that a complete random space fact? I couldn't really tell, but okay. It was. I was just intentionally not enunciating the way I usually do. The Virgo cluster is the closest and best studied great cluster of galaxies, lying at a distance of about 20 megaparsecs in the constellation of Virgo.

If you go back all the way to 1784, Charles Messier noted an unusual concentration of nebulae in Virgo, so fuzzy patches, and now we know there are more than 1,200 galaxies in the Virgo group. Nice neighborhood. Got to visit someday. We'd like you to someday. Are we ready? We'd like you to go.

Are we ready for this big contest? No, but I think we should do it anyway. Let's go. Because we had a lot of great entries. So I asked you, if you were a car company trying to market the lunar roving vehicle for whatever purpose, what would you name it? And what would your slogan be for it? And I know we did great, Matt.

Yeah, we did get a bunch of entries, and I know that you've reviewed them. And we've come up with some runners-up, a second-place prize, and a winner. And we also have, in fact, I'll give this first, the winner in the youth category. It's Andrew Jones and his five-year-old daughter Lilia in Finland. Lilia contributed to this, the little green van. Nice, nice work, Lilia. Beginning with the runners-up now, Howard Medlock in Lubbock, Texas. He thinks that the rover should be called Moonlight, and the slogan, made from the right stuff.

the rover should be called Moonlight, and the slogan? Made from the right stuff. This from Wojtek Nawalek in the Czech Republic. Loon over, the only convertible that won't let you feel wind in your hair. And you better hope that your hair is not exposed to the outside. Just a couple of good names here. I like this one from Alex Starr in Baltimore, the Moongati. And Paul McEwen, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He says, well, obviously it's a Moonstruck. One long lunar night only, Moonstruck rally.

Be there. It's Eric O'Day who is taking second place in this competition from Malden, Massachusetts. He says the rover, when it's sold, should definitely be called the Lunatic. Low gravity, no atmosphere, no problem. I can see the ad now. Congratulations to them and to all of the other folks who came in with terrific entries. Our winner, though, because he went above and beyond, is Mark Little in Port Stewart, North Ireland. He came up with the Inspire, specifically the LRV Inspire, the slogan, because Neil did. But really what blew us away is the video. And I'm running some of the music from his little promotional video right now.

It's wordless, so there's no point in running it on the radio. But we do have the link, and we're going to push it out through social media. It is spectacular. Mark, congratulations. You enjoyed it, too, didn't you, Bruce? I did, very much. We are going to send Mark a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a patch, a brand new light sail patch. And we're going to do the same for Eric O'Day.

And we're even going to send one to Milia. I don't know if we have a shirt the size, sized correctly for a five-year-old girl, but hopefully she'll enjoy the light sail patch and give the t-shirt to Dad. All right, something a little more conventional. About how many galaxies? So about,. About how many galaxies, so about approximately how many galaxies, including dwarf galaxies, are in the local group that the Milky Way is part of? So closer to home than the Virgo group we talked about. How many galaxies are in the local group? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Local group rules, beat Virgo.

dot org slash radio contest. Local group rules beat Virgo. You've got until the 18th. That'd be 8 a.m. on Tuesday, August 18th to get us this answer. We'll once again send out a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a light sail patch. You've inspired me, Matt. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about what sports galaxies would play against each other. Thank you, and good night. I think it would have to be soccer or football, as it's known around the world, so that the L.A. galaxy could rule. He's Bruce Betts. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. and he 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 acutely listening members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.