Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Tour of the Solar System With Bill Hartmann

Episode Date: August 22, 2005

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A spectacular tour of the solar system, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. It's the stuff that dreams are made of. Dreams of exploring our immediate neighborhood in the universe, I'm Matt Kaplan. We'll talk with planetary scientist, author, and artist Bill Hartman about The Grand Tour, a traveler's guide to the solar system. Bruce Betts has a bit of amphibian trouble in our What's Up segment, but you'll still get his suggestions on what to look for in the night sky

and some surprising information about our trivia contest. And here's all the news from here to the Oort cloud, almost. Don't hold your breath waiting for the next shuttle launch unless you've got a heck of a set of lungs. NASA has decided the earliest possible launch opportunity for the STS-121 mission is March 4, 2006. And it will once again be Space Shuttle Discovery rather than sister ship Atlantis. The space agency wants the time in part part, to fully assess the recently completed flight. All's well with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, now peacefully cruising its way to the red planet. And much farther out, Cassini continues to explore the Saturnian system.

By the time you hear this, the spacecraft will have taken its first close look at Titan in four months. You can read about this encounter at planetary.org. Emily is spinning her wheels and wants to tell you about them in this week's Q&A segment. I'll be right back with Bill Hartman. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, During the rover's tenure on Mars, I've seen many references to the amount of slippage.

How do the rovers know whether their wheels are slipping or rolling? Like any car on Earth, the rovers measure distance traveled by counting how many times their wheels rotate. But the rovers' wheels do slip on the dusty surface of Mars, especially when the rovers are going uphill or traversing sand dunes. So the rover odometers tend to overestimate the distance that the rovers have traveled. How does a rover know when it's slipping? Because the rover can see where it's going. The rover has three pairs of navigational cameras, two on the body, four in aft, and one pair on a periscope. The paired cameras give the rover human-like depth perception. From each pair of images, the rover

can create a computer model of the terrain in front of it with all the rocks, humps, and depressions. After each part of a drive, the rover compares where it thinks its wheels should have taken it to its model and figures out whether its wheels slipped on the way. But if the rovers are so smart, why did Opportunity try to keep rolling and rolling when it got stuck in a sand dune? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. William K. Hartman lives and works in his beloved American Southwest.

He is senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. But his reputation for planetary science, space art, and writing have brought him world renown. It has been two years since we last talked with him at the amazing City Library in Cerritos, California. He recently returned to this facility where we sat down to talk about his newest nonfiction effort. Bill Hartman, it is such a pleasure to welcome you back to the Planetary Radio Microphones. Great to be back. Last time we talked, it was the Traveler's Guide to Mars. It was an auspicious time to talk about the Red Planet.

That's true. But now you are back with your colleague, Ron Miller, with this, what I think is the nicest art book of the year. It is the Grand Tour, a Traveler's Guide, not just to Mars, but to the whole shebang, the whole solar system. Thanks. Yeah. Third edition. Every 12 years, you guys do one of these. Is it actually like clockwork? I don't know.

But, no, we just felt that we had just done this Mars book, or I had done that, and it was time to get another title out. And Peter Workman and Ron Miller, Peter being the owner of the publishing company, we said, hey, you know, we ought to get a new edition. There's been so many discoveries, and so much is changing fast about what we understand about the solar system. So there it is. Sure makes it exciting. I was amazed. I mean, this book is just out this year. And here we are sitting here in August, and you've got shots from Huygens on Titan. The last thing we did was shoehorn those in. But no, that was great. And we wanted to say something about how that went.

It is, as have been the previous editions, as was the Mars book, absolutely packed with the kind of images that, as a kid, people like Chesley Bonestell were inspiring me. I mean, I realized as I was looking through the book that I think as much as science fiction and the wonder of astronomy brought me into this area, I think it was also the artwork of these guys that you have dedicated the book to. Well, that's right. Both Ron and I as kids were inspired by this. And Bonestell, for those of our listeners who don't know, Bonestell was kind of the father of astronomical art in

this country. We're taping here near Los Angeles. Bonestell actually worked in Hollywood as the highest paid mat artist, special effects artist at that time. He worked on Citizen Kane, among other famous movies. And he always had, as a kid, he had hiked up to Mount Wilson and he liked astronomers and telescopes. And so he had to deal with perspective in his work, and he got very interested in figuring out, well, how big would Saturn look if you were on Titan or on Mimas? And what would these planets look like from different vantage points in space? So Ron and I feel like we want to try to carry on that tradition and get some books out there that other kids can see. And I often come back to what Martin Luther King, Jr. said,

you know, I have a dream, and he didn't say I have a blueprint. He didn't have the blueprint. He had the dream, and that's what the artists do. Bonestell painted that silver rocket on the moon back in 1948 on the front cover of The Conquest of Space. And it's amazing how many engineers in the Apollo program that actually put people on the moon had that book when they were 10 or 12 or 14 years old, like I did. And so I think the artist is the one who puts out the dream,

and then the next generation goes out and does it. I totally agree. Your art in this book, much like these pioneers, like Monastel, I guess is how it's pronounced, he tried to be as accurate as possible based on the astronomical facts known at the time. You guys have done the same, but like his work, so many of these images are awe-inspiring and truly romantic. Yeah, that's, I think, what we go for. And I see the artist as synthesizing what the scientist does because scientists, by their nature, study one thing at a time. And so you have one scientist studying atmosphere and one scientist studying the rock composition or the spectra, and they write papers on these things.

But the artist has to take all of that and put it together into a view of what would it be like for a human being to be standing there and to see these things. And then you want to make something beautiful and emotional out of it, too. So you want to take the reality, take the best science we have, and make a beautiful piece of art and hope that maybe that excites someone else down the line. The last time we talked, you spoke about what you think your interest in art and your artistic abilities brought to your work as a scientist, as an astronomer. Yeah, I don't think I saw that so much during my career, in the middle of my career.

And now I'm older and I can kind of look back and I can see and I remember people saying to me, oh, you tend to think visually. And I actually do feel like I'm probably not as good an analytic scientist with the math and so on as some of my colleagues who do the theory. But what I like to do is kind of put together different facts from different sources and try to understand sort of the big picture of what's going on. So I think there's room for different kinds of people in science. And, you know, if I again look back at some of the work I've done, I can see that I was

not so much linearly following one little logical train of thought, but more bringing together different kinds of information to work on different problems in planetary studies. But certainly your appreciation for the beauty of what you were seeing in the solar system had a big influence on your work. Yes, and I think you find that with a lot of scientists. I mean, I think there is this sense, particularly planetary science, and you always heard that in what Carl Sagan would talk about, you know, this sense of awe, sense of wonder.

And I think the planetary scientists still have that when they look outward. And I think they also have a special sense of looking at problems on the Earth, because we tend to look at today's political headlines from, I mean, international headlines, you know, from a kind of planetary perspective. And you start thinking some of this is crazy. You know, we're fighting over the last reserves of fossil fuel and so on, and it's a finite little world as the astronauts taught us when they went out to the moon and looked back. And we really need to start seeing ourselves in a planetary perspective, and how are we going to get out of our petroleum box,

and what are we going to be doing for sustainable energy, and so on and so on. He mentioned Carl Sagan, how appropriate. He was the recipient of the first ever Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society. That's our guest, Bill Hartman, William K. Hartman, co-author of The Grand Tour, A Traveler's Guide to the Solar System. It's the third edition of the book. It's been 12 years since one has come out. Lots of new stuff.

When we come back, we've got to talk about what's new in this book. Good. So we will be back with Bill Hartman 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. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more?

Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. William K. Hartman is our guest. He is, as we've said, the co-author of The Grand Tour, a traveler's guide to the Solar System with his colleague, Ron Miller. And Bill, we said when we came back, we really ought to talk about this beautiful book a little bit. And maybe in particular, what has changed with this? It is

the third edition. The last one was 12 years ago. So much has happened since then. That's right. I think we felt like we wanted to update this. There's been discoveries in, it seems like, practically all parts of the solar system, particularly Mars, one of my favorites. The rovers have just found sedimentary rocks on Mars. All the previous rocks we knew of were volcanic, lava-like rocks. So that adds to the evidence that early Mars had seas, that early Mars was like the Earth. We have the Cassini mission flying around Saturn and taking close-up pictures of Saturn satellites. The probe that landed on Titan went through the clouds of Titan. So lots of new information coming back. Well, and speaking of water, that discovery of just a few weeks ago on Enceladus of some water vapor there.

That's right. And, I mean, there's a small satellite of Saturn. It's about 300 miles across, something like that. You could tell we always knew that it was interesting because part of it is heavily cratered. That means it's been a surface that's around for a long time, been taking asteroid hits, hit, hit, hit, hit. But other parts of it are clean ice with no craters, which means it's fairly fresh. And does that mean it's resurfacing itself or what? Well, when Cassini recently flew by, it saw a big puff of water

vapor come out of Enceladus near the South Pole. And that seems to clearly show we're getting eruptions of water. So there is yet another body in the solar system that has liquid water. We've got Mars. It had the ancient seas. And we have Europa, the satellite of Jupiter. We have Titan. Don't know if it has liquid water, but it has a nitrogen atmosphere, lots of organic molecules. Interesting place to look for possible life forming. And now we have Enceladus with shooting off water vapors. So there's four places right there where we could go and try to answer the question of how did life start? Does

it start on other planets? Does it start wherever you have an ocean of water? You know, what do you need to get life started? One of the big cosmic questions. I'm glad you went in that direction because, you know, NASA's theme for the past few years has been follow the water. Well, they followed it and they found it, as you've just demonstrated. Now it does seem to be about or should be about looking for life. I think so. I think that's been one of the big drivers. And most of the planetary scientists I know are really excited by that kind of question. I mean, this is a big question we've been asking ourselves for 3,000 or 4,000 years.

What's our relation to the universe? What is humanity's role there? Are we just one of many species that might be on other worlds? I mean, even back in the 1700s, they talked about plurality of worlds, the idea that there might be many Earths, but we don't know. As I say in my talks, often Sigourney Weaver chases all those aliens around on the screen, but we don't know if there's any aliens out there. And so space science, space exploration gives us a chance to really come to grips with that question.

And maybe in our generation, for the first time in all history, we may actually know whether life started on some other planet. Well, and we certainly, and this has been since your last edition, have discovered that there sure are a lot of other solar systems out there. That's right. And the new edition of the book is, oh, nearly 50% bigger because we added a section at the beginning on how the planetary systems form and then a section at the end on this great discovery from the 1990s that

there are planets now known around other stars. And so that's the first time we've ever known as human beings that for sure there really are other planetary systems. So at least we know we're not the only planetary system in the universe. We're not the imperial capital of the universe, the only planet, and so on. We don't have the sun going around us like Copernicus and Galileo were able to show. Well, now in our generation, we're showing that we're not the only planetary system. I just got to make one more reference to water because one of my favorite images in the book,

it's not one of the biggest images, is this little foggy morning on Mars. Mars is great for a painter, because Mars has weather, and it has different kinds of scenes. And, you know, sometimes people say, oh, well, space art, you know, everything looks the same in the spacecraft photos we get back. There's lots of rocks out there. But we've landed a lot of these in the relatively dull places where we knew we could set something down. I mean, even the Viking landers were in smooth plains, and there's always these kind of engineering safety constraints. But the painter, as one of my friends said, Kim Poore, who runs a gallery in Tucson of space art, Nova Space,

and Kim said, well, the painters can go where the engineers fear to tread. Yes, among those places. You guys spent quite a bit of time on the surface of Io, apparently. Yes, we did. And there's a funny story about that because one of the images of Io we have in our second edition, we had the problem between Ron and Bill, my friend Ron Miller, the illustrator who's my co-author. Who's going to get to do the picture on the cover? So we solved this by working on it together.

So the second edition actually had a picture that we painted in paint together. And this edition has a kind of another version of that picture, but whichron has done as digital art. And many illustrators have gone entirely to digital art, computer art, because you need to provide these pictures on a short time frame to some magazine that wants them or something of that sort. So you send it over email. So we have digital art in there along with my pictures are paintings, and I still work in paint. I like to go out and paint. But we also have digital pictures, and then we have a lot of the original photographs from the space missions. We only have a couple of minutes left.

I should say that you still have an image of Io on the third edition cover, and it's an animated image. But I don't know how Workman gets a book out like this for $20. Workman is a great publisher, and I think probably the short answer is a big press run. Workman puts out a lot of these, and they try to make them purchasable by everybody. I mean, a lot of popular science books will be a very small press run and then a fairly expensive book to get the investment back. But Workman is a great publisher, and they try to make them out there for everybody. There's also a hardcover edition as well as a softcover edition.

So I've found some people who are collectors and really like, in these pictures, these books with a lot of artwork, they like to have a hardcover edition. Well, you can actually order that if you want. Just a minute or so left. What else are you up to, Bill? I know you handed me a copy of the newsletter from PSI. PSI, yes, that's our Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, which is a little non-profit, and we have been there for 30 years, and we're putting out our newsletter now. We have a nice website telling about some of the things we're doing, and that's www.psi.edu,

we're doing, and that's www.psi.edu, so people can get on there. We have, for educators and teachers, we have some nice little tutorials, too, that are illustrated about, oh, the history of the moon and the object that blew up over Siberia in 1908 and so on and so on. We will put that link up on our site, planetary.org, along with a link to the Workman Press site so that people can easily find the Grand Tour, a traveler's guide to the solar system. Got about 30 seconds left. I want you to look forward to the fourth edition, 12 years down the line, 2017. Got any speculation for us?

Oh, my fearless forecast for 2017, I say we're already on an asteroid. I think the Moon-Mars initiative that President Bush has announced will become a Moon-asteroid-Mars initiative because we know there are asteroids easier to get to than Mars. And who knows, maybe we'll have to delay the 2017 edition for a year because they'll be just ready to launch to Mars, and we'll have to just wait and see what happens, what do we discover on Mars. And then those mermaids on Europa. The mermaids that will be swimming under the ice on Europa, and we'll find the little thin

spot in the ice and drill down through there and see what's swimming around. I'm going to look forward to it. But for now, the third edition of the Grand Tour, A Traveler's Guide to the Solar System, I recommend it highly. It is a beautiful and inspiring book for anybody, really, who appreciates art. But, boy, if you appreciate space art, I think this is it. Bill, thank you for joining us again. Thanks very much.

We're going to turn it back over to Emily Lakdawalla for a bit more of this week's Q&A. And then to a former colleague of yours, Bruce Betts, for his regular segment on this show, What's Up? Hello, Bruce, from Bill. Thank you, Bill. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Spirit and Opportunity are intelligent robots that can figure out whether their wheels are rolling properly or slipping on the Martian surface. If that's so, how did Opportunity mire itself up to its hubcaps in a dusty dune trough? Every drive that the rover does has two components.

The first is a fast, blind drive that is pre-programmed from Earth by human planners, plotting a course among rocks seen in rover images. The second component of each drive is much slower and is navigated solely by the rover using its artificial intelligence. Because Opportunity's landing site is incredibly flat and appears to contain few potential hazards, the Earth-based engineers had been instructing Opportunity to take very long blind drives more than 100 meters a day. It was during one of these blind drives that the rover drove into Purgatory Dune.

Opportunity continued rotating its wheels for 50 meters worth of driving, not noticing that its wheels weren't taking it anywhere but downward into the dirt. If the rover had been looking, it wouldn't have gotten itself into that mess. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. It is Bruce Betts joining us at the microphone. He is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he's going to tell us what's up. I am indeed, Matt. This week, those planets are coming together, coming together, and coming together. Now, this is so totally cool. We've got Jupiter and Venus after sunset. Look in the west, and they'll get closest on September 1st, but they're going to be pretty snuggly for the week or so before and the week or so after. If you look before September 1st, we have Venus below Jupiter. And then after September 1st, they will switch,

and Jupiter will continue down as each night progresses until it is lost in the glare of the sun. They're the two brightest objects up there besides when the moon is up. They look like very bright stars, and they'll be coming together. Take a look. Maybe pull out the binoculars. Maybe pull out the telescope. It's cool stuff. You've also got Mars getting brighter and brighter as we head towards late October, and it will be rising a little before midnight, and it will be up before dawn, and it is looking orangish.

And when it rises around midnight, before midnight, it will be in the east. Frog in your throat? Why, actually, no. It's a newt, but thank you for asking. Better now, though. All right, this week in space history, a lot of spiffy things happened this week. In 1976, Luna 24, the Soviet spacecraft, returned samples from the moon, the last spacecraft to bring samples back from the moon.

And we had Voyager 2 going past Saturn in 1981 and in the same week going past Neptune in 1989. Cool. Yeah. On to random space fact. Hey, Matt, did you know the tidal effects that Pluto and Charon, its moon, have on each other have actually tidally locked the two bodies to each other?

Just like the moon is tidally locked to the earth in synchronous locked rotation, so it always faces one side. But both of them are facing the same side to each other all the time. Because Pluto is a little guy, right? It's a little guy. Well, more significantly, Charon is the largest compared to its parent body in the solar system. It is nearly half the diameter of Pluto. I'm just as interested by two other factors.

One, that we can see them well enough to determine that now. And two, that I've been pronouncing Charon incorrectly for all my life, or at least since it was discovered. No, I think I just have no clue how to pronounce it. And it seems to have the most disagreement of any moon out there, I'd say, probably because we've observed it so very little. I'm sure some scholar knows how to pronounce it. I don't.

Enceladus, or Enceladus, which is how the Cassini people say it. And, you know, that's good enough for me because they're there. They're the ones who planted a flag. So, sorry with me. I'm sticking with Enceladus. Yeah, I'm sticking with Enceladus. Although I do enjoy Enceladus with some Caesar dressing. And what's next?

Okay, thank goodness. On to the trivia contest. Oh, yeah. Now, we had asked you a couple weeks ago, the crew exploration vehicle, the next spacecraft being developed by NASA to go first into Earth orbit and then be a prototype to be developed to head off to something that might go to the moon or Mars. Give us a more interesting name and make us laugh. Be humorous. Come up with what we would call the first crew exploration vehicle. I don't know, Matt. I mean, thank you for those who submitted things. I was a little disappointed. Well, We had a couple of pretty funny ones.

We did. And we're not going to mention them because that wouldn't be fair. They might end up being the funniest. But we know our audience, and we know you're funny, and we know you can do better. Feel like the parents here. That's right. They know you can do better. You gave an effort.

But we're looking for more. So what we're going to do is we're going to up the prize. Oh boy. This is a first. We've never done this before. We've never done this. Every week that we're dissatisfied with the results. Don't give them an incentive not to be funny. Good point.

Okay, we'll start sending rotten food at some point. But right now, go ahead. We'll give you another few days, week, to submit something. Well, we'll give you until, what would it be? We'll give you until the 29th. We'll give you until the 29th of August at 2 p.m. Pacific time, usual deadline. And remember, it doesn't have to be based on CEV.

No. Right? That already has. Some people were working off CEV. CEV stands for Crew Exploration Vehicle. Right? That already has. Some people were working off CEV. CEV stands for Crew Exploration Vehicle. Right. And we had a couple of funny CEV ones, too, but we just think we can get more. Open your brains.

Expand your minds. Look up at the night sky. Think about this kind of thing, okay? Just remember, folks, there is no greater burden than a great potential. And there's no greater potential than a great burden. That's right. Wow. It's profound, and that's why we're here.

Exactly. Here to help you and inspire you to great humor and profundity. Profundity. Yes, so we've got that. And, oh, we're going to add two things together. We're going to give you a poster in addition to the T-shirt, whoever wins this contest now. And then the next week we may add something nice or we may add rotted fruit. So we suggest you send us something nice.

Now, I was going to go ahead and give them yet another normal trivia contest. What do you think, Matt, or should we just... Oh, I don't know. No, don't do that because it takes so long. If we get a bunch of funny ones and we'll want to run through a bunch, I'd say no. I'd say hold off. Is that okay with you? That's okay with me. So the burden

of proof, burden of pressure, burden of fun is out there on you listeners. Make us laugh. We know you'll come through for us. I think we're done. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Go out there, look up in the night sky and think about what the crew exploration vehicle should be called if you wanted to make people laugh. Thank you. Good night. Well, he's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us each week here for What's Up, where we put the fun back in profundity and the newt back in Bruce's throat. That's all the time we have for this episode of Planetary Radio. Our show is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Did you know you can write to us and we won't even make you enter the trivia contest? The address is planetaryradio at planetary.org. Back next time with a look at amateur astronomy. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.