Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Rogue World Wanders as PlanetVac Heads for the Moon and Mars

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

In a jam-packed episode, we’ll talk to a discoverer of a distant, lonely planet that wanders the galaxy, and then turn to plans to send a radically-simple sample collection system to the Moon and Mars’ moon Phobos. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye will add his congratulations for the PlanetVac team. We’ve also got a signed copy of Bill’s latest book for the winner of the new What’s Up space trivia contest. Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/1111-2020-poleski-rogue-planet-zacny-planetvacSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A distant world wanders the galaxy, and PlanetVac heads into space this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. So much to share with you today, we'll talk with astronomer Radek Pileski, whose team has used relativity to discover an Earth-sized planet that is nearly a quarter of the way across the Milky Way. Then we'll turn to Chris Zachney of Honeybee Robotics, along with our own Bruce Betts, to learn how the radically simple gas-driven sample collection system called PlanetVac, will soon head for the Moon and Mars. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye will share some thoughts, too, and it's a signed copy of Bill's newest book

that someone will soon win in the What's Up Space Trivia contest Bruce will announce. That pale blue dot where we all live tops the November 6th edition of the downlink. You'll find these stories, among others below it, beginning with word that there may be as many as 300 million habitable planets in our own galaxy alone. We've also learned that the European Space Agency's little Philae lander, carried to Comet 67P by Rosetta tumbled through ancient surface ice that was, and I'm quoting, fluffier than cappuccino froth. And if you want to see how our solar system's biggest worlds may have migrated outward from much closer to the sun,

well, we've got the video at planetary.org slash downlink. Here's something that is not in the downlink. It's my personal thanks to those of you who took a few moments to leave us ratings and reviews in Apple Podcasts across the last few days. I'm still hoping more of you will join them. I learned a remarkable thing a couple of weeks ago. An international team led from the University of Warsaw in Poland announced that it had discovered an exoplanet. Did I hear you say, so what? Or maybe you agree with me that the discovery of any world is worthy of celebration. But this one is wandering the galaxy on its own,

tens of thousands of light years from Earth. And we can once again thank Albert Einstein's insights for enabling its discovery. Astronomer Radek Poleski is one of the leaders of that team. He joined me from Warsaw a few days ago. Dr. Poleski, welcome to Planetary Radio and congratulations on this nearly miraculous discovery of this little world that is off floating across the Milky Way all by itself. We're glad to have you on with us on Planetary Radio. Good afternoon. Before we talk about how you and this team made this amazing discovery, I'd like to hear

more about this lonely little world. What can you tell us about it? Yeah, so you said the most important part, meaning it's lonely. So we found a planet that seems to be just a single planet that is not orbiting any star. Like Earth orbits the sun, this little planet seems to have no star around it. So it's just a single planet. There's nothing more really. I have read that our current understanding of planet formation and what happens in solar systems indicates that this single example may be just one of what, millions across our galaxy? I'm pretty sure there are more such planets in the galaxy. It's very hard to find

them. So we found one that has very small mass. And I'm almost sure there are planets with smaller masses. We have just a few such objects that we currently know. And we know that it's very hard to discover them. So the real number must be much, much higher. Do we know how far away this world is? We know it's closer than the galactic bulge. That's for sure. Because we detected the planet in a very rare phenomenon that is called gravitational microlensing. And microlensing happens when the light of the background, more distant source of light, travels next to a massive object, in this case a planet, and the gravity of the planet bends the light rays. The effect of that is that we receive more light from the source. And in this case, as is the case for most of the microlensing events,

the source is in the galactic bulge. So 8.5 kiloparsecs from us, 25-something thousand light years from us. And for sure we know that the lens, meaning the planet that we found, is closer to us. And for sure, we know that the lens, meaning the planet that we found, is closer to us. Most probably, it's around 6,000 parsecs away. And what would that be in light years? Do you know offhand? Around 20,000. Absolutely amazing to think that not only has this world, which I've read is maybe just the size of our own, of Earth, could be found at that kind of distance. And we'll talk more about gravitational lensing in a moment. So when you say on this side of the galactic bulge,

that's largely because it's so difficult to see through that bulge, which is basically the core of our galaxy. Is that correct? Microlensing is a very rare phenomenon because we need a source and a lens and us as an observer to be aligned almost exactly at

one straight line. If you observe a million stars for a year, then most probably you will see only a single case of micro lensing. We observe galactic bulge because that's the place on the sky where we can see lots of stars. And then we see the microlensing events where the sources are the stars in the

galactic bulge. And the lenses can be either in the galactic bulge or in the galactic disks, slightly closer. I see. Before we leave this world, I have to ask, is it crazy to talk about whether a rogue planet like this could be habitable? Yes, that does sound like a crazy question. But then I think of someplace like the moon Enceladus at Saturn, which has liquid water inside it. It was thought for years to be far too small for that. It's fairly distant from Saturn, so it's not hugely influenced by Saturn's gravity, as is a world like Europa and Jupiter.

Do you think that this is even worth talking about, whether it is a habitable world, or is that a real possibility? For sure it's worth talking about. It's, I would say, a very important scientific question. And it's important not only to scientists, but for the society as a whole. The problem is that it's very hard to verify if there's any possibility of light on this planet or not. We don't know that much about the planet. What we can say, though, we don't know that much about the planet what we can say though

is that there are two main mechanisms that could produce this object so first of all this object could be formed in a similar way as stars form meaning a collapse of a single cloud of gas it just happened that this one has smaller mass than the stars very small mass in this case so that's one has smaller mass than the stars. Very small mass in this case.

So that's one possibility. The other is that this planet was ejected from a planetary system that had more planets and these planets were orbiting a star. In this case, in this second scenario, it's possible that some forms of life started on the planet while it was orbiting

its star, and then when the planet was ejected due to gravitational interactions between planets, then the life still survived for some time. It's hard to say, you know, much more than that, but for sure

we would like to know the answer to the questions you're posing. It is a stunning possibility. We have talked about gravitational lensing several times in the past on our show, usually in terms of revealing giant structures like galaxies that formed very early in the history of the universe. I was very surprised to learn that it could work with something as small as a planet. And from what you have said, the gravitational lens, in this case, may have been another planet, something no bigger or roughly in the same size range as the planet that has been revealed?

Yes. All the time I'm talking about gravitational microlensing. And microlensing means that the additional images that are formed are so close to each other that we cannot separate them on images taken from the ground or from Hubble Space Telescope. We just see that we are receiving more flux from the ground or from Hubble Space Telescope. We just see that we were receiving more flux from the source than we should have if there was no microlensing. Such events happen in the galactic scales, and that's why we observe the galactic bulge. Currently, we detect more than 2,000 microlensing events per year.

more than 2,000 microlensing events per year. Small percentage of those shows not only that there's the main lensing object, which is a star in most cases, but also some additional object, which in some cases happens to be a planet. In this case, we see extremely short microlensing events. So this event, the timescale of the event was 42 minutes. Wow. So it's something extremely short, really. And over these 42 minutes, the whole event happened.

If you compare that to the galaxy lensing about which we talked before, then these galactic lenses don't change. They slightly change over our lifetime, but they're extremely similar from one epoch to another. Here we have something completely different and completely different observing strategy. We don't need huge telescopes. We need moderate-sized telescopes,

but with large cameras with big field of view so that we can see many stars at a time. And then you use that to study lots of stars and from those stars to search for these very rare microlensing events. And we will talk about a very wide field telescope that is hopefully going to be headed for space before too many more years pass, one that you are hoping to work with. But for now, we'll stick with how it's being done from the surface of our planet. You talked about how rare it is to make this kind of discovery, but I hope that you can tell us about the program that you and this team have been working with for 28 years now, which I see is OGLE. It stands for the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment.

What do you actually call it? Do you call it OGLE or OGLE? That was the idea behind the acronym. I love it. Tell us about OGLE. OGLE is a long-term photometric survey. It started in 1992 at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile at the one-meter telescope called SWOPE.

A few years later, a separate telescope was built only for this project. It's called Warsaw Telescope. It has a diameter of 1.3 meters. Every few years, we're attaching a new larger camera to the telescope. Currently, the camera is so large that no larger camera can fit underneath the telescope. So we're using full capacity of the telescope. The project started relatively small compared to what we're doing right now. Right now, we're monitoring 2 billion

stars regularly and we're observing the galactic bulge to search for microlensing events and variable stars we're also observing magellanic clouds where we search for cepheids where we did some other studies of the variable stars. We also observed the galactic disk fields. A year ago, we published a paper where we analyzed the structure of the galaxy. We said, based on cepheids, we showed that the galaxy is warped. So that was quite a well-publicized result.

We observed the star on which we seen the planetary signal. We observed the source star, in this case, for 23 years. So since we built the second telescope was built. At that time, I was not involved in astronomy at all. But the heads of the project, and most importantly, Professor Andrzej Udalski, they built it and it's in operation since then. Currently, unfortunately, it's not operating due to coronavirus pandemic, but we hope to return

to observations as soon as possible. I read that and I'm sorry that observations had to end, but of course the pandemic has gotten in the way of so much of human activity, including science. I would say the observations are paused, not ended. Ah, yes, that's a much better way to put it. I am still blown away when I hear an astronomer like yourself say that you are monitoring two billion stars with one instrument. That must be quite a wide field. Yes, the field of view of the camera is 1.4 square degrees.

So it's more or less six times larger than the size of the full moon on the sky. And we take a single image of that size every two minutes in the galactic bulge. So we take quite a lot of data. I hope that listeners will go to our show page at planetary.org slash radio for this week's episode, because there we have links to the OGLE website, and you'll be able to see simulations of what happens.

It's actually quite fascinating to see what happens as this source that causes the lensing crosses the path of what it's going to reveal. It is absolutely fascinating to see. What do you actually see? Is it an image or is it just a light curve? Yes, so the images we're taking, they look very dense, meaning there are lots of sources of light. In fact, one on top of another. We can resolve the brighter ones, the very faint ones.

We cannot, in fact, resolve there's one on top of another what we've seen was slight brightening of one of these sources, so it didn't get bigger it just got slightly brighter and slightly I mean that I think most of us would not be able to see

a difference between the two images even if we knew it was time to look at what objects. And of course, we don't know. So it's a really small amplitude, short episode. Though in this case, I would say it's important to know that we're sure the event really happened. It's not that we had maybe some problem with our camera

or some other thing. And I know that because the same event was observed by a different collaboration and different telescope with a different camera. And that was one of the telescope belonging to Korean microlensing telescope network. And they've seen their data confirmed our finding. So what we see on images is just the brightening. Then we turn it to light curve, as you said, meaning we have a graph which shows on the x-axis time

and on the y-axis brightness. And we've seen a signal we were looking for. Can you envision a day in which it would actually be possible to image a tiny object like this that is so far away? Honestly, not. I don't think in my lifetime we will be able to image such an object. We could image bigger objects that are closer and somehow similar, but really what we see is an effect of gravity of this object, and it has nothing to do with how bright it is. We only see gravitational signal of the object, not its brightness.

So it's unlikely we'll see any light from it in my lifetime. I'm afraid that does sound likely. But let's talk about the future. I mentioned that other space telescope, now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly the WFIRST. You are looking forward to making observations with it? Yes, yes. That's an extremely exciting possibility to have such a telescope.

So it will be a telescope quite similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, but it will only observe in near-infrared bands, though its camera will be 100 times larger than the Hubble telescope camera. It will have a few different main programs, and one of them is to conduct a survey of the galactic bulge in order to search for planets via microlensing. I'm sure that this survey will discover many other important things including an order of hundred thousand transiting planets but its main goal would be to search for planets using microlensing and it will overcome some of the problems that we have from the ground,

which simply cannot be overcome just by having more telescopes and taking deeper exposures and so on. One of the important aspects of the Roman telescope is that it will be able to observe selected fields in the galactic bulge continuously. Every 15 minutes we will have an image and on the ground you always, depending on the weather, on moon maybe, you have a day when you cannot observe given fields and with Roman telescope we will have deeper images.

They'll be in near infrared bands, so it'll be really much deeper, in fact, than from the ground we're getting right now. And we'll have lots of those. So we'll see thousands of microlensing planets in this data for sure. That's very exciting to know that that is not far

off in our future. I have to ask you about something that is much farther out, if it ever happens. And I don't know that you've ever heard of this project, but it is one we've talked about on our show. The lead, the principal investigator is a gentleman at the Jet Propulsion Lab named Slava Turashev, who's been my guest. He's working with my old boss, Lou Friedman, one of the founders of the Planetary Society. They are researching the possibility of sending a spacecraft and using our own sun to do gravitational microlensing. And then the spacecraft would be able to move around so that different

objects, we would be able to do the microlensing with them. Is this something you've heard about? And whether you have or not, what do you think of that kind of mission? I'm not aware of that one. It's the first time I hear about it. It's known that we can use objects, we can try to use objects at the distance similar to Kuiper belt to observe microlensing on them as lenses.

Though it's hard for me to say if you're really able to point it to any specific source. Yeah, so if you have a spacecraft that you can control, yeah, then it gives maybe more possibilities than I've heard before using natural objects in the solar system. It sounds interesting for sure. I have just one other question for you, and it's about the institution where you work. It would appear that the University of Warsaw has been at this work with OGLE

and the gravitational microlensing for many years, and that the university is a real leader in this field. How did you become involved? Poland is my home country, so I was born in Poland. And when I was choosing the university to which I'll go, somebody told me that Warsaw is the best place in Poland to study astronomy. And I think it was true. I did my master's and PhD in Warsaw.

I did my master's and PhD in Warsaw during my master's studies I started to be involved in the Ogil project when I started PhD I was involved in observing so I've been to Las Campanas Observatory many times I've spent more than 500 nights on the mountain and the telescope all together during my life so it's quite a long time I would say after doing PhD I went to Ohio State

University where also this study of microlensing phenomenon is very well established and I met people who are more involved in analysis of the data and running other projects. So I got a good understanding of data analysis, some aspect of data analysis there. I stayed there a few years and then I went back to Poland. So yes, I'm involved in the Ogle project for 11 years now. So it's a big part of my life. That's a lot of time you've spent at the telescope site at Las Campanas.

I've also been up high there in northern Chile, up in the Atacama. It's quite a beautiful place in its own way, isn't it? Yes, it's beautiful and it's beautiful for astronomers. So at the Las Campanas Observatory, the giant Magellan telescope is being built right now, which shows it's one of the best places on the Earth for astronomical observations. Another telescope that we will be talking about, I'm sure, many more times on this program. Radek, thank you again. Congratulations once again to you and the entire team. All of us, I'm sure, wish you many more discoveries of this sort using gravitational microlensing as the work gets back underway with the OGLE experiment. And I hope that that will

happen very soon. Thank you very much. And I hope we'll find many more fascinating objects and we'll try to report them. University of Warsaw astronomer Rodek Pileski, one of the discoverers of that lonely, starless world. I'll be back with a whole series of stars, beginning with Bill Nye, right after this break. What a year it has been for space exploration. Hi, I'm Sarah, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society. Will you help us celebrate 2020's greatest accomplishments? You can cast your votes for the most stunning image, the most exciting mission,

the most surprising discovery, and more at planetary.org slash best of 2020. We've also got special year-end content on our social media channels. Voting is open now at planetary.org slash best of 2020. Long-time listeners know that we've followed the progress of PlanetVac for many years. Its creator, Honeybee Robotics, learned not long ago that their radically simplified system for collecting loose material from the surface of pretty much any rocky body in the solar system had been chosen for two upcoming missions, one to the moon and another to distant Phobos, the bigger moon circling Mars. We'll welcome Honeybee Vice President

and Director of Exploration Technology, Chris Zachney, and our Bruce Betts. First, though, here's a couple of minutes with Planetary Society CEO, Bill Nye. Bill, we'll be talking to Bruce Betts and Chris Acne of Honeybee Robotics in moments here, but I wanted to give you a chance to say something about this accomplishment.

So everyone, we pulled this off. We got funding from support from our members, people like you, to make a more efficient, cheaper way to collect samples from extraterrestrial bodies, like the moon and Mars. This is really an advance. We increase the reliability of this, the amount of sample you can get,

and we do it all using the free helium that's above the tanks of fuel on these spacecraft. It's just a cool idea, and it took years to get the details right so that it would work reliably, but we've got it and we've been selected on two missions. So thanks to our members. Thank you all for your support. This is one of the three legs of our, one of the three pillars of our work at the Planetary Society. We advocate, we educate, and we innovate. PlanetVac is an innovation. So along this line, everybody, there's a fabulous word. It's not a big word, but it's a word you don't hear very often. Ullage. U-L-L-A-G-E. That's the space above the liquid in a tank. It's the space above the fuel in a spacecraft. And so to make sure that the fuel doesn't react to cause a chemical reaction

with anything inside the tank and not contaminate the valves and have some pressure to push it through stuff, traditionally, we fill the ullage above the fuel with helium, which doesn't react with anything. It's the noblest of noble gases. We're using that leftover helium to do this important work. You know, if you talk to a geologist, and as I like to say, some of my best friends are geologists, they'll tell you that if you have a rock from Mars, you can tell who the president was or something. Okay, you guys, you know, pull back, don't get so carried away. But what they're saying is there's tremendous amount of information in a sample brought back from the moon or Mars or an asteroid. The tremendous amount of geological information that is exciting.

And so with your support, my member friends, we have a faster, better, cheaper way to do this. Planet vac. Isn't this a great example of the kind of effort, the kind of project that the society looks for? I mean, we didn't pay for the whole thing, but what our members enabled us to do in supporting it was just enough to catalyze it. That's right. Matt, you hit the nail on the head. No, and we advocated for it. We said, this is something that would work. This is a project we can pursue.

It's not huge, but it's not nothing. And so very excited about it. You know, if we bring back more samples from Mars more cheaply, it's just going to be cool. Because, you know, the thing that I still want to do while I'm still alive, Matt, is find evidence of life on another world. want to do while I'm still alive, Matt, is find evidence of life on another world. Amen. Whether or not it's there, you have to search for evidence of life on Mars. I mean, that's just as logical as it gets. It's exciting. And thanks for asking me about it. You're in love. You want to tell the world, as Carl Sagan always said. And so I love Planet Mac.

And so I love Planet Mac. Except in space, there's no sound. It's just like that. But there's sound on Mars. There's sound on Mars, doggone it. And we're going to have microphones on Mars after February 18th. And we're going to have a planet fest. And it's going to be big fun. And for me, this is all part of the larger idea, the mission of this, the mission

of the Planetary Society, to know the cosmos and our place within it. I am looking forward to all of that, sharing that with you and our members and everybody else out there. Thank you, Bill. I guess in space, no one can hear you suck. Can I say that? I guess you did. Carry on. That's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Chris Zachney, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It has been a while. Bruce Betts, it hasn't been nearly as long for you, but hey, welcome back as well. Thanks, man. Thank you, Matt. I'm super excited to be back on your radio show. It was a while. It's been a couple of years. Bruce, was it 2018 that I think you went out there more than once, but that I got to go out and stand behind sandbags and watch Planet Vac on the foot of a Masten Space System Zodiac rocket and watched it pull up some Mojave Desert dirt? Yes, almost completely correct, except that it was Mars simulant.

But it was in the Mojave Desert, and yes, it was two years ago, and it was big fun watching the rocket flying with Planivac and watching Planivac work so great. I still have, I think, a few flakes of melted reconstituted concrete from underneath the rocket motor. That was very cool. I still have some of that in my

hair. It is so hard to know. And I still have some of that in my hair. It is so hard to get out. And I still have some of the sample. Oh, good. You don't want to give that up. That's going to be worth a lot of money someday. It's ours. Chris, speaking of samples, we are primarily here to celebrate this announcement that was made. It's still as we speak, only about a month ago that PlanetVac is going to the moon and going to Phobos. Let's talk about the moon first. You're going there courtesy of NASA?

Yes. So let's talk about the moon, right? Both Phobos and our moon are moons. Let's talk about the bigger moon. Capital M moon. Capital M moon. This is absolutely thrilling. It's a dream come true. It's just unbelievable how all the pieces came together and a big role, obviously, planetary society. If you remember a couple of years ago, we did end-to-end demonstration of a planet vac in our Mars chamber. And for the first time, we demonstrated that pneumatic sampling into some kind of a container is feasible in vacuum, in a vacuum environment. Up to that point, it was more of a, you know,

nice PowerPoint presentations, get designs and people's imagination. But that was the first time we actually did that. To me, that was the tipping point. NASA picked it up again. So up to that point, NASA spent SBIR or small business innovative research money developing technology. But after the demonstration in the Mars chamber, the next big thing was a flight on the Mustang lander. Again, big, big milestone. For the first time, on the master and lender.

Again, big, big milestone. For the first time, we demonstrated that putting something on the leg of a lender is feasible, that a leg can double as a sampling system and as this thing that touches the planetary surface and holds the rocket or lender upright. Everything just came together. And finally, the announcement of Eclipse, the commercial lunar payload services. This is a new way of doing business. NASA and public or private industry in the circle of PPP, public-private partnership. This is an unbelievable, successful venture. A bunch of good things that industry provides, a lot of things that NASA provides. Each of those sides bring the best to the table.

And that's why this partnership works. And CLIPS works. So as part of CLIPS, we were selected to fly planet Earth to the moon to demonstrate this technology. We're flying to Maricrisium on a mission called 19D. We do not know who is flying us. In fact, either today or sometime next week, NASA will select one of the 14 Eclipse providers to take us to the moon.

No kidding. Yeah, pretty soon we're going to know. Everything is very exciting. We're actually finishing all the slides, getting ready for preliminary design review, which is going to happen beginning of December. We have critical design review sometime in June, July of 2021. And afterwards, we're going to be cutting metal and getting ready for flight. That is very exciting. I know that one of those at least possible landers, I mean,

Masten Space Systems, right, that we were talking about in the Mojave, you could end up again on their lander. Yes, definitely. We could. We could. In fact, they already won one eclipse contract to fly to the moon. There may be, you know, another flight for them. I'm sure they, you know, they eager to know. And we also very, very eager to know. It's just going to be great week next week. I'll say that we're probably doing this a few days early. Bruce, we'll have to mention that during the WhatsApp segment when that lander gets selected that Planet Factor is going to get its ride from. when that lander gets selected that PlanetVac is going to get its ride from.

Even before we go on to talking about this Japanese mission to Phobos, Bruce, this is not just you, but all of us at the Society, our members, should be feeling pretty good about this. Should be feeling very good about this. PlanetVac is a perfect example of what we try to do with our science and technology program and that members make happen by supporting key funding inserts into programs like PlanetVac when they need a funding boost, whether it be the end-to-end lab test in a vacuum in 2013, where we funded a good portion of that, or whether we came in and funded a portion of the Masten flight of some of the work on PlanetVac, where there were critical monetary needs. And we

gave seed money that helped take it to the next level, helped Honeybee out with their fabulous technical expertise. And now we're seeing the ultimate payoff, which is the technology is flying not just on one spacecraft to one location, but on two spacecraft to two locations. And I just want to publicly congratulate Chris and his whole Honeybee team because this has been quite the success for them. Was it around 2013 that I remember you and I going over to Honeybee, their facility in Pasadena, and shooting some video. And it's just hard to believe that it was that long ago that the program was then that early a state.

And you've been our liaison with the company all along. Yeah, unfortunately for Chris, they've had to deal with me all along. They got to deal with nice people too. Yeah, yeah, it was a few years ago that we shot that glorious video hanging out in the honeybee shop with all sorts of toys. Though I don't think they call them toys. And I'm not allowed to touch them because I'm not afraid.

They are toys. They are toys. I'm glad because that's how I think of them, too. Let's go ahead and talk about going to Mars. Chris, I read now this lunar mission. This is a technology demo. So whatever sample PlanetFact picks up, I guess it won't be coming home.

That's not what's going to happen on JAXA's Martian moons exploration or MMX mission. For that one, you should be bringing stuff back, right? Yeah, absolutely. So the work that we've done with Masten and these superb engineers a couple of years ago, demonstrating Planet Deck on the footpath, this work was done in sampling Mars Mojave Simulator. So it's even closer to what we called pneumatic sampler or P-sampler that will be flying on a Japanese mission,

Martian moons exploration to Phobos and Deimos. The primary goal of MMX is to explore both moons and touch down on the surface of Phobos for two, maybe three hours and bring some of the samples back. P-sampler or pneumatic sampler is one of the two sampling systems that will be deployed. There is another one made by JAXA, or Japanese Aerospace Agency, which is a core sampler. Core sampler is sort of like a push tube that robotic arm will push into the Phobos surface, into the Phobos surface, will capture material from 10 centimeters below the surface and put it inside a sample return container. The primary purpose of

a P-sampler is to sample near-surface material from the first few centimeters and deposit into the canister. Once we do that on the surface of Phobos, our job is not done yet. The spacecraft is going to go back into the orbit. And while in orbit, robotic arm is going to come in, will pick up our sample canister, and then insert it into sample return container. So it's going to be very robotic intensive mission. For the first time, we're going to be bringing sample not just from Phobos, but also Martian sample. There is plenty of Martian ejecta floating around Martian orbit, and some of the stuff has fallen on the surface of Phobos. So it's going to be not just the first

Phobos sample return, but also Mars sample return mission. Phobos sample return, but also Mars sample return mission. That's a very important point. Bruce, you've been involved with at least attempts to return samples from Phobos in the past. One in particular, I know that you must be thinking of as I say this. Is there additional scientific significance to accomplishing a mission like this? Yes, definitely. Phobos and Deimos, interestingly, there's still significant debate over where they came from. Did they form around Mars or they captured asteroids? So the

hope is with sample return, you would be able to resolve that, as well as broader science questions about them. Chris, when is MMX supposed to make it back to Earth, returning those samples? Good question. So we're launching in 24, and we're going to be departing around 26. So 26, 27 timeframe, we should be seeing samples back. They're going to re-enter Australia, somewhere in the outback Australia, just like Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2. Chris, before we let you go, I want to congratulate Honeybee Robotics on its contribution to the Perseverance Mars Rover mission, which is now more than halfway through its journey to the red planet. What is Honeybee's role in that mission? For this mission, we had to segue slightly away from

bread and butter robotic system that we normally do. For us, Perseverance offered a completely new challenge. And the challenge was developing hardware that we call witness plate assemblies. Witness plate assemblies is plates and screens and sieves put together into something that looks like a chalk, cylindrical centimeter diameter, couple of centimeter long cylinder. Its job is to witness all of the contamination that the rover has witnessed from a clean room all the way to Mars and during Martian operation. There are five of those. They're sitting in the sampling tubes. Some of them will be exposed only on Mars, and they will witness the environment around the rover. Once those five sampling tubes or witness plate assemblies with sampling tubes

come back, they're going to be analyzed to determine what sort of forward contamination we have brought with us in terms of molecular and particular contaminants. And once we know that, we're going to examine rock samples and soil samples that we bring from Mars to determine if any of those, if we see exactly the same contaminant. And by looking at the two and comparing the two, we'll know whether material is indeed pristine Martian material or whether it has been contaminated by the rover itself. So they're extremely important. They're extremely important. We need these witnesses in order to be absolutely sure about the science that will be coming back by analyzing those samples. To Honeybee, this was the very first hardware that has to reach extreme level of cleanliness. This is probably the cleanest hardware that has ever flown in space. It was an amazing challenge. And this is also going to be the first hardware that will be coming back from Mars. And we're super thrilled about it.

Sounds like a pretty important role to play on this sample return mission from Mars. Bruce, I want to give you a chance, once again, turning to you as a scientist, to remind us of why sample return from Mars, from the surface in this case, has remained such an important goal. fly on our spacecraft, it's still so limited in mass and volume and capability that if you can get samples back to Earth, then you have the full laboratory capability and instrumentation of Earth to work with it. And also the samples can be analyzed by multiple scientists in multiple ways. If you can get samples from Mars with context of what geologic unit you took them out of, then you can bring them back, use Earth laboratory equipment, and really dig down and get a whole other layer of science, much deeper and more profound discoveries. Or at least that's what happens.

That's certainly what happened with lunar samples. Every time we've done sampling in the solar system, hopefully with PlanetVac, it'll happen with Phobos. Bruce, don't go away because in a few minutes, we'll bring you back to tell us what's up in the night sky. But Chris, I'm sure this isn't the last time that we'll be talking either. Best of luck with all of these efforts underway. And there are others we could talk about,

and maybe we'll on a future episode of Planetary Radio. But I guess most immediately, best of luck with that upcoming February landing on Mars and the performance of Honeybee Robotics hardware on the Perseverance rover. Thanks, Matt, and I appreciate all the work Planetary Society has done to advance these technologies. Dream come true, and I'm thrilled that Planetary Society is part of this. Thanks, everyone. As a member, I am very proud that we have had that involvement, and Bruce, that you've been able to coordinate it all for us. You heard there Honeybee Robotics Vice President

and Director of Exploration Technology, Chris Zachney. Also joining us was the Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts. And as I said, he'll be back with us for What's Up. Season's greetings. Bill Nye here. The holidays are racing toward us. We've got the perfect present for the space enthusiast in your life. A gift membership to the Planetary Society will make her or him part of everything we do, like flying our own

light sail spacecraft, two of them, advocating for space exploration, keeping our planet from getting hit by an asteroid, and this show. Sure, you'd like to give them a ticket to the moon or Mars, but I promise you this is the next best thing. Memberships start at $50 a year or just $4 a month. We've got discounts for students, educators, and seniors. Visit us at planetary.org slash gift to learn about the benefits of membership and how easy it is to give someone special the passion, beauty, and joy of space. That's planetary.org slash gift. Thank you and happy holidays.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. And as such, in addition to telling us what's up in the night sky, he has some other duties, including going to conferences and representing us. And you did that last week. Can you tell us about it? Sure. You did that last week. Can you tell us about it?

Sure. I went to the, well, virtually went to the Apophis T-9 years workshop. Oh, so nine years from now, close pass, right? Remind us, how close is the Big Rock going to come? Big Rock will come closer than our geostationary satellites. So a few Earth radii. It will be visible looking like a third magnitude, so fairly bright star passing across the sky if you're in the right half of the world, which would be Europe and Africa and Western Asia. So put it on your 2029 calendars, everybody. I know I am. What did

you come up with at this conference? What was it all about? It was trying to figure out how to best use this opportunity for science, for planetary defense, protecting the Earth from asteroid impact. Again, this isn't going to hit in the near future anyway. But I was presenting, along with my colleague Casey Dreyer, that this is a real opportunity for education about planetary defense and asteroids in general, education about risk, and use it to get the good information out there early, the correct information, and try to head off some of the undoubtedly bogus information that will come out as we grow closer to the encounter. That's right up our alley. So very appropriate. And we're not done talking about asteroids, but what else is up there? What's up there right now? We don't have to wait nine years to see.

A bunch of asteroids if you have big telescopes, but otherwise, a bunch of planets if you have decent eyesight and no clouds. We've got Jupiter and Saturn still hanging out in the southwest in the early evening, Jupiter being the much brighter one. On the 18th of November, the crescent moon will join them for a lovely little triplet. And then we've got Mars up in the evening as well over in the towards the east, the southeast, and it's still looking super bright, but it is fading gradually as Earth and Mars get farther away. And then in the pre-dawn sky, dominating the east is super bright Venus. We've also got an apparition of Mercury going on right now below Venus to its lower left, Mercury looking like a bright star,

not nearly as bright as Venus, but still bright, but always low to the horizon. So I get a clear view to the eastern horizon in the pre-dawn. You can see Venus and below it Mercury. And if you look on the 13th of November, you will see a moon hanging out. It's our moon. It's the moon, just to be clear. Capital M moon, as we said during one of the conversations today. Indeed. Let us go on to this week in space history. There was some significant, a lot of stuff happened. I'll mention just a couple of them that are having factors of 10 anniversaries. 50 years ago this week, Lunokhod 1

became the first rover on another world, on the moon in 1970. 10 years later, so 40 years ago, Voyager 1 did its flyby of Saturn. Good ones, yeah. All right, on to 4, 3, 2, 1. Random space fact, Random space fact. Random space fact. Lavochkin Association of Russia in 1993, they sold Luna COD 2 and the Luna 21 lander that went along with it at a Sotheby's auction. These are on the moon, to be clear.

And for $68,000 US dollars, Richard Garriott bought them. And to my knowledge, still owns them. Richard Garriott, the son of astronaut Owen Garriott, and an astronaut himself is a space tourist, computer gaming entrepreneur. Owns Lunacod 2 and Luna 21. I hope that somebody hasn't stolen the wheels by the time he gets up there. Well, even a Lunacod on blocks is still worth something. And you can always hang out in the trailer park next door. Yeah, right. Lunar next door. Yeah, right. Lunar trailer trash.

That's right. All right. Bring us back from this weird place we've gone. Let us take you to the weird place of the trivia contest. As of now, as measured by average diameter or equivalently volume, what is the smallest asteroid that has been visited by a spacecraft? How do we do? I'm going to start with this. He's not our winner, but Andrew Miller in Ohio said, for all the people who like to send poems with their submissions, I'm really looking forward to finding out how they rhyme. Itakawa, is he correct?

Yes, he is correct. The target of the Hayabusa sample return mission. Andrew, I'm afraid we're going to keep you in suspense. Here is Dave Fairchild, our Poet Laureate's response. Back in 1998, an asteroid was found, a rubble pile up in space that wasn't even round. Instead, it had a peanut shape and it was kind of small. Compared to other NEOs, well, it's hardly there at all. But Ida Kawa got the nod with JAXA's claim to fame. They harvested some particles when Hayabusa came,

then brought them back to Earth again, like space-time caviar. This asteroid's the smallest that we've visited so far. Nice. Here is our winner. He last won four and a half years ago. Talk about hanging in there for a second. Good job. Yeah.

Hudson Ansley in New Jersey, who said, yeah, 25143 Itakawa. Congratulations, Hudson. I hope it was worth the wait. You are also going to be waiting a little while, at least, to pick up a Planetary Society kick asteroid rubber asteroid. It has not yet been visited by any spacecraft, as far as we know. But if it were, it would definitely be the smallest. We didn't mention Itokawa, about 350 meters average diameter.

Kirk Zorb mentioned that. He also said that it confirms a peanut shape factor of 0.9. I didn't know there was a peanut scale. Is that something Mr. Peanut came up with? Yeah, the trick is you have to look at all the pictures of the asteroid wearing a monocle. That's someone really out of, if I knew Photoshop. Ben Drought, apparently imaginary town of Ames, Hawaii is where he says he's from. He says, as small as it is, it would fill five vehicle assembly buildings, 70 1,000-foot Great Lakes ore ships to haul. Yeah, I was just wondering that.

Pavel Kamesha in Belarus loves the Hayabusa mission story, similar to the adventures of Mark Watney on Mars, only cooler because everything went wrong. Despite all the breakdowns and failure of three of four engines, JAXA specialists still managed to obtain samples from the asteroid surface and return them to Earth. Ian Jackson in Germany, who's looking forward to the DART mission that's going to Didymoon, just 160 meters in diameter, he says it'll fly into it, and if the surface is anything like Bennu, fly straight through and come out the other side.

surfaces anything like Bennu, fly straight through and come out the other side. Well, I don't think it's big enough to do that, but it may kick up an awful lot of stuff. A lot of references to rubble piles up there, but as John Burilli pointed out, while it may have been the smallest one yet visited, at about 350 meters, it's still big enough to ruin your day. Oh, yeah. By the way, for anyone wondering, the DART mission is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Guess we're ready for another one. Here's your question.

Who named most of the lunar maria with the names that are used today? By which, to be clear, the International Astronomical Union approved names of the MARIA features on the moon. So who named most of them? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 18th, that'd be November 18th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And we have a pretty cool prize for you. Bill Nye has a new book out for kids 10 and up. It's called Bill Nye's Great Big World of Science. And it's co-authored with Gregory Moan.

We're going to send the winner out there a copy, and it'll be signed by Bill. Not bad. I think it's coming from his personal stash of these books, which just came out just a couple of weeks ago. Cool. And that's it. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about how much you'd pay for an old robotic spacecraft on the moon. Thank you and good night. You think they'd have taken something in barter? I've got an old drone here that doesn't work, but I doubt the rover does anymore either. Well, you might be able to get one of the crashed spacecraft.

That's Bruce Betts. He is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members, Rogue and otherwise. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.