Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Starlight Festival Cassini Mission Update

Episode Date: June 3, 2014

Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker joins us at the first Starlight Festival in Big Bear Lake, California, and festival MC Andre Bormanis makes a bonus appearance on the show.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the Starlight Festival in Big Bear Lake, California, this is Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that brings you to the final frontier. This is Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, sitting outdoors at the Starlight Festival in Big Bear Lake, the first of its kind in this stunningly beautiful location, where in a few short hours it will be dark and people will be looking through telescopes. Well, this is a radio show, so we won't be doing that, but we will in a few moments talk with our most frequent guest over all the years that we've done this radio show that has been on the air only a little bit longer than Cassini has been in space.

That's Linda Spilker, the project scientist for Cassini. Up first, though, we're going to listen in to Emily Lakdawalla, our senior editor, and then to Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. But I'll be back in a couple of minutes here with Linda Spilker. Emily, just time for a quick update, a little bit of a tease for a couple of your latest blog entries this time, beginning with something new from Deep Impact, or really not all that new. Well, it's not all that new, but this is the way the data archiving works. The very, very last data that the Deep Impact spacecraft took before it tragically went missing August of last year

has finally hit the planetary data system, which is the public archive that NASA uses to share all science results from all its space missions with the world. I went in there, I got the notification from the PDS that the data were available. And I went in there and I found the very last images that Deep Impact took, which were of the comet Ison, which was still several astronomical units away. So it's not the most impressive photo, it's just a smudge. But Deep Impact was the very first spaceborne imager to actually take any photos of Comet ISON. So it's sort of a poignant image, not the greatest astrophoto, but kind of an

homage to the end of a very noble and hardworking spacecraft. Certainly, kind of bittersweet. There is another blog entry that we'll just mention very briefly, and that's your latest update on Curiosity. Yes, and Curiosity is back on the road again, so there's not going to be a whole lot of science for a while, but hopefully lots and lots of meters driven as they try to close that final distance, about five kilometers, to Mount Sharp. Check out that very thorough report, an update on the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory mission that Emily posted on the 30th of May. And that Deep Impact piece was from just a couple of days before. Emily, I'll talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. She is the senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society,

also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, a special report from Casey Dreyer because there was a busy week in Washington. Yeah, Matt, absolutely. The House of Representatives, the full House passed a budget that included funding for NASA. $17.9 billion. That's an increase from last year and an increase over what the president requested. Very great number. We're very happy with this budget. Foreign amendments tried to take money away from NASA. Every single one of those amendments were defeated. So we're very happy about that, too. This budget also includes $1.45 billion for planetary science. Just a stone's throw from our goal of $1.5 billion here at the Planetary Society. Senate doing their version of NASA's budget. So the House has done theirs. It's passed the full House. The Senate's running behind. They need to go through their committees and then work up to doing a full vote. It's going to be different, probably going to have some similar top line

numbers for NASA, but we don't know where planetary science is going to come out. So we'll be following that very closely. So I feel like we've closed a chapter, but the next one is just beginning in this whole process of the annual budget cycle, but we're in very good shape. It's a great story, and if you want to read much more about it, go to Casey's blog at planetary.org. It's a May 30 entry called The House Passes a $435 Million Increase to NASA's Budget. Casey, thanks very much, and I'm sure we'll be checking with you again.

Absolutely, Matt. Thanks for having me. Bill, a couple of stories that may seem unrelated, but I suspect that they actually are. Oh, yeah. I was at the White House Science Fair last week, and the president got to shake my hand again, that lucky guy. But while that was going on, you know that Congress has passed two different bills. I'm pretty sure it'll go through to build our own RD-180 engine, build one in the United States. I had heard something about this. Are we allowed to do that? Doesn't that violate some Russian guy's patent?

Well, the whole thing is that they want to develop an engine to replace it. And they talk about hydrocarbon and liquid oxygen rather than just kerosene so some more powerful fuel like i'm not saying it's gas higher test higher octane and this would be a huge thing and it shows you where the international relationships of whatever the heck these annexing crimea led to this disagreement and now there's funding through the military to make a rocket that will probably be used for all sorts of civilian applications. Meanwhile, the Dragon V2. My goodness, that thing is just fantastic looking. It is the coolest.

It's a spaceship right out of science fiction. So it's supposed to land on its legs, yeah? Yep, soft land, no wings and no need for wings. And how about that instrument panel? Oh man, it's cool. Swings into play. Very cool. And brushed aluminum walls on the interior. It's almost as if it was being made by a company that makes cool automobiles. Wait a minute! SpaceX is run by the same guy as Tesla.

No, it's an exciting time. I mean, here's, we're going to have, the world is going to have new launch capability from at least two different companies. I'm sure when the money stops changing hands, the conflict or disagreement will be resolved about the RD-180 engine, and that'll be flying again. And people will have access at least to low Earth orbit. And I hope we get things together worldwide to send a mission to Europa and to make the Mars 2020 rover a big deal. It's an exciting time. Let's all remember this. It's 2014. One old rocket and two new rockets are going to come into play. Could really change the world. We could make discoveries that would really be extraordinary.

Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Go watch Cosmos on your DVR. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Turn it up loud. It's about climate change. He's Bill Nye, the science guy and the CEO of the Planetary Society. Back in a moment with Linda Spilker at the Starlight Festival. We're back at the first ever Starlight Festival in Big Bear Lake, California, about 7,000 feet closer to, well, if we're pointing in the right direction,

to Saturn and Cassini. My guest sitting outdoors here at the Starlight Festival is our most frequent guest, and that is Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Cassini mission. Linda, welcome back. Thanks, Matt. I just got the treat of listening to you inside. You gave a presentation to a big crowd here at the Northwoods Resort and gave the most wonderful review of what this mission has been up to for 10 years.

Right. It's been a great mission. Our 10-year anniversary is June 30th this year. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. And so much of the stuff that you talked about in there is about what's still in store. I mean, it was really telling us over and over why it is so important that this mission run out to the very bitter end that you've already planned. Right. That's right. That's what? Three years away? 2017? It is so important that this mission run out to the very bitter end that you've already planned. Right. That's right.

That's what? Three years away? 2017? Right. September 15, 2017 is the final day of the Cassini mission. What we're going to do is we're going to go into the atmosphere of Saturn with Cassini. And the reason we're doing that is that we have two worlds now that we know have liquid water oceans underneath their icy crusts.

And that's Enceladus and Titan. And so we don't want to accidentally crash Cassini into one of those moons when it runs out of fuel. So instead, we're going to make sure that it basically burns up in the atmosphere of Saturn. Because you don't want to disturb the aliens underneath the ice. Right. You've got liquid water. You've got all the ingredients for life. You have potential habitats that are very different from the habitat we used to think of when we think of the Earth. You had some great shots of those plumes emanating from near the south pole of Enceladus. So let me ask you, because everybody's excited about this, as we start to look at maybe NASA warming, if you'll pardon the expression, to the idea of a mission to Europa,

that other moon with an ocean below the ice. I've got to ask you if we shouldn't be talking about Enceladus as the target. Well, I think the right answer is to go to both places. We need to have those two worlds we can compare. So go to Europa and then plan a mission maybe to fly through the Enceladus plume, maybe bring back a sample or fly through the plume and maybe orbit Titan and learn more about Titan as well. So there's a lot of possible missions you could do in the Saturn system with Enceladus.

Why isn't Cassini able to give us the data that we'd love to get from Enceladus, from those plumes? When you think about it, Matt, we have free samples coming from the Enceladus plumes, and we fly through and we measure what those molecules are. But we don't have the instruments to look for the proteins and the complex molecules that would indicate that there's life there, no instruments to look for DNA. We didn't know Enceladus had plumes when the Cassini mission launched. Well, and you were also putting these instruments together a long time ago now. That's right.

In fact, the instruments were selected and started to be built back in 1990. My colleague Emily Lakdawalla, who you know, publishes a lot of images that she works with that you guys get to her from the mission. We keep learning more about the plumes. And one of the things that she mentioned to me, she said, ask Linda about this, is that the plumes apparently, that they're active pretty much continuously. So far with Cassini, we've seen the plumes active the entire time. The only difference is that the plumes are more active when Enceladus is further

away from Saturn, about three times more active than when Enceladus is closest to Saturn. Its orbit is slightly elliptical, and we think that there's forces that open up the fractures a little bit when it's further from Saturn, and perhaps close them down a little bit, so you get this variation in the nozzle, basically basically and you get more emission near apoaps a distant point the mechanism that has allowed these liquid oceans to remain liquid on Enceladus is it the same as we believe has taken place on Europa we think it might be similar in that you have a resonance in fact Enceladus is in resonance with Dione and that maybe keeps its orbit slightly elliptical and as it goes further and closer to Saturn, it's sort of like squeezing

on a rubber ball. With that squeezing, that tidal heating, you can get liquid water. And it appears that Enceladus is primarily underneath the South Pole. Everything in this system, this Saturnian system, seems to have a relationship with everything else. You had a nice slide in there that showed Enceladus actually contributing to a ring. That's right, that's right. A lot of the plume material falls back to the surface of Enceladus, and that's why it's this bright white icy moon, but some of the tiniest particles, about one micron in size or so, go out and make the E-ring. Basically the E-ring is thickest at the orbit of Enceladus,

but then solar pressure and charging up allows that ring to spread throughout the Saturn system. So if you look at the other moons in the system, they're coated with E ring particles, at least on one side, and that ring goes all the way out to the orbit of Titan. All right, since we're talking about moons, let's move to the big one, Titan. What's new since last we may have talked four or five months ago about on Titan? The big excitement with Titan is that we figured out a way with the radar signal that goes down to actually measure the depth of one of the seas on Titan.

And that sea is Lygia Mare. We have a very strong echo coming off the surface of the sea, and there's a smaller echo that's there coming from the bottom. And it turns out that's about 160 meters deep. That's about as deep as Lake Michigan, and Lygia Mare is about the size of Lake Michigan. So just intriguing. And we're hoping in the end of 2014, the end of this year, to do the same thing with the biggest sea on Titan, Croc and Maray. Prove the depth of its sea.

When you showed that slide that indicated the depth of this lake on Titan, I was sitting next to our mutual friend, Andre Bramantes, who's the master of ceremonies up here at Starlight Festival. And we both went, wow. The fact that we are plumbing a methane lake on this distant world is just mind-blowing. Very pure methane to get a signal through that deep. It has to be mostly methane, maybe with a little bit of ethane mixed in. So this not only helped us find how deep the lake is, but it helped us confirm its composition? Right. At least part of the composition.

We know it's got to be very pure methane. Anything bigger would absorb the signal and you wouldn't have gotten that echo from the bottom of the lake. How about this new little moon, which you also had an image of, called Peggy? Oh, that's a really interesting little story. Turns out that on the outer edge of the A ring, the outermost of the main rings of Saturn, there was this bright feature. And we've seen features like that before. And that usually indicates that there's a small little moonlet that's forming. And it turns out that Peggy is maybe a kilometer or two in size. We can't see it,

but we could see Peggy's signature. It's like making half of a propeller. Objects further inside the rings have a two-armed propeller. We know there's a big object in the middle. Peggy was like making one arm of the propeller. And that's just the deflection of the ring particles? Right, deflecting the ring particles, looking like a propeller. And these bigger objects would love to open up a gap in the rings, but they're not quite massive enough to basically push those ring particles out of the way and open up a gap.

So here's Peggy right at the edge of the A-ring, and we're wondering, are we going to see the birth of a new moon? Will Peggy move outside the A-ring and go on to be a new moonlet orbiting Saturn? So we're going to keep watching. Does what you're watching, and will continue to with any luck for the next three years, does it also begin to tell us things about the formation of planets elsewhere in the galaxy? Oh, absolutely, Matt. The ring disk of Saturn with all those particles is very similar to the disk that was around the sun from which the planets formed in our solar system,

similar to what would form planets around other stars, exoplanets. And so watching how these tiny particles can come together and grow tell us about how planets could form in other solar systems. All right, we have not surprisingly edged into the rings as we talk about this because they interact so dynamically with the moons. What is the latest on the rings, what we're learning about them? Well, we're watching as the sun goes higher and higher in the sky on the rings and getting just really good occultations of the rings. One very interesting bit of information

is it turns out that Saturn actually has certain modes, almost like it rings like a bell at certain frequencies. And as it does this, for some reason, it puts a signature into the rings in the form of these little waves. We've seen seven waves that are telling us about the modes at which Saturn is basically ringing. We're doing Saturn seismology. It's very similar to the kind of thing you can do with the sun, only in this case, our detector is the rings. You had a beautiful animation that showed the effect on the rings when something like the tail of a

comet passes through them. Right. You know the one I'm thinking of? Right, right. It turns out that we think we saw when the Sun was edge on to the rings we saw what looked like this periodic corrugated structure. We could see bright, dark, bright, dark, bright, dark. And we looked at it and we figured that what had happened is that maybe the edge of the rings went through the dust tail of a comet and for several days these little particles from the comet hit the ring particles and actually tried to change the disk of the rings a little bit. And then the rings re-equilibrated and started to basically create this spiral, this wave

that got shorter and shorter in wavelength. And we could go backwards. It's a linear process to measure the change in wavelength with time. We had several measurements, actually, after the equinox. And it turns out about 1983, after Voyager flew by Saturn, and before Cassini got there, there was probably an event that actually tipped the rings and created this structure.

What's really fascinating is that then we went back, we looked at Jupiter's dusty ring, the rings and created this structure. What's really fascinating is that then we went back, we looked at Jupiter's dusty ring, and that the same process was happening in Jupiter's ring. And so we mapped when did that event happen? Bingo, 1994, when Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going into Jupiter, some of that dust got pushed probably by the solar pressure and actually ended up impacting one side of Jupiter's ring. So two places now where we've seen the same phenomena. Amazing to be able to use science to go into the past, essentially, to corroborate the other evidence that we've had that this theory is working for us.

Who knows? This may be useful elsewhere in the galaxy as well. That's true. And we might see more events at Saturn. Who knows? We'll keep watching. Project scientist Linda Spilker of the Cassini Mission at Saturn. We'll be back with more from the Starlight Festival in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business.

You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out.

Your name carried to an asteroid! How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society,

we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week, welcoming back Linda Spilker, project scientist for the Cassini mission that has three more years of discovery ahead at Saturn. Linda joined me on the outdoor stage at the Starlight Festival in beautiful Big Bear Lake, California. We've already covered some of the latest news about the moons and rings of that fantastic world. Then there's the planet itself. You spent a good deal of time during your talk today at the Starlight Festival showing us the beautiful surface, if it had a surface, what passes for the surface, the cloud tops of Saturn. And there was that storm that you guys captured,

which eventually made its way all the way around the planet. And I said to Andre, holy cow, fluid dynamics, this is sorcery. Right, just amazing. This is a huge storm that formed. Storms like this only happen about once every 30 years at Saturn. We were just lucky to have Cassini there to watch it. A huge, like a thunderstorm, a huge vortex formed. It had a tail that went behind it, and a second vortex formed, and that vortex was going more slowly.

Eventually, the two vortices came together, and the storm disappeared just like that. So basically the head of the storm ate its tail and disappeared. Speaking of fluid dynamics, you showed off the hexagon. What magazine was it, you said, that counted this as one of the five most? I think Bob Berman's magazine. He had something in it looking at the very oddest things in the cosmos. And the hexagon came out number three, this six-sided jet stream that goes around Saturn's North Pole. And in fact, he was wondering, is this a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence?

Because we know of no other hexagonal storm or jet stream in the solar system. You kidded that it maybe was some alien activity. It must be a piece of performance art from somebody from Alpha Centauri. Any more thinking or hypotheses about what might be generating and sustaining that hexagon? Yeah, they're wondering how deep the circulation must go to keep that hexagonal shape. And we just keep watching. It's, it's just very stable, been very stable since the 1980s when Voyager discovered it. Anything else at the planet itself that we should be talking about now out of recent data, the last few months?

Just as the sun again gets higher in the sky, we're getting better and better views to watch the entire hexagon and look at the hurricane that Cassini discovered. There's this hurricane. It's about half the size of the United States, very high wind speeds, and it's right smack on the North Pole. You know that I was out at JPL when we had that little wave at Saturn, wave at Cassini selfie, which was prominently featured at the, I think it was at the tail end of your presentation there. On July 19th, we asked all the people on the Earth to go outside and look up and wave at Saturn in this 20-minute window when Cassini would be taking pictures of the Earth. And then we asked them to take pictures of themselves and send them to us.

And we got thousands of pictures. We put them together into the mosaic that came out that day, and it's all made up of individual little pictures, and you can find them on our Cassini website. You can find that mosaic on the saturn.jpl.nasa.gov website. And we'll find that image. We'll put it up on the show page that people can get to from planetary.org slash radio. But the other image

is the one from behind Saturn that you showed off, similar to the one that I have on my business card, the earlier image that you took of Saturn. But if anything, this new one is even more beautiful and has the bonus of more planets. That's right. This new image, we actually have four planets. You have Saturn, of course, the Earth and the Moon, and then Mars and Venus all in the same, basically it was a mosaic of 141 pictures that we put together into this very beautiful image. The E-ring glows almost like a halo around the planet. It looked like there was a little bit of a blue glow above and below the planet.

Was that just a photographic artifact? No, that's actually the E-ring particles and they were the closest to the Sun. Saturn was covering up the Sun. When they get closer to the Sun, those small particles forward scatter more light and so they appear brighter at the top and the bottom. So now I really understand why you said it looks sort of like a halo. It's very ethereal. There is another planet in our solar system that managed to get imaged by Cassini, not long ago. You know the one I'm talking about? Oh, Uranus. Yeah. We just thought, okay, we've gotten pictures now of

Mars and Venus and Earth. Wouldn't it be kind of fun, you know, as Uranus comes close Cassini orbits around Saturn, so we just had to look for that moment and we could get Uranus close to the rings of the planet and took a picture of it. And there it is. And you can even tell, unless I imagined it, it is sort of bluish, the way Uranus should be. And you could see it as a disk. It really wasn't bad. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to take that.

And some of the teams are looking at the data to see if maybe we can get some interesting information from Cassini about Uranus. Well, Cassini, at least at the moment, being the only outer system, outer solar system probe that we have, that would be a nice bonus for the people who would love to see a mission going back to Uranus and Neptune, which has not happened since Voyager, of course. Great places to go back.

We've only, like you say, Voyager is flown by Uranus and Neptune, and it would be great to have a mission like Cassini and Orbiter to go back to both of these worlds and study the planets, the rings, and the moons themselves. With Voyager, we only got to see one side of the Uranian moons, because Uranus is tipped on its side, and it was like a giant bullseye pointed at the sun. So what do the other sides of those moons look like? We need to look.

We need to go out and look. What can we look forward to? We've already said three more years. What's in the immediate future, and then what is further out? Talk a little bit more about why it's so important that this mission continue until basically you run out of gas. Right, right. The plan is for the next three years to watch as the seasons continue to change,

both on Saturn and on Titan. We're going to probe the depth of Croc and Mare at the end of 2014. At the end of 2015, there are three more flybys of Enceladus, one directly through the plume again to sample it, and another one that's very exciting, that the Enceladus North Pole has been in darkness for our previous flyby. So we have one flyby targeted to go over the North Pole of Enceladus, and we'll look to see was the North Pole ever active in the past,

any evidence of that, and to just get really high-resolution pictures of the North Pole of Enceladus. And what is farther out? Cassini will end its life on Saturn, but before that, it's going to get much closer to the planet. Right, right. Actually, it's going to, at the very end of the mission in 2017, dive in between the innermost ring and Saturn's

atmosphere, and we'll have 22 orbits, basically a brand new mission so close. We'll be able to measure Saturn's gravity field and magnetic field to exquisite precision, to be able to compare that to Jupiter's gravity and magnetic field, because Juno will be doing the same mission at Jupiter that Cassini is doing at Saturn. And then, of course, to get the mass of the rings for the very first time. The mass of the rings is uncertain by about a factor of 100% right now, and we'll get in close and get that precision down to about 7%.

And if the rings are more massive, that might tell us that they formed at the same time as Saturn. right now, and we'll get in close and get that precision down to about 7%. And if the rings are more massive, that might tell us that they formed at the same time as Saturn. It would be 4.5 billion years old. Or if they're less massive, it would tell us that they formed perhaps from a comet that got broken apart, or a moon that got broken apart by getting in too close to Saturn. This is a question that has puzzled astronomers for centuries, and we might be a little bit closer with this to an answer. Right, to actually get the age of the rings, because Saturn isn't the only planet with rings.

You've got Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune, and now even a centaur that has a ring around it. So you have five places in the solar system with rings. Amazing. How is it that being closer to the planet will help you get the mass of the rings? Is this an interaction with the spacecraft? Well, actually, if you think about it, Matt, you have right now the mass of the rings plus Saturn together. And when you dive in between and you're close to Saturn, you'll have the mass of Saturn alone. So you can basically subtract out that mass from your previous data, and what's left to very high precision is going to be the mass of the rings.

Why hasn't this already happened? Has it been too dangerous for the spacecraft to go this close? Well, it's a region that we haven't flown before, and we're just not sure what's in that region. We're pretty sure there are not too many ring particles, if any, in that region, but it's a place, once you hop into it, we couldn't hop back out. You wouldn't be visiting Enceladus and Titan. Right, right. So we're going to do it at the very end of the mission and then use that set of orbits for our final orbit to go into Saturn. Health of the spacecraft? Things going well?

The spacecraft is in good health right now. Everything is working fine. All right, last thing. It's too late for people to get in on it, but it's this Cassini name game. And before long, not long after people hear this show, you're going to be naming something. Right. We asked people to help us name that very special end-of-mission set of orbits. And we got lots and lots of names. And we've been going through them and picking out that name. And we're going to wait and announce that for Cassini's 10th anniversary.

Linda, I love getting these status reports from you. We need to do it again in another few months, and I'm sure there will be much more science for us to talk about out there at Saturn. Yes, Cassini continues to amaze with all of its discoveries. Thank you, Linda. Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker. Now it's a few hours later at the Starlight Festival. Night has fallen and I've just run into an old friend.

Andre Bermanis got started with the Star Trek franchise as its science advisor. He ended up a lead writer and producer. After working on several other series, he found himself on the team that created Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, the wonderful Fox series hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Andre is also a first-rate amateur astronomer. Andre, this is your kind of crowd. This is my kind of crowd. These are my people. Amateur astronomers, enthusiasts, people who are eager to look through telescopes, see what's up in the night sky, get excited about it. It's great.

And I'm so impressed by the size of the crowd here tonight. It's a Sunday night on a holiday weekend, and there are long lines to look through every one of the telescopes here. Really long lines, like half-hour, 45-minute lines, I think. It's like Disneyland. It's like getting into Space Mountain, for God's sake. And they did a great job. I love how even the permanent lighting here, they put in red filters.

Yeah, they were very conscientious about that and really did a fantastic job putting the Starlight Festival together. Hats off to Scott Roberts and his guys. And the resort here has just been wonderful. You have not just been here in the dark because you've been the master of ceremonies. I was the master of ceremonies and did a talk myself on my work on Star Trek and Cosmos. And it's been a really fun weekend. They had some extraordinary speakers, Linda Spilker, Keith Johnson, who is a bubbleologist,

and yes, he does put that on his tax form. Got the kids very excited about the science of bubbles. And, of course, the incomparable Story Musgrave, who is an amazing guy and amazing stories of his six trips on the space shuttle and all of the other things he's done in his nearly 80-year life. So it was a really spectacular weekend. I saw a video monitor with you interviewing Seth Shostak. Yeah, and Seth Shostak as well. Yeah, he talked about his work at SETI, of course, and we did a separate little

conversation that'll be up on the website. I've known Seth for a very long time, and it's always great to see him. Always has a good talk, and you know, he's an optimist, and I like that. You know, he's pretty convinced that sometime in the next 20 years there's a better than 50-50 chance we'll hear something significant. I didn't. I knew he was optimistic about this, but better than 50-50? Better than 50-50. It's a function of the exponential rate of growth of our detector technology and the sensitivity of the antennas that are listening to potential signals from deep space. The fact that the Kepler telescope has found so many potential Earth-like planets,

and the fact that we know that red dwarfs, which are the most common kind of stars in the universe, are very viable as home stars for planets that could potentially support life. It's a great discovery that there's a habitable zone around these dim little stars. Exactly, and they're not only dim, you know, which one would think is, well, you know, that's not necessarily the best environment for life, but they're very long-lived. There are stars in our galaxy that form just a couple of billion years after the Big Bang,

and our sun will continue in its present state for maybe 10 billion years, you know, from start to finish. A red dwarf will live for about 100 billion years, steadily putting out light. So the opportunity for life to evolve on a planet orbiting a red star is probably a lot higher than it is for orbiting, you know, a planet orbiting a star like the sun. And you brought up Kepler. Yes. Which is one of those tools, maybe the best of them, that has done so much to help us

fill in those unknowns, those variables in the Drake equation. Absolutely. You know, it's hard to believe that it was just 20 years ago, not that long ago, when we knew of no other planets outside of our solar system.

And now we know there are thousands. And the latest estimates are that probably one out of five sun-like stars supports an Earth-like planet. That's amazing. You have a special affinity for this telescope right over here, this beauty. Yeah, there is a 10-inch reflector over here that has got a video camera attached to it. It's a 10-inch Takahashi Mulan, which is a casagrain-style reflector, a really well-made telescope. I happen to own one, which is great, so when I saw this one

tonight, I was like, oh my gosh, that's my telescope. And the gentleman who owns it is pointing it at various objects, and rather than having an eyepiece attached to it, he's got a little video camera, and that little video camera can take exposures of 15, 20, 30 seconds, and you can easily see,

even from this relatively light polluted site here in Big Bear, things like the Sombrero Galaxy, M13, this gorgeous globular cluster in Hercules, and he can project those images on a TV monitor and share it with dozens of people at a time, so it's pretty fabulous. Have you got a good CD camera for your scopes? It's pretty fabulous. Have you got a good CD camera for your scopes? You know, I have a modified Canon 20D, which is an older camera now, but it does great astronomical photographs. The only thing that's different between it and a stock Canon 20D

is that the little infrared light-blocking filter has been removed so that the red frequencies can get through to the little sensor in the camera. And it takes great exposures. In 10 seconds from my roof deck in West LA, I got a great picture of the Orion Nebula, the kind of picture that would have taken me with that same telescope with film, even hypersensitized film, half an hour from a dark site. Amazing. Yeah. And you've got a little bit more time now to look through telescopes because you've wrapped up, what's the name of that show? Cosmos, yes, that's the one.

Yeah, we wrapped Cosmos a few weeks ago, and it was a great experience. It was a lot of work, but I think we're all very pleased with how the show turned out. And now I've got a few weeks here to relax, and I'm just looking for the next job. I'm disappointed because I didn't get to hear your talk, because I was with Linda Spilker at that time on a different stage. Jupiter! That was a shout-out for Jupiter. Some celebration going on here tonight, which is great.

And why not? Neil Tyson was on the show about two weeks ago. He obviously had a wonderful time doing this and is a huge believer in the importance of doing that kind of work, of doing that kind of series and bringing the universe to people, well, on a commercial network. I assume you feel the same. Absolutely.

I mean, what's more important than trying to encourage the next generation of scientists and trying to give the general public a better grasp of what we've learned in the last 20, 30 years about the universe, why science is so important, why it's so critical to our future that the public becomes science literate. You know, this is not a small thing, and it's a challenge for every generation. You know, this is not a small thing and it's a challenge for every generation. You know, it's not something special to us. We constantly have to keep people informed, let them know what's going on, and the future is only going to become more and more science-oriented and technological. The kinds of decisions that people need to make in their

day-to-day lives, when they go out and vote, when they look at public policy. It's only going to get more complex, and the only way to deal with that is for people to be science literate. Well said, as always. Thank you so much, Matt. It's a pleasure. Same here. Andre Berman is talking with me on the last night of the Starlight Festival in Big Bear Lake, California. Can you stay up a bit longer?

We're going to look at that night sky with Bruce Batts. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society is Dr. Bruce Batts. He's on the Skype line. Welcome back. Cool prize to tell people about, but we can wait until the time comes. Okay, let me tell them about a plethora of planets in the plevening sky. I've always had trouble with that alliteration thing.

Please. There you go. So if you look very low in the west, Mercury's going away quickly, but you still might catch it low in the west shortly after sunset. Really easy to catch, though, is Jupiter higher up in the southwest in the early evening looking like a super bright star. Mars high in the south looking like an orangish bright star. And then Saturn over in the southeast looking like a yellowish kind of star. And then in the pre-dawn low in the east you can check out super bright Venus, a plethora of planets, please. On to this week in space history.

It was this week in 1966 that Surveyor 1 landed on the moon, which was the first ever successful soft landing on the moon. Or on anything else, I think, right? Other than Earth. Yes. It was very exciting. Speaking of cool, on to Random Space Fact! You know, we did have a guest, but I forgot to tell you, and I'm kind of glad because that was a fun one. So next week, a special guest celebrity Random Space Fact introducer.

I'll try to remember next time. For this time, during its approximately six-year flight to Jupiter, taking the long road, the Galileo spacecraft had five flybys before going into orbit around Jupiter. Non-Jupiter flybys. In chronological order, they were Venus, Earth, the asteroid Gaspera, Earth once again to say goodbye, and then Ida, and you could count it as a sixth flyby because Ida turned out to have a little tiny asteroid moonlet dactyl. That's a lot. Yeah. They filled up their quiet time with a lot of busyness. Speaking of good stuff, Matt, on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what is the third largest galaxy in the local group?

third largest galaxy in the local group, the local group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way that we live in and the other large galaxy, Andromeda. How'd we do, Matt? I'm just going to add to that that we heard from Ilya Schwartz, who often gives us interesting stuff, that there are more than 54 galaxies, including numerous dwarf galaxies, in the local group, and that its gravitational center is, appropriately, between us, the Milky Way, and Andromeda. That's a big group. It is a big group. It makes for some crowded parties, but, you know, it's a social set. We're getting snubbed.

We're not getting all the invitations, are we? No. Our winner is Ian Kent. Kent what? He, ha, ha. He's never ever heard that. He noted that right here in his email. I'm sure he hasn't. Place your bets on that one. Ian Kant of Toronto, Ontario, where some of us may actually be visiting come October when the International Astronautical Congress visits that beautiful city. Ian said it is Triangulum, or M33, is he correct?

He is indeed correct, sometimes referred to as the Pinwheel Galaxy, although it shares that name with M101, just to confuse matters. So we'll stick to Triangulum. Well, Ian, you're going to get that brand new design Planetary Radio t-shirt, which is proving very popular. Our entries are up. We've got a cool prize for next time, but first, tell people what they have to answer.

Here's your question. I'm just in a galaxy's mood. Name a galaxy that is named after a hat. A galaxy named after a hat? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I've got one in mind. There may be

more. Someone needs to kind of officially recognize it. You've got until the 10th. That'd be Tuesday, June 10 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this particular answer. In addition to a Planetary Radio t-shirt, we are going to give you a copy

of Max Goes to the Space Station. Many people out there may be aware of this series of books by our friend Jeff Bennett, Jeffrey Bennett, who has done a whole bunch of books about Max going all over the solar system. This is the latest. It is illustrated by the wonderful

Michael Carroll, one of the finest space artists around. And this one is special because it came from a team that Jeff put together, which decided it would be a good choice for the first book to be read on the space station. So, of course, it's about a doggie named Max visiting the space station.

And you may be interested to hear that there's a Kickstarter campaign underway to support the very fine organization that Jeffrey is part of, which is Storytime from Space. How appropriate. The Kickstarter only runs until July 6th. You can find it, of course, at kickstarter.com. And they are looking for support to help inspire kids by reading stories from space, which quite a few astronauts have done. They've also read some of the previous Max books.

And so Jeffrey's donated this to us, and you'll get that along with a Planetary Radio t-shirt if you answer correctly. Go, Max! Woof! All right, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about radishes. Thank you, and good night. Ah, the first thing I actually tried to grow

in the backyard and then discovered that I really hate how they taste. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and is made possible by the ravishing members of the Society. Clear skies.