Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A New Generation Looking for ET

Episode Date: December 10, 2007

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Gen Y on the lookout for extraterrestrials, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Where do young space scientists and engineers come from? They come from the same places they always have, of course, though a few of them may be pleasantly surprised by the path they find themselves on. We'll meet 27-year-old Curtis Mead. Curtis is the primary research assistant on the All-Sky Optical SETI Project at Harvard. He never would have suspected that he could one day be looking for evidence that we are not alone. Bruce Betts will also be along shortly, bringing more of the news about the night sky.

In fact, we've got an exciting announcement to share during this week's edition of What's Up. And it's not just another space trivia contest. Space shuttle Atlantis tops our headlines this week. She'll be spending the holidays on the ground. NASA scrubbed a planned December 9 launch when it got a false reading from one of four engine cutoff or eco-sensors inside the liquid hydrogen section of the external fuel tank. The agency is hoping to get the problem taken care of in time

for another attempt on January 2, 2008. May I also suggest you check out Emily Lakdawalla's blog at planetary.org. She'll wish you a happy Uranian equinox, but you can also read her fascinating and somewhat disturbing tale of Chinese lunar orbiter Chang Ye's first image of the moon. Emily is in the thick of a bit of controversy over this picture. And since she is a bit under the weather, here's a Q&A classic from Emily. I'll be right back with Curtis Mead of the All Sky SETI Project. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

Mars Global Surveyor was in orbit for almost 10 years. It's sad that it's lost, but there are three other newer orbiters at Mars. Are we really missing anything now that Mars Global Surveyor is gone? For a few months, four highly capable orbiters were operating simultaneously at Mars. Are we really missing anything now that Mars Global Surveyor is gone? For a few months, four highly capable orbiters were operating simultaneously at Mars. Mars Global Surveyor arrived in 1997, Mars Odyssey arrived in 2001, Mars Express got there in 2003, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was the most recent arrival in 2006. Many people erroneously assume that the newer spacecraft replace or even better the capabilities of Mars Global Surveyor. However, every planetary spacecraft carries only a handful

of instruments, each one custom-built to satisfy the mission's unique science objectives. For one example, Mars Global Surveyor carried a magnetometer to create a global map of Mars' magnetic field. None of the other Mars orbiters has a similar instrument. For another example, every one of the orbiters carries a camera, but each camera is tuned to a different set of wavelengths of light and achieves a different resolution on the surface. In fact, one of the cameras on Mars Global Surveyor was uniquely capable because of its extremely low resolution. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out why. We thought that this week, rather than talking with one of the leaders in space exploration,

we talked to someone whose career is still taking shape. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort like many others around our planet. As such, it depends on vital contributions by scientists in training. Scientists like Harvard doctoral candidate Curtis Mead. Curtis works for famed electronics pioneer and SETI researcher Paul Horowitz. They and the rest of the AllSky team are searching the sky not for radio signals, but for flashes of laser light. By the way, you can read all about optical SETI and AllSky

at planetary.org. Curtis, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. I'm pleased to be here. Thanks for having me. Curtis, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. I'm pleased to be here. Thanks for having me. You are in a very interesting position. You are the only official grad student or research assistant assigned to the OSETI project and to this fairly legendary boss that you have, Paul Horowitz, who is a past guest of the show. Now, we'll talk about Paul in a couple of minutes. How did you end up working on optical SETI, specifically the All-Sky Telescope? It's a fun story for me. I spent my

first year at Harvard taking classes mostly, and it was very stressful, quite a heavy workload, and I just wanted to get out of here at the end of the school year. But before I left, I was doing a small electronics project and I needed an instrument to do some testing for myself. I asked around to the engineering department, some electronic professors, and none of them had this, what I thought was a pretty common tool. Nobody had one of these. The undergraduate teaching lab didn't have one of these. And I asked the guy in the electronics shop, and he said, oh, you know, go ask Paul Horowitz.

He'll probably have it. He's got everything. I had actually bought his book when I was an undergrad, you know, maybe three years before this, but I didn't make the connection. I went to his office and said, hey, you know, I'm a graduate student, and I wondered if I could borrow this from you. And he said, yeah, sure,, I'm a graduate student, and I wondered if I could borrow this instrument from you. He said, yeah, sure, come on in. You sucker.

It's amazing how accepting Paul is and enthusiastic he is. And, you know, he just drew me in. You know, and we had a conversation. He said, sure, you can borrow it. By the way, do you have a professor? Who are you working with? by the way, do you have a professor? Who are you working with? So he actually, you know, sent out a feeler and sort of asked me if I was interested in doing what he was doing. And I said,

this is all happening so fast. Let me think about it. And I went away for the summer. And when I came back in the fall, I had decided that it was a great idea. So I went to the lab and said, you know, Paul, I think I would like to work with you. And he said, great, let's figure out how to get you paid. I was like, that's right, let's do that. And, you know, he set it all up for me. We got all the forms signed out so I could receive a stipend. And he's very, you know, caring like that, and he takes care of everything. It's great. forms signed out so I could receive a stipend. He's very caring like that. He takes care of everything. It's great.

He does have this reputation. The last time we had him on the show, he had a previous graduate assistant that he brought on with him, which was a very generous thing for him to do. We should also tell people who don't know about it about the book that you mentioned. He's kind of written the book on electronics.

The Art of Electronics. And that really is what the book is great for, sort of the art of building instruments. And what are the nitty-gritty details that you need to know to do it right and to do it well? That's what Paul is great at, those finer points. Listen, you're into applied physics. It sounds like he's at least partially turned you into an astronomer. But it seems like you are, while you certainly are very involved with the impressive electronics on the AllSky, you do everything from that to washing the mirror. Yeah, we're a full-stop shop here. We like to do everything ourselves, and

in that way, we can learn about it. And you're right, he has drawn me into this sort of astrophysics and astronomy world, but the AllSky project was perfect for me because my background is electroengineering. It's a great platform for me to build different gadgetry and instruments and get sort of a practical aspect to my education, which can be lacking in graduate programs, I think. Talk about this amazing instrument, not just the telescope, but, well, I guess you might call it the business end of the telescope, but, well, I guess you might call it the business end of the telescope, essentially the camera. Okay. So our experiment is notable for a

couple reasons. It certainly has the most sophisticated electronics of any optical study experiment currently running. That all is embodied by the camera. It consists of 16 photomultiplier tubes, which are these optical sensors that can detect single photons, single photons of light. And it turns that into electrical signals and sifts through all these electrical signals looking for pulses of light.

The reason why this is highly sophisticated is not all that has been done before, but we multiplied the complexity of this experiment from our last experiment, which ran between 98 and 2003. We multiplied complexity about a thousand times, compressing all that electronic circuitry down into just physical space that was reasonable to work with took a lot of work. And that work was done by Andrew Howard, which designed a custom computer chip. They call it an ASIC, an application-specific integrated circuit. A lot of the sophistication is buried down in that layer, which took him four years to

develop that single chip. And we've got 32 of those in the experiment. There must be some people out there who are surprised when they hear about, I mean, this antique word, a tube, a photomultiplier tube. And yet, these are what not only allow you to do the very sensitive work that you do with the AllSky, but, I mean, you hear about them at the bottom of mine shafts detecting neutrinos. Yeah. Not too many engineers still get to play with tubes, but they use them a lot in particle physics experiments.

As you mentioned, those neutrino experiments, trying to look for neutrinos from the sun, they're sort of a niche item. They're great when you have very fast phenomenon, like in particle physics, you'll have, you know, you have particles that are moving at the speed of light, and so they'll just shoot off a burst of energy in a couple nanoseconds, and you can only detect that with certain types of detectors, and these photomultiplier tubes are perfect for that. The idea of a device that can detect a single photon is really mind-boggling. It's really extraordinary when you think about it. They do this regularly and easily. What happens

is the light hits a photosensitive layer, and that layer turns the photon into an electron. And when you have a charged electron, it's easy to just apply a voltage. You can accelerate that electron, and it creates an avalanche of other electrons within this phototube. And so then you get this packet of electrons, and we call that a current, out the back of the phototube. And it's really amazing. But it's been around since the 60s. Yeah. And before that, even. Curtis Mead, Harvard doctoral candidate and research assistant on the All-Sky Optical SETI project. He'll rejoin us in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work

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Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We continue our conversation with Curtis Mead,

Research Assistant on the All-Sky Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Harvard University. No one knows when, if ever, a SETI project will tell the world that someone out there is saying hello. Nevertheless, the data continues to pour in as the search continues. Let's turn to this trip that you made to Arizona recently. As I understand it, you were following up on some candidate flashes. That's right. Our experiment, it does have a couple drawbacks. One is that it can only move in elevation, the telescope,

which means that it has to wait for the sky to pass it by. As the world turns, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. So if there's a particular star that you want to observe, for the sky to pass it by. As the world turns, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. So if there's a particular star that you want to observe, you only get one chance a night. That chance will typically last for about three minutes, depending on the declination that you're observing.

When you want to go back and re-observe locations that you may have thought were interesting, it's sort of difficult to do with our experiment. And that was really the reason why I wanted to go to this telescope in Arizona. Another reason is that the type of telescope that I was using has not been applied to the field of optical SETI very often, so it's also somewhat novel. You've already made this trip to Arizona? Yeah, that's right, The first two weeks of November. What did you find, if anything?

I mean, is that data that's still being analyzed? I don't want to ruin it for everybody. I'm going to hopefully present a paper in April at a conference. We run up against that all the time. All right. Although you can't blame us for being intrigued considering the goal of this project. Not at all. It's a very interesting topic, and especially for a graduate student, I think, because so many grad students are involved in research that is very specific to one field

and can sometimes be hard to discuss in, you know, a social situation. SETI is really a topic that anybody can, you know, sit around the campfire and discuss and dream of possibilities. You know, that makes me wonder, you've got friends who have nothing to do with a SETI search except that they're your friends. What's the reaction you get? I mean, when you're sitting around having a beer with buddies or whatever, or maybe better yet, on a date, I mean, you know,

how do you tell people about what you do and what's their reaction? Well, you have to be careful, first of all, because sometimes I have to decide what I'm going to say. When somebody asks, oh, what do you do? Do I say, oh, I look for aliens? The response is either the eyes glaze over or

wow, that's really great, tell me more. And it's hard to predict which. Now, of course, if somebody asks me, what do you do? And I say, well, I'm an astrophysicist. That's always a conversation ender. And what a shame that that's the case in our society, but maybe we'll help to change that. Do you mind my asking how old you are?

27. Okay, not the youngest person at Harvard, but still pretty young for a field like this. I just wonder how you look at life shaping up because of this chance encounter you had with Paul Horowitz because he happened to have the instrument you needed. I couldn't be happier with my decision to join Paul's lab. I think it will help me immensely later on just through Paul's contacts and the contacts that I've met at Harvard. There's so many interesting people here and also interesting people that Paul knows.

He's such a schmooze-meister. He knows everyone. I'm happy with the choice that I've made, certainly. You certainly had no idea that before that day when you walked into Paul's lab that you would be looking for, pardon the expression, little green men. Paul's lab that you would be looking for, pardon the expression, little green men. I didn't, but just his enthusiasm drew me in so much. And then the sort of science itself and this project has been, I think, very fertile for my own curiosity with electronics.

I mean, that's really why I'm here. This is an electronics lab, and that's what we do best. And I'm glad that there's been a great project built on that firm grounding, something that's very interesting, great topic of conversation at parties, and something that could push me into a career in astronomy or in physics or in electronics. So, you know, the possibilities for me are wide open. Very quickly, have you thought about how you might feel if the right series of flashes appeared from the vicinity of some nearby star and you guys hit the jackpot, the wow,

the optical wow. It's something that you try not to think about too much. It's very tantalizing. Every time you sit down at the observing console, you could look in the database and find that signal, and there it is. And would that be anticlimactic, like, oh, there it is? and there it is, and would that be anticlimactic? Like, oh, there it is. Or would it be pull my hair out, pop the cork champagne,

running around screaming, look what I found. I don't know. Well, if it happens, please, just make sure you call the Planetary Society, if not first, soon after. If that day comes, I'm pretty sure everyone will be informed. Well, and I will be on the next plane to Cambridge to join the celebration. And the search continues, right? Oh, it does. We have done quite a few upgrades to the instruments in the last summer, we've increased our sensitivity about five times from where we were last year. So we're very happy about that. And in the lower sensitivity, we have covered the sky almost entirely of what we can see of it from Cambridge. And we're about 50%

coverage at the higher sensitivity. Curtis, I guess we're out of it from Cambridge, and we're about 50% coverage at the higher sensitivity. Curtis, I guess we're out of time. Please give our best and highest regards to Paul Horowitz, and keep up the good work, and we'll wait for that phone call. All right. Good talking to you. Curtis Mead is in the Applied Physics program at Harvard University, where he is a doctoral candidate. He is the research assistant, at least the only official one, to Dr. Paul Horowitz, also of Harvard. And they take good care of the all-sky instrument, supported in part by the Planetary Society, watching for that telltale signal that we are not alone in the universe. We know we're not alone in planetary radio because

in just a minute or so, I'll be joined by Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That's after a return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. Mars Global Surveyor is irreplaceable by any of the other three orbiters at Mars for many reasons. Just one example is because of its unique wide-angle camera. The wide-angle camera was capable of capturing images of the entire globe of Mars in one shot in two different wavelengths every day. These images were very low-res seven and a half kilometers per pixel, but what they lacked in spatial resolution, they made up for in temporal resolution.

Mars Global Surveyor captured these global images of Mars almost every single day of its nearly 10 years in orbit. These images form a vast data set on Mars's climate. They show the ebb and flow of Mars's polar caps, its high-altitude clouds, and its dust storms over nearly five full Martian years. None of the subsequent orbiters will be able to replace Mars Global Surveyor as a monitor of Mars' current weather and climate. This is one capability that we will need to replace

if we ever want to establish a permanent human presence on the Red Planet. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, is at the other end of the line. And my goodness, we have so much to be excited about, beginning with the fact that you're not on the telephone.

This is a Skype call. I know. It's very exciting for you. You've been harassing me for months about this. Yes, and it's almost like being—well, no, it's not really like being there, but it is much better than the telephone. Thank you. Thank you for going to all the trouble. And I know that the nice British lady was intimidating, but see, it worked. Wow, that's obscure for anyone who's never done it. And we're not even getting any money from them, so I should stop promoting them. What's up? Hey, what's up? We've got a lovely meteor shower, if you're picking this up shortly after we record it. So the Geminid meteors, traditionally the best of the year, peaking on December 13th or 14th, either of those nights, or a couple nights before or after. Go outside, stare up at the sky,

preferably later at night, preferably when it's not cloudy, up to one meteor a minute on average, so 60 an hour from a dark site. While you're out there, you can check up Mars. Mars is about as bright as it's going to get this time around and as bright as it's going to be for about 10 years, setting in the west around dawn and high, high overhead at midnight. So you can go out in the early evening, check it out in the east. It's that bright orangish-reddish thing. It's as bright as any of the stars right now. It's about as bright as the brightest star in the sky.

It's in Gemini. So excitement in Mars coming up on its opposition, opposite side of the Earth from the sun. And then in the middle of the night, we've got Saturn rising in the east and then high overhead before dawn and Venus still the brightest star-like object out there in the pre-dawn. On to this week in space history. 35 years, Matt. It's been 35 years since humans last walked on the moon. You mean 35 years this week? This week. 35 years this very week since Gene Cernan became the last human to set foot on the moon. Or have his feet on the moon, I should say.

And it's going to be a few more before anybody tries to fill those shoes or those footprints, isn't it? It is indeed. But people are working that direction again. Let us go on to Random Space Fact! Okay, a little fun with Skype reverb there.

Mostly in my own throat. Hey, it's been about, not quite, 30 years since NASA selected first females in an astronaut class, a little less than 30 years ago. Shannon Lucid, Rhea Seddon, Kathy Thornton, Judy Resnick, Anna Fisher, and Sally Ride. Those are the first NASA female astronauts. And we'll come back to them in the trivia question. Nice. Why, thank you. Thank you very much. Let us move on to the trivia contest.

We asked you, what is the temperature at the center of the sun within a really big range, since it's theoretical anyway? How did we do, Matt? Boy, it really is a big range, as a lot of our listeners discovered. Some of them had simpler concerns. Jeff Williams only wondered how close he'd have to get to toast marshmallows, which would be kind of fun to take a marshmallow up in a vacuum just to see what happens. Then we had other people who gave us incredible, almost textbooks full of information about the temperature of the sun. And did you know that the sun's core has increased in temperature by about 8% over the last very,

very many years? It's actually gotten warmer and it varies. And well, you know all this stuff, don't you? Well, I won't say I know all of it, but I know a pretty good amount. Yeah. Well, Lindsay Dawson shared some of this with us. Well, good. I pretty much was looking for kind of a basic fact to get across to people, which is that surface of the sun is a few thousand degrees. And that center of the sun is many, many, many millions of degrees.

Try 15 million degrees Kelvin. Is that close enough? 15 million Kelvins. Good enough. Well, that means that Guy Medor of Lawrenceville, Georgia, is our winner for the week because he came in with that figure, which tended to be sort of in the center of all the numbers that we got from various listeners. 15 million degrees Kelvin. Not very different in centigrade,

but what, about 27 million Fahrenheit. So, Guy, we're going to send you a T-shirt. Well, congratulations. You know, we're going to have some different prizes to give out pretty soon. Yeah, I've heard that. We're not ready to talk about that yet? Well, we can. Well, what kind of stuff are we going to have?

Well, we've got some cool Stardust at Home T-shirts. Find out on our website how you analyze data from the Stardust spacecraft to look for interstellar dust particles. We've got Duster t-shirts. We've also got the latest year in space calendar just coming out. I'd say let's go with the Planetary Radio t-shirt this time around and make sure we've got things in stock, and then we can start moving on and fill people's virtual stockings and real stockings with these year-in-space calendars, which are really cool, and, of course, the official source of this week in space history. So much impending excitement. Give us the new question, and then we'll talk about the last bit of news that we have.

All righty, going back to what I was talking about before. Who is the only woman from the first NASA astronaut class that included women who is still an active astronaut or who is an active astronaut now, I should say? Who's the only person from those names I read off who is an active astronaut with NASA right now? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to get us your entry and compete for the Planetary Radio t-shirt. And get us those entries by the 17th of December, December 17, when there will be only eight shopping days left until Christmas.

Get them to us by that Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. So, our next big announcement. Another big change coming for Planetary Radio. Very soon, in the next two or three weeks, maybe at the very beginning of the year. Not entirely figured it out yet. Bruce, you may do the honors. Well, Planetary Society Vice President Bill Nye, the science guy,

is going to start contributing to our show, giving us little segments, little blurbs with his thoughts on the universe and all of his enthusiasm and passion. That's starting soon. PB&J, passion, beauty, and joy. We've already started to work on it. We've got a couple in the can, as they say. We're just going to build up a little backlog. But for those of you out of the country, those of you who live under rocks and don't know who Bill Nye is, stay tuned.

I think you're going to enjoy Bill Nye the Science Guy as a regular contributor to Planetary Radio, coming up in just not very long at all, a few weeks. Okay. Alright, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about if dragons like jello, what kind of jello would they like? Thank you, and good night. I thought dragons would be

partial pudding myself. Well, we know they like pudding. It's the jello I'm uncertain of. Bread pudding. He's the jello I'm uncertain of. Bread pudding. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society

in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.