Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Renaissance Space Man: Dr. William Hartmann Talks About His Novels, Art and Research

Episode Date: January 27, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan, accomplished planetary scientist, popular writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a terrific artist. Dr. Bill Hartman may have earned the right to be called a Renaissance man, a term that is often applied to him. The author of Mars Underground and most recently Cities of Gold will join us on this week's Planetary Radio. Later it will be water, water everywhere on Mars,

but not a liquid drop to drink when we rejoin Bruce Betts. Bruce will also unveil this week's trivia contest question. First up, though, Emily takes us to the asteroid belt with questions and answers. Look, up in the sky, it's this week's Planetary Radio. This week's Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener from Greece asked us, What can that asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter be?

Is it a destroyed planet? We gave this question to Dr. Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801, there was great joy in finding what many had considered to be a missing planet in the large gap between Mars and Jupiter. But joy turned to dismay when Heinrich Olbers found a second asteroid palace in 1802. Olbers reasoned that the missing planet must actually be in pieces, an idea confirmed as more asteroids were discovered. Today, we know of more than 15,000 asteroids.

Now we have a better understanding of the physical nature of the asteroid belt, and the idea of a destroyed planet just doesn't fit the facts. I'll return to explain how the asteroid belt actually formed in a few minutes. So, Bill Hartman, do you ever get tired of being called a Renaissance man? Uh, yeah, I guess so. Well, if I'm called a Renaissance man too much, to just turn around and start something new, right? But that just confirms the diagnosis, doesn't it? We are talking with Bill Hartman, and you're at your home, or specifically your studio at your home?

I'm at a studio that I have here at home. You know, I think by the time you get to my age, which is early 60s, you discover that the office is the place where you can't get anything done anymore because there's too much going on there. So the studio is a place I can retreat to and get some writing done or get some painting done, get some ideas. And we should say that your studio, your home, your work are all in Tucson, Arizona, the Southwest, which you have a bit of a love affair with, don't you? Yeah. We have a group here, the Planetary Science Institute, with, by the way, a tip of the hat to the Planetary Society, which has helped support some programs and done some joint programs with us.

And I came to Arizona back in the early 60s as a graduate student from Pennsylvania, so that was a big transition from all that bushy green to sort of halfway to Mars. That's a nice way of putting it, halfway to Mars. Is that part of the appeal? Yeah, I think it really is. When I came here, I had never seen lava flows, craters, deserts, When I came here, I had never seen lava flows, craters, deserts, some of the phenomena that we deal with on other planets all the time. And we used to, some of us graduate students, get in our old Ford Falcon and go off to lava flows in Mexico and crazy places.

Now I wouldn't go without a four-wheel drive. Yeah, there's a lot here that are good analogs to other planets. And that's interesting to me from both a pure sort of science point of view, you know, geological analysis and so forth, but also just to kind of absorb the ambiance of what those environments might be like for being on other planets. And, you know, as you know, I like to make pictures of these things, make paintings and so forth. So sitting out there and doing that is really interesting once you've looked at pictures

of Mars and the Moon and Ganymede and so forth. We start to get into a pretty interesting topic that we definitely want to talk about during this brief conversation, and that is the fact that you are both an accomplished artist, and we'll leave the writing out for a moment, although we're going to get to that later, but also very much a scientist. You are on the imaging team of an incredibly successful mission, the Mars Global Surveyor, and that means that you spend your day, I assume, examining these incredible images of the red planet. Am I right?

Yeah, that's right. And anybody can do that now. These are posted both by NASA and the Malan Space Science Systems website, msss.com. So anybody can explore these. And this is a Mars Global Surveyor camera, a big, whacking great telephoto camera in orbit over Mars. It's seeing things the size of a bus. And we try to target it to interesting places.

And it's fascinating going through these pictures. And you realize a lot of the time, and really anybody who looks at the web could realize this for themselves, that you're almost the first human being to critically look at some of these pictures. In reality, you might be the tenth human being to really sit down and look at them, or the third or something like that. So there's a lot of fascinating stuff to go through there. Do you consider yourself in that sense an explorer? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think that's the mindset you want to have. That's the fun of being on an imaging team on a new mission.

phenomena, but this sense of just kind of getting out there and exploring and feeling what it's like and trying to make links in your mind, you know, how does this feature link to something else, what could be causing this? You know, I think that's the sense that you like to cultivate when you're doing that. Well, you come at that from a fairly unique angle. You're probably not quite alone, but scientists, planetary scientists in particular, who are also artists, that's a pretty rare breed. There's a number of us. There's Dan Derda and there's a few others, but yeah, that's right.

And I think that's partly because in the 20th century and now the 21st century, there's a sense of specialization. And you go to graduate school and you're really trained in one thing. And if you're in your second year of graduate school and you start fooling your, you know, you're studying planetary science or geophysics or something, and you start fooling around with the piano or you start fooling around with painting and that kind of thing, it's viewed as if you're not being serious about your studies. And I think that's a little bit too bad.

And I like the old 19th century model where, you know, a leading scientist could play the violin, for instance, like Einstein, who, after all, could play the violin, or sit down and play Beethoven, or, you know, that kind of thing. I like the idea of a good scientist being really well-rounded and interested in a lot of things. And a lot of scientists move in that direction as they get older because now they can do it. But it's a little bit too bad to me to talk to all the graduate students who feel that they're not allowed to branch out into a lot of other things. Do you think that your artistic abilities, talents, have given you, if not an advantage, at least a different way of looking or even a different way of knowing about the work that you do,

which is, after all, very much tied to looking at images? I think about that a lot, and I think you said it right, that I'm coming around to the idea that there are different ways of knowing about things. When I was in high school and college and studying physics, I think if you had asked me, I'd say, well, physics, science covers 90% of all the phenomena we see in the world. Maybe not understand everything perfectly, but we're at least dealing with that. And the more I think about this, the more I think that astronomy and physics and planetary science, this is kind of a heretical thing to say, maybe only deals with 10% of

the phenomena that are going on in the world. An example of that, sort of a crazy example, is that along with some colleagues, I've studied asteroids for some time, particularly in the 80s. We'd go to Mauna Kea Observatory and measure colors and spectra of asteroids, and we're all trying to figure out what they're made out of. And there's certain specific spectra techniques. You're looking for absorption bands and so forth. And it began to dawn on me when I would come back here to the studio and maybe try to paint a picture of an asteroid, that here we were measuring these colors scientifically,

and they're expressed in certain modes, you know, in the magnitude system that astronomers use. And you look at the difference between the amount of red light and the amount of blue light, and that'll be 0.327 magnitudes or something like that. Nobody knew what those measured colors actually were in terms of what human beings perceive as colors. It was crazy. I mean, we had all these measurements of asteroids, and a dozen of us around the world or more devoting professional career time to trying to measure these colors. And you'd say, well, we know it's a reddish color. There's more red light than blue

light. And we know this thing is pretty dark, but is that sort of a Hershey bar brown? Or is that like black velvet, but a slightly warm tone? Or is it actually reddish like redwood paint, or what is it? I mean, how would it look if you were out there? And, you know, there's a number of examples like that that fascinate me where we devote our careers to measuring something, but we never quite take the final step to turn it into human terms. I don't know quite what that means, but I think there's that dimension of human adventure and, as you said, exploration that comes into this, and that we don't want to just back off so far that we only experience something

in, let's say, a purely mathematical way or some kind of cerebral way, but we don't really know what it's like from the other aspects of our human body. We would be missing something, I take it. We have only a few seconds left before we need to take a break. I do want to mention that anyone who's interested in seeing your artwork, it is on your personal web page at the PSI, that is the Planetary Science Institute website, and we will have that link available on the Planetary Society website

along with this edition to Planetary Radio. And I do know, though, that if anybody puts in the name William K. Hartman, H-A-R-T-M-A-N-N, into Google or your favorite search engine, I use Google, it's going to come up and they can take a look at this work that you've done, your personal visualizations of things that no human being has ever seen in some cases. And I guess we will take a break for a moment, if that's all right with you, Bill, and we'll come back and maybe explore that element of the explorer that you see in your job and how that's entered into your writing as well. Terrific. I'll be here.

We are talking with Dr. William Hartman, planetary scientist, and we will continue that conversation right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report.

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We're back with Dr. Bill Hartman of the Planetary Science Institute, accomplished artist and author and explorer, as he said. And it's that element of exploration which also overlaps his other interests, the science and the writing in particular. And, Bill, I'm thinking of the book that you have, your last novel, which just came out last November. It is Cities of Gold, and it is all about exploration. It is, really, and thanks for bringing that up. It's a case where, having come here to southern Arizona, I got interested in the Coronado expedition that came through.

They were the first European explorers. They were coming up from Mexico trying to find out what was to the north. They thought they were going to encounter wealthy cities, hence the title. They did find this Seven Cities of Cibola, which was a big Native American trading center in western New Mexico, the city of Zuni now, Zuni Cuevas. They left all kinds of records and documents and letters, and it's fascinating to go through those and kind of meet those people as actual individual personalities. And that's what really got me into it.

And I quoted a lot of those letters and documents in the novel. There were people just coming out of the Dark Ages and going into the Renaissance and trying to re-understand the world. There were debates, for example. I mean, talk about links to space exploration and finding aliens. There were actually scholastic debates going on at that time about whether the people, that is, the Native American people that they found in the New World, were human beings and had souls. And, you know, did they have the moral right to simply enslave them on the grounds that they weren't human beings?

And this was one of the big arguments of the day. So, you know, there's a lot of interesting issues there. You know, the first thing I thought of when you described that, and the closest parallel I can think of now, is a minor debate that may grow larger in our budding exploration of Mars and whether we have the right to disturb any native life that may be on Mars. Does it carry the same value as our own? That's absolutely right. That's the link.

And I thought, you know, maybe science fiction readers, my book isn't science fiction, but I thought my earlier novel, Mars Underground, is science fiction and deals with that a little bit. But I thought at least some of those readers might find that interesting if they read this Cities of Gold because, I mean, that's correct. You know, a lot of us are concerned about the attitude that we Americans have toward countries in the rest of the world, this kind of supercilious sort of attitude.

And, gee, you know, you really see that in that Spanish mindset, that they were this superior, you know, Christian civilization with, you know, the moral right to do whatever they wanted to the underling people that they found in the New World. And so that debate, there's three levels. The way it was expressed in the 1500s, as I just mentioned, the way it's going on in sort of modern American culture now and our relation to the rest of the world. And as you say, in the future, what do we do on other planets?

Yes, whether we're going to have a prime directive or not, I guess. There's another element of this, which we were talking about before we started recording. Another very interesting parallel between that earlier age of exploration and our own. And that is sort of the hiatus that some people see in our own time compared to, let's say, during the late 60s, early 70s, when the Apollo missions were having such glorious success. Yeah, that's right. It's something I began to notice as I was writing the book and thinking about the Apollo missions, and really the Coronado expedition was the Apollo mission of that period.

I mean, it was enormous, and they had about 1,200 people and animals and all sorts of things that they brought up here. Many people invested in it. Basically, they expected to find wealth that they could carry away, transportable wealth, probably basically gold like they found among the Aztecs and the Incas. That had been just the previous 10 years, so it was a very reasonable expectation. And they didn't find this, and so it was viewed as a failure. And they didn't come back.

The Spanish just didn't come back for about 40 years, 40 or 50 years. And it looks like we're doing the same thing with the Moon. Now, you know, our expectations were a little bit different, but we had this big social push to go to the Moon and then canceled the last few Apollo missions, kind of a lack of interest in 1972, and 30 years later, you know, we still haven't been back to the moon. And you can actually start looking and finding other parallels. There's similar parallels at the North Pole and the South Pole of the Earth.

There's Mars landers. We went with Viking in 1976, and then it took until 1997 to get another lander on Mars. Something's going on in the human psyche that we get psyched up to do something like that. The psychic energy goes away somehow, and maybe it just takes a generation to reflect on what we've done and what do we want to do next and sort of absorb the result. But I think it's quite interesting that this happens. And if that's so, and if we only have to wait a generation,

then it's the young folks today ought to be putting this out there. Maybe we're starting to see that in some of the efforts to find cheaper ways to get to orbit, to get up into space. I would certainly point to, as a point of inspiration, the Planetary Society Solar Sail Project, the Cosmos One Project. Let's stick with your writing, though. You're certainly not done writing, are you? Well, no.

I've really enjoyed nonfiction. I've done some nonfiction books about the solar system. You know, going back, this started with writing textbooks. Of course, I was writing scientific papers. I got an opportunity to do a textbook textbook then started writing my nonfiction book and then going into fiction each of these steps to me was uh... you you kind of get to where there's too many limitations in that

genre and and for me that the the novel is the one that you can do anything you want what you say is a novel is a novel. And to me, a novelist is like a scientist of the human soul or something. You're trying to... The kinds of novels I like are not just, quote, just, unquote, entertainment, but you're meeting somebody that's done something and gone someplace and has some views.

The author is somebody that you're interested in what they have to say, and they've gone through some experience, and they're putting that back out, and that's what I like about the novels. But when you talk about limitations of nonfiction, you wrote a modest little book called The History of the Earth, which was very well reviewed. It doesn't sound like there were too many limitations on that. No, but, you know, you are, there's a box there. You're trying to put out what's known.

You certainly don't want to take a flight of fancy. You don't want to misquote somebody. You know, the kinds of things that you're doing as you write, it's fun. It's wonderful. And, you know, you're trying to get across the excitement of what's going on. you know at some point uh i don't know i just felt like uh you know gee you've absorbed a lot of experience in your life and how do you put this back out in some interesting way and i think that's what drew me to the novel and you know on the cities of gold novel well let me back up the mars underground novel a lot of the Mars presentation was based on, as we said earlier,

going out into the desert here in Arizona, going up to observe at Mauna Kea, at the summit of Mauna Kea, 14,000 feet, no plants, all red rocks and lava. It looks just like Mars. All this construction equipment lying around from the different observatory domes, I think that's just what Mars is going to look like when we start operating there. And in the case of the Cities of Gold novel, there's actually two stories there. One set in modern Tucson and southern Arizona and down into Sonora, Mexico, and then a parallel story in alternate chapters with these Coronado characters

and their letters and documents. parallel story and alternate chapters with these Coronado characters and their letters and documents. And I tried to weave those together to show, I don't know, a sense of the long timescale of things that if you're aware of centuries instead of just worrying about this week, everything becomes more interesting, the landscape's more interesting. You know, oh, this is where that happened. Oh my gosh, my gosh, this is where that guy died. Those kinds of things you start seeing all around you. It just makes things really interesting. I think also you start seeing these parallels.

I mean, another parallel is the conquistador mentality that they had that I think, well, I guess we said it a minute ago, it sort of carries over into modern life. Where did that come from? Why are we Americans the way we are? And why do different nationalities have different traits and so forth? All those ideas are in there. Certainly a warning, at least, something to stay aware of. We have less than a minute left. Your next literary venture, I think you're returning to nonfiction,

and it's time to coincide with an exciting thing that's going to be happening in the skies. Can you give us a 30-second preview? Yeah, I have a book coming out with Workman in New York, and we're calling it A Traveler's Guide to Mars. And it's a look at a lot of the best of the pictures from Mars Global Surveyor, and the framework is to pick about three dozen places on Mars that are interesting and tie them together into a story about the history of that planet and why it's interesting and what are the exciting things we're finding.

And this is coming out, what, May, June, which is about... That's what we hope for, so stay tuned. Yes, and keep looking at the skies. And we will look forward to that, Tom, and mention that Cities of Gold, your most recent literary work, your novel, was published last November. It is from Forge, and I know for a fact it's

available from Amazon, and I suppose I should mention that anybody wanting to get to Amazon, you can do that too directly from the Planetary Society website. We have a link. And we have been talking with Dr. Bill Hartman, the author of that book, and Bill, we'll look forward to talking to you again

perhaps about Mars or of any of another huge range of topics, we'll look forward to talking to you again, perhaps about Mars or of any of another huge range of topics, which I think you are qualified to speak on. Thanks very much. It's lots of fun to talk about these things. Planetary Radio will return in just a moment. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. It was once believed that the asteroid belt is a destroyed planet, but now we know that the asteroids are actually remnants of a planet that never got a chance to form in the first place. In order for planetesimals orbiting a young star to merge into a single

large planet, they must be on nearly circular orbits. This is because, when two planetesimals on nearby circular orbits collide, they're not moving very fast with respect to each other, so they gently bump together, fusing into a larger object. But giant Jupiter's gravity was strong enough to disturb the orbits of planetesimals in orbits close to Jupiter's gravity was strong enough to disturb the orbits of planetesimals in orbits close to Jupiter's in the asteroid zone. As a result, the asteroids' orbits became elliptical or oval-shaped instead of circular. Planetesimals on these elongated orbits bumped into each other too fast for them to fuse, so only a few small protoplanets like Ceres and Vesta managed to form, and a great many planetesimals remained.

This is exciting because it means that the planetesimals orbiting in the asteroid zone are leftover building blocks from the earliest days of the solar system, clues to our distant past. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org, and you may hear it answered by a leading space scientist or expert. Be sure to provide your name and how to pronounce it,

and tell us where you're from. And now, here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts rejoins us for What's Up? at the end of each Planetary Radio show. We have a number of topics to cover today. Are we going to talk about what's up in the sky first, Bruce? Yes, we are. It's kind of interesting. We've got all five planets that are visible to the naked eye, are visible to the naked eye in the sky right now. In the evening, you can see Saturn and Jupiter. You can see Saturn rises early and by about 10 p.m. is right overhead.

By about 10 p.m. is right overhead. And if you look up, it's the brightest thing in that area. It's above Orion. We've also got Jupiter, which is rising right at sunset, basically, and is overhead at midnight. And, in fact, on February 1st and 2nd, depending on where you're living, it reaches opposition, meaning it's on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning it'll be directly overhead as high as it gets right at midnight. So that's where Jupiter is.

If you go out in the very early morning, say an hour before sunrise, then you can see three planets, although two are a little bit of a challenge. You've got Venus, really, really bright, brightest thing out there in the east. You've got Mars to its upper right, dim and red. And now you're starting to be able to see Mercury, very low down in the lower left of Venus and very low down. Mercury is not that often easy to see I think I remember. No it's not easy to see for very long but it's easy to see it's period being shorter going around the sun we

we have opportunities to see it more frequently but they don't last very long. One other thing to mention is we've got a nice vision of the moon. It's going to be very near Venus on January 28th. Okay, so January 28th, Tuesday. That'll be something else to look for, and I hope the skies will be clear here in Southern California so that I can head out there as well. What else have you got for us this week? Well, this week in space history marks two of the darkest times in space history, unfortunately. We had on January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 astronauts White, Grissman, Chaffee died in a cockpit fire during the launch pad test.

And January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing astronauts Scobie, Smith, Resnick, Onizuka, McNair, McAuliffe, and Jarvis. So the two space disasters in American space history both occurring one day apart. And, you know, reluctant to bring these kinds of downers up, but it's important for us to remember. Yes, indeed. Let's move on. A little bit more cheerful topic here. All right. Random space fact!

Did you know, you probably did, Matt, but maybe some of our listeners don't know that liquid water does not currently occur on Mars because of the cold temperatures and particularly the low atmospheric pressures. So water on Mars currently acts like carbon dioxide does on Earth. Dry ice goes straight from a solid to a gas and back and forth. Now, the big questions in Mars history are how it acted before, and there's clearly evidence of liquid water and how that happened

is of interest to many scientists. All right, Bruce, let's close out with the interactive portion of Planetary Radio, and that, of course, is our trivia contest. But first, let's find out what was the correct answer to last week's question. Last week's question was how long is a day on Venus, and the amount of time it takes for Venus to rotate once, or really the amount of time for the sun to return to the same point in the sky. This is actually 243 Earth days, so extremely long. And we had, I guess, several winners this week. Is that correct?

We sure did. We had seven correct winners. And, of course, we only give out one T-shirt a week, folks. And so we reached into the virtual Planetary Society hat, and out came Chad Stellwright. Chad Stellwright of Shell Lake, Wisconsin, is our winner this week. Congratulations, Chad, for the rest of you who got those correct answers in. Try again this week. We're going to have another question for you

right now. Right now, another question. And this one, we're going a little bit different direction. Who is the first American to eat food in space? Oh, my goodness. That's a departure. Good luck trying to find this one on the web, folks, at some NASA site. Obviously, Bruce, you dug this up.

Was it Tang? Well, maybe we should define more accurately. There probably was Tang as a chaser. But we're really looking for something pretending to be food. And at that time, it was only pretending. But, no, actually, the first food, interestingly enough, eaten by an American in space, they really spent a lot of money on the rest of the space program. So basically, they were using leftover monkey chow from the rhesus monkeys.

Are you serious? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. I am completely and totally not serious on that point. Okay. But thanks for playing. With that, tell our listeners how they can enter this week's contest. Go to planetary.org and follow the links to Planetary Radio,

and from there you'll be able to enter our contest to answer who was the first American to eat monkey chow, I mean food, in space. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he is with us every week for this segment that we call What's Up. Thanks very much, Bruce. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you. Good night.

Buckle up. Drive safely. That's it for this week's Planetary Radio. We hope you'll join us again next Monday at 5.30 p.m. Pacific here on KUCI or at KUCI.org. And remember, whenever you've just got to have more, you'll find all of our shows at the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. All of us hope you have a great week. Thanks for listening. Planetary Radio is a production of the Planetary Society, which is solely responsible for its content.

Our producer is Matt Kaplan. Other contributors include Charlene Anderson, Monica Lopez, and Jennifer Vaughn. The executive producer is Dr. Louis Friedman. This edition of Planetary Radio is copyrighted by the Planetary Society. All rights are reserved. Your questions and comments are always welcome. Write to planetaryradio at planetary.org.