Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Venus Phosphine Scoop! The Return of Jane Greaves

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Astronomer Jane Greaves and her worldwide team have had quite a ride. It has been two years since the Cardiff University professor announced evidence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. Many scientists were and still are skeptical, but Jane is back with more data, including some that she shares with us first. She and Mat talk about what this could mean. Phosphine-belching Venusian penguins are very unlikely, but we want your artists’ concepts of them! That’s in addition to yet another space trivia contest from Bruce Betts. There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-jane-greaves-more-venus-phosphineSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Venusian Phosphine Scoop, 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. Cardiff University astronomer Jane Greaves has returned with more evidence for phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Earth's broiling sister planet. Jane and I will talk about the implications, including speculative models of how living organisms could be responsible. It's a delightful conversation with a delightful guest, and it ends with a challenge for the more artistically gifted among you.

Equally delightful, Bruce Betts will pick up with a look at the current night sky, a random space fact, and a new space trivia contest, all as part of this week's What's Up. Have you heard last week's stinky comet feature? My conversation with three University of Bern scientists gets top billing in the August 12 edition of the Downlink, the Planetary Society's free weekly newsletter. There's more comet commotion in this issue, including a pretty image of Swift Tuttle, the body that is responsible for the just-finished Perseid meteor shower. The Artemis 1 mission is still headed toward its first launch opportunity on August 29th. I'll be there with my Society colleagues, Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer and Editorial Director Ray Paletta. We're hoping to meet with other Society members, and all of us

are hoping to see that giant Space Launch System rocket lift off for the first time. Even as we look forward to Artemis I, NASA is preparing to send four astronauts on a similar moon-orbiting trip. Artemis II might happen as soon as 2024. You can always find more at planetary.org. The Venusian Phosphine Saga has a new chapter. It comes to us once again from Professor Jane Greaves, leader of an international interdisciplinary team of scientists. We first reported on their findings back in October of

2020. That announcement generated a lot of media interest and a lot of skepticism from other researchers. As you'll hear in this new conversation, Jane and her team have never stopped gathering data, and this data still points to the presence of phosphine gas. So, if it's really there, where is it coming from? Volcanoes on the surface? Living microbes that have adapted to a difficult life in the clouds? Or some other yet-to-be-discovered mechanism? These are some of the topics I covered with Jane a few days ago.

Jane, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Congratulations on delivering the Fred Kavli lecture at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The Fred Kavli lecture at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. We're going to link to the video of your presentation that I highly recommend our listeners take a look at. It is a wonderful background, really about all of Venus exploration, not just the work that you've been doing, but it is certainly that as well. And that's what we'll talk about today. Thanks for coming back to the show. Thanks very much for having me on the show again. It has been quite a ride, hasn't it?

It certainly has. It's hard to believe that we published our results and, like, you know, conveyed them to everybody public in the world, like, nearly two years ago now. It was September 2020. And we covered that media briefing, that press conference, and then you were on the show soon after. And then you came back on the show to talk about the commotion that had been caused. You know, I was tempted to call this episode, the phosphine strikes back or revenge of the phosphine. But that kind of implies,

you know, we media people were always looking for controversy and conflict, of course. The opposition that was generated by legitimate scientists, wasn't that exactly the way science is supposed to work? It was mostly, yeah. I mean, we put everything out there very publicly, so all our data were public and all our things on the computer that we process the data, so all our results were reproducible, which nobody's really queried that those procedures we use didn't work. But yeah, it is you put it out there and people go, you know, that's not my favorite technique.

And so we've been kind of wrestling with that. I think the thing that was a bit of a downer was people that didn't get really get in touch with us and say, let's share expertise, which was what we really wanted. And say, let's share expertise, which was what we really wanted. People putting out their things going, I can't find it. And then we'd be looking through what they'd done and going like, you haven't shown us the details, but we think you've done the following. So it's been a little bit rough on the two of us who are doing the data processing. But yeah, it is very much the way science proceeds. I'm sorry to hear about that part of it. I mean, some of us tend to forget that scientists are merely human and do things that other humans do periodically. But now, I mean, it's the work that you detailed in the Kavli lecture. You have new data, which we're

going to get to in a moment. But I want to go back even further, because I don't think I've asked you this before. What first got you thinking, hmm, I wonder if there could be phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere and how would we go about finding it? What got that underway? Oh, it's kind of funny because I was asked to do a kind of very early specification for what a far infrared space telescope might in the future be able to do for solar system science. And this was for a system science. And this was for a UK meeting. And that's kind of very niche for the UK. So they asked me and I didn't know a huge lot about it. Of course, this will be very exciting, particularly in the US because NASA has plans for far infrared space telescopes. I really hope we get to do these things.

You know, I was looking around thinking what kind of things have been done before for the solar system in the far infrared, which is a heritage of things like the infrared space observatory that the European Space Agency built a couple of decades ago so I looked through all this because particularly the brief was to look at things you could do at spectra for detecting molecules I found phosphine is a molecule being studied a lot and then I had to look it up because I was like never heard of it okay it's ph3 that sounds quite a simple molecule and then I did a little bit more looking it up and most of the stuff that came up was about how it's poisonous um but also how it's

a gas that you find on earth where you've got these bacteria in extreme situations and they don't use oxygen so they get their energy in other ways. And for reasons we don't really understand, they pump out some phosphine gas. And in the back of my mind, there was solar system, you know, what's been done in the solar system? Where haven't we been so much? And I was thinking, oh, yeah, there's this old idea that Carl Sagan and some other people came up with, that there could be life floating in the clouds of Venus, where there's no oxygen, and kind of all these things fell into place. And I was like, well, you know, nobody's stopping us doing a search for phosphine on Venus. It's never been done.

And I thought, oh, well, we'll have to wait 20 years for this space telescope or 30 years and I'll be super retired. And then I realized that you could actually do some of this with the radio telescopes we already have. There's one of these absorption wavelengths of phosphine that you can do with radio telescopes from facilities we already have. There's one of these absorption wavelengths of phosphine that you can do with radio telescopes from facilities we already have on the ground. So that's what kicked it off. What a brilliant scientific inference or progression of thought there. That's exactly what I wanted to hear about. So that first work done with data that you got from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and the ALMA array, which I never failed to tell people that I got to visit once there in the Atacama Desert in Chile. That's what gave you this first tantalizing data.

A second round of observations from the JCMT, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. What's different about this second set of data from that instrument? Well, the JCMT have been great to us. Not only did they give us a bit of time in the first place, which other telescopes were like, please don't waste our time with this idea. But they very generously gave us a few hours to do it and gathered the data. But then they went back without us even asking, in fact. So this was two years ago now, two summers ago. They had a new instrument on the telescope, which wasn't even being used by like regular astronomers.

But they did a little bit of time because Venus had come back, swung back again and took us a few more spectra. And then we had all the excitement with the paper coming out and talking to people and great interactions with the public and then the start of people going like no you must be wrong in the science community and i didn't really get to look at the new jcmt data for um like almost a year i think and then i looked at it and we do see the phosphine absorption again and it's pretty similar. So we have 2017 and 2020 data with the same telescope, but with different instruments and different kinds of tackling the processing issues that come in there. And we got the same results. So I'm very happy about that. The article by my colleague, Jason Davis, who I think you spoke to a while back, we're going to link to his article as well. It includes this wonderful graphic of three different plots, all of which show this big

dip and are from three different, well, two different telescopes, ALMA and the JCMT. But on the JCMT now, two completely different instruments. It looks like you have reason to have a bit more confidence here. I think we do. And in fact, I haven't told anyone yet this because I was doing it this morning before speaking to you. But we have a third set of data from the JCMT because on the back of what we had already, they're allowing us to do what's called a legacy survey, where we can use far, far more telescope time and collect a whole slew of data. And my friend, Dr. Dave Clements at Imperial College here in the UK is leading that. But the whole pile of data from February landed on my computer, which is a very slow computer. And I finally teased out the third detection of phosphine from the JCMT just this morning.

So, in fact, your listeners are the first to do that because I haven't had time to email Dave yet. That is fantastic. I'm sorry that it'll be a few days before this show goes out, but thank you for that scoop. I read that there was also some data, maybe not as significant, from SOFIA, that big infrared telescope built into a Boeing 747. How would you characterize that data? Yeah, so I'm still trying to get hold of some of the people at the observatory to discuss that, because that wasn't data that was taken for us. But of course, as most big modern telescopes do, the data are the data remained public you know so everybody can have a go at it um and you know i'm not so familiar with sofia but the excitement was they took this data which looks at a different absorption line of phosphine so it's about one quarter the wavelength for the original one and that is the true far infrared

and that's where you need ideally a space telescope but a plane flying in the stratosphere so fear can get nearly as good so i've run the kinds of processing we've developed for the jcmt and it looks like there is a detection of this other absorption line of phosphine as well which would be amazing so either i've completely misunderstood some things you know the data tells you in the sort of metadata and looked at completely the wrong place or something. But I think that's also starting to look kind of solid. So I'm excited to talk to the people who took that data and the observatory staff about that. It's unfortunate that I believe Sophia is just flying back to home base at the moment, having done its last astronomical flight. But, you know, I hope they'll sort out maybe the funding situation and

will be ready to fly again maybe in a few years. That would be awesome. Yeah, it's not looking good right now. I mean, I have a special place in my heart for Sophia as well. I went on one of those observation flights and right now, as far as we know, it's still going to make its last flight by September 30th. But with results like this, maybe people will start to reconsider. I hope so, because it does such unique science. I mean, particularly the US, and I think we in Europe are hoping to join that effort. You know, I think it's really like there'll be a new amazing far infrared space telescope. So picking up where JWST stops at wavelengths of about 30 microns, you know, something to go from there into the really obscure parts of the infrared that we have very little information about, that would be

awesome. What is it about this search for phosphine on that nearby world in its atmosphere, what makes it so incredibly difficult to sort through this and find the indications, the data that you're looking for? Well, the actual absorption feature we're looking for is about 10 times fainter than what's been done fairly easily before. So telescope like the JCMT haven't changed a great deal over the last two or three decades even. We're just trying to push the techniques to go deeper. And we come

into all sorts of nasty things, which is what I'm scratching my head over at the moment. So Venus is incredibly bright as a radio object. So some of that light comes into the telescope enclosure and we think just bounces around. So it hits the floor and the wall and the back of the telescope and kind of pings around and reenters the optical path and then joins in the receiver going, I'm a bit late to the party, but here I am. And unfortunately, the mathematical techniques that are used to produce the spectrum, they kind of scramble this and tell you there's some other signal at another wavelength in there. And it kind of makes the spectrum undulate up and down. It's just like this huge, hideous, complicated wave pattern. So I've been sitting looking at the new JCMT data we got just this February going like, that's 50 waves, all of different sizes going past, you know, I'm not the world's best surfer, but this kind of thing,

you'd be like, yeah, these are all going past. And in the middle there is the tiny thing I'm trying to find. It's a neat mathematical challenge. I wish it wasn't quite so difficult, but that's the problem. So we're looking for like, always kind of like one little shark fin sticking up over a whole load of bobbly waves. What is the additional challenge caused by the Doppler effect? I mean, the difference between our world and the one you're trying to observe.

Yeah, so I suppose astronomers think if Venus is moving away from us at, what is it, about 10 kilometers per second, that's not very fast. But actually, that is like really, really fast. That's per second, you know, miles per second or kilometers per second. That's really fast. We're not talking per hour. So this means that the little spectrum of the phosphine we're looking for is slightly more red shifting over time. At the moment, we're using that as kind of a neat feature because the things that are happening in the telescope frame are just kind of sitting there at the same wavelength all the time. things that are happening in the telescope frame.

We're just kind of sitting there at the same wavelength all the time. So we can use this changing velocity to help dig out the phosphine signal. And this is really the first time we've had a chance to do this. We got 20 days of data in February this year, which is completely overwhelming. Venus shifted by quite a bit in that time. So we can look for it as kind of like a perturbation of what's happening with the regular instrument patterns. So I think this is going to help. It's just, you know, more data than I've ever had to look at before.

That's very interesting. Here I was thinking that the Doppler only caused you more headaches, but it actually might help you sort through the data. I'd help you sort through the data. You also addressed in your lecture the various arguments for and against how phosphine might be getting generated, volcanoes, I don't think it's heavy industry on the surface, and of course, this possibility of life floating around up there. And that reference that you made, maybe regret now to you hope it's flying penguins because you know i read i i actually looked at that paper by completely unrelated researchers about phosphine created in the guts of antarctic penguins i'm guessing maybe i didn't get far enough into the paper by more anaerobic bacteria that are turning out those phosphine i think that's

true i tried to read that penguin paper too and And as a whole branch of penguinology, I was not familiar with as an astronomer. But yeah, we mentioned this because we all got kind of, you know, oh, the cute penguins in the pictures, the Gentoo penguins, I think, which are exceptionally cute. I think we must have mentioned this one too many times because people got confused by this idea, like, how do the penguins stay up in the clouds of Venus? And we didn't mean like literal penguins. Although, you know, as I'd put in some email to you, let's hope that the DaVinci Plus probe, when it descends, doesn't bean any flying penguins as it descends. I'll come back to those missions that we're all looking forward to. I'll come back to those missions that we're all looking forward to.

As you talked about these various possible sources, I'll ask you to first maybe give the argument, which you give in the lecture, the arguments against this coming from a biological source, from something living in that high atmosphere, in those clouds. I guess there are plausible answers, right? Yeah, this is nice because there's a lot of challenges you can put to sort of chemists and people like that. And the limit is we know so little about Venus, but we think that volcanoes, volcanic plumes on Earth, you can get some phosphine gas because it's kind of mantle materials being shot out suddenly through the volcano. And then they react with water and you can get phosphine that way.

And I think that's maybe not been experimentally proved even on Earth, because who wants to fly through that? Or maybe even send a drone through that. But yeah, so there have been some serious calculations for Venus where the volcanoes may be very energetic and large, though we haven't imaged too much about them, but they're thought to be there on the surface. So possibly if some phosphine bearing rocks from under the surface got literally hurled like 40 miles into the atmosphere and then reacted, you could get some phosphine gas. Latest thinking, at least on our team, is this probably doesn't work because there's a lot of the right kind of rock like deep in the mantle of the earth, but it kind

of comes up slowly. You know, it doesn't like come out from a gun from, you know, like many miles down and it alters on the way because of temperature and pressure and things. So it looks like there isn't enough of what I'm told of phosphides by any calculations, you know, by orders of magnitude to make this idea work. But I just saw the authors of that have had a bit of a comeback going, you know, Venus, not quite like Earth. And, you know, maybe these phosphides could come up. But the fundamental limit appears to be there isn't the water that there would be in and around the volcanic plumes on Earth because Venus is

pretty dry because it's been baked so hot. So it seems like if you talk to geologists, this probably doesn't work. And that brings us back to the original idea of going like pH three, such a simple molecule, but there isn't all this free hydrogen in the atmosphere of Venus. So take some quite exotic out of equilibrium process to collect all this hydrogen. And that's where the life idea originally came in. And now I think you may have reached, it's one of my favorite slides in your lecture presentation. It's the one that was titled microhabitats. And there's a question mark

on the end of that. You know, the one I'm talking about, could you talk a little bit about that? Yes, I hope I'm picturing the same slide as you. But the idea is that, and this is my colleagues, Sarah Seeger, MIT, leading this particularly, that the droplets in the clouds of Venus, which we think are there, could be an actual habitat. So these things might be only a few millionths of a meter across, really, really tiny things, but like a tiny drop where you could fit in a few microbes, because they're a bit smaller than that. In that case, they could make a kind of protective environment for themselves. So maybe these droplets won't all be the same, some could have more water in them, they could reduce the sulfuric acid in the droplets

by some kind of biological action and kind of preserve themselves. And then their little bubble bursts or they fall or something. They could maybe go into some kind of spore stage and then get carried around by winds and turbulence and end up in a different droplet. Sarah's team have worked out a whole kind of life cycle there, you know, which is all put together on the basis of sensible ideas. But what we'd really need is some probe to go there and, you know, see if those conditions actually work. Now you've gone exactly where I was hoping to go next. And it does make me also think that we're going to need to get Sarah back on our show before too long to talk a little bit more in depth about this work that is underway on these micro habitats. I think you've answered the question, but I'll ask it anyway. How important is it that we go to Venus, physically go there,

and sniff this atmosphere directly? It's amazing the basic information we don't have. So, you know, we've decided phosphorus is important, and phosphorus as a chemical element is really important for life and you and me and everyone. So it's in our DNA molecules. It wouldn't work without that, for example. We have no measure of any kind of the amount of phosphorus on the surface of Venus.

And we have one measure in the atmosphere, essentially. Actually, two measures now now two different spacecraft from the 1970s you know we just don't have the kind of wealth of information you could get with modern spacecraft so you know ideally i'd want to send a flotilla and observe the heck out of everything but i think the race is on to go and look at some of these new questions that have come up with like what is really in the clouds you know are they completely dry um you know even things like how windy is it you know how stable could anything be we know so little so hopefully a slew of instruments is going um and several space

agencies now have declared an interest so it's great to have new players in the game as well or with different ideas of what kind of instrument you could send ranging from um something like the quickest shot you could do the next time venus comes around maybe one tiny instrument a sort of palm size instrument just to do one thing related to life in the clouds that would be amazing up to you know the biggest space agencies like nasa and isa who'd pack probably a dozen instruments to tell you all kinds of other things. Like we don't know if there's lightning in the clouds of Venus for sure. There's an example really hard to observe from the Earth. So, you know, some kind of camera or radio sensor could answer all these questions at the moment.

We're literally trying to find archives of 1970s data and figure out what even the format was of this punch card or something. Wow. We have a little experience with this at the Planetary Society, the Pioneer Anomaly, Pioneers 10 and 11, and trying to read that now ancient data in terms of scientific advancement. Absolutely fascinating. I wish you luck with that. Now, as you know, we are going from famine to feast, you might say, with missions to Venus. I'll go back to my colleague Jason Davis's article, which again, we'll link to from this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio, where he lists all of these. Of course, there's, you know, Da Vinci and Veritas from NASA,

but I mean, India, the United Arab Emirates, the European Space Agency a little bit later. I am especially intrigued by what may be the first ever privately funded probe that could leave as soon as next year for Venus from Rocket Lab,

that amazing little company based in, well, here in California, but also in New Zealand. They want to send a probe. And I think they've said that they specifically want to look for phosphine. Is that your understanding? Yeah, they're really excited about Venus. Certainly the founder of the company is really enthused. And they've had a lot of successes recently. is really infused.

They've had a lot of successes recently. So they launched this whole satellite into orbit around the moon, which is going to help with NASA missions to the moon. So they're hoping to go interplanetary as soon as possible, as you mentioned, and get to Venus. Not necessarily phosphine, but something even more directly life-related

might go as the instrument package on their spacecraft. So Sarah, again, has been working a lot with the Breakthrough Project people to say what would get you the most bang for the buck in one of these sort of palm-sized instruments you could drop through the clouds. So I have great trouble saying this, but I think what it says in the report is an autofluorescing nephelometer, which looks for the fluorescence of molecules that you get, the molecules that are associated with life. So they fluoresce in some way that non-biological molecules don't.

So that's the idea to take what is like a small commercial piece of kit and drop it through the clouds of Venus. And then you have a couple of minutes maybe to get signals out before it's disappeared forever. So you know this is a super exciting idea and I think they're aiming for the next close swing by of Venus or whenever it's lined up the best for a connecting orbit from Earth. Yeah, can't wait to see that happen. Are you or Sarah or other members of your team, are you talking to members or are you talking to the teams for these other spacecraft like the two NASA probes that are expected to launch in 2028? Yeah, very much. They're calling on different people of our team, depending on expertise, you know, to understand chemistry or modeling atmospheres and computers or whatever. The Da Vinci people have been particularly generous and just held a roundtable meeting, inviting people to put forward ideas

because their instrument package is pretty much, you know, the design is finished, but they found a way to slot in kind of a fourth bit of wavelength to one of the instruments, which is a laser spectrometer. So they were saying like, get your bids in for what you'd like it to be. So we went in as both team phosphine and team ammonia, both of which

would be great biomarkers. So I was, you know, sneakily putting myself on both teams. And then there's some other really interesting molecules up for consideration as well that might tell us a whole lot about the volcanoes, or looking for rare isotopes that would tell us a whole lot about the volcanoes or looking for rare isotopes that would tell us more about the molecules and atoms that are left in the atmosphere. Give us a real clue to the past of Venus because lighter ones like fly away in this event that's thought to have got rid of the oceans and the water that may have been there.

So you can calculate how much atmosphere was lost from these heavier and lighter isotopes as I understand it and so we could get some idea if venus had oceans so this is all like thrilling science so in a way it doesn't matter which instrument they managed to put on us this fourth channel or even if they can't do it they already have super exciting plans but yeah team phosphine and team ammonia which dave is telling me is now called team phosmonia or something like that.

We're hoping they might pick one of our molecules. I go team phosmonia, I suppose. So much to look forward to. Other than talking to these groups that are going to be launching these spacecraft before too long, What's next? I mean, what are you and your team currently working on in terms of what can be done from down here on Earth? Well, we're still thinking radio astronomy. And this is something we have the data in hand, but we're not quite finished yet. So we use the enormous Green Bank telescope in West Virginia.

So it's this 100 meter across radio telescope, which is an amazing facility and did proper radio astronomy. None of these like millimeter size waves at JCMT and Albedo, but proper centimeter size jobs, proper radio astronomy. No comment from me because I'm of course a big fan of ALMA, but yes, okay, I get it. I'm a big fan of all of this. But they very kindly gave us a couple of hours to look for ammonia. So we're hoping something will either come out of that data or having done this crazy thing with this giant telescope that they've never done before, that we would get another shot to look for it. So ammonia would absorb at this wavelength near one centimeter if it's in the clouds.

So we're really hoping to get a handle on that. Turns out I couldn't find any radio spectrum of Venus ever taken in this wave band by any telescope ever since the 1960s. So at least we have the first radio spectrum, whatever it's telling us. This is shot in the dark, but I know that you mentioned the Breakthrough folks, Breakthrough Institute, or Foundation, and they, I know, have time on the Green Bank telescope because they put some money into saving that facility. Is that at all related to the work you're doing, the observation time you have there, or is this

just the Green Bank NRAO people saying, yes, this looks like a great project? Yeah, I think they're just great people out there and they're open to new ideas. So I believe the SETI instrument can piggyback on whatever regular observations are going on, or perhaps they can make use of time that other people can't for very narrow band type signals. for very narrow band type signals you know like when you're tuning your car radio to try and find some really narrow signal i believe that's what the seti people are doing looking at nearby stars and maybe they can do that while nearby stars go past um in the course of other people's projects so not directly related but i am very excited about what they're doing as well yes i loved your closing slide in your k cattley lecture presentation had snapshots of your team uh it looks like a fun diverse group yeah they've been great people to work with and you

know still i've never met quite a lot of them face to face you know we've and these amazing team zooms just to say hello you know where somebody's got up at three in the morning in Japan, there's giving us a very tired wave, or, you know, it's breakfast time in Hawaii or something that could not have done it without them. So I try and put up those shots whenever I can. And, you know, in some ways, the most important person on the team was Elisa Lee, who operated the telescope for us, because we didn't go out to Hawaii for the original few hours, she was operating the JCMT. And, you know, these are people in the community that, you know, I've never met. But, you know, we're all doing science together.

So Elisa is African-American, I believe. You know, she was doing this while doing her student studies, studying science, you know, just as kind of a job to make some money, was what I was told. You know, so it's great, you know, the diversity and the participation that we've had with these people I wouldn't have expected to work with on a more regular project. Just seemed like another nice benefit of this work that is underway, that has brought this group together. I want to propose that whatever we learn about the Venusian atmosphere, even if we learn that there is some more plausible source of this phosphine than life,

or that it's not there at all, that you have played a big role in reigniting interest in this world by scientists, by space agencies, and mere fans like me. So thank you for that. Yeah, I find this a bit astonishing as I'm just sitting here in my flat, you know, trying to survive the last pandemic, looking out the window of my apartment. It seems odd that I've like poked NASA along a bit. But, you know, and along with the team, you know, there would have been no publications without the important things that the team did. It would have been no chemistry, no biology, no nothing without them. So I should say the 19 of us on the team were the ones who poked NASA rather unexpectedly and the other space agencies.

So I hope not too many people are annoyed that the missions got funded at the expense of something else. too many people are annoyed that the missions got funded at the expense of something else. But you know, I think it's what we need to do as a human species is like, keep taking a look at what's around us. Keep poking away, Jane. Wouldn't it be just delicious if we discovered life above Venus before we found evidence of life or even past life on Mars? That would be quite something. That would be quite crazy. I think what kind of hit me in the face was like, I'm starting to think maybe there's life in all these environments because life is so tough. If, you know, we turn around a few years and we're like, well, obviously on Venus and on

Mars and inside Europa and Enceladus, you know, why wouldn't there be? It might be a situation like, you know, now we're going like, well, why wouldn't there be planets everywhere, which seems crazy, if you look back now at a 30 year old, maybe a child's textbook, like, we will never know if there are planets around other stars. You know, I'll say, how did they write that? That's so dumb. So yeah, maybe the next textbooks will be going, how did they write? We will never know if there's life on other planets. I want to be around when the need to revise those current textbooks comes around. I got just one other question for you. It's another shot in the dark. Have you received any drawings of those phosphine belching penguins that live so happily in the

high cool Venusian clouds? No, sadly, I haven't. We did get a very odd message saying it had been a question in a Japanese quiz show. And so they phoned up rather confused to go, is the correct answer yes penguins or no penguins? And my team were like, what? Can you explain a bit? We have a very talented...

We need the drawings of how the penguins fly and so on. All right. We're calling on you, listeners. We have a very talented group of listeners out there, and I am challenging anybody out there. You can send to me at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Your rendering of penguin, penguinaceous life in the clouds of Venus, and I will pass them on to Jane and her team. Deal? Okay. Jane, it is always a delight. Thank you for joining us again. And for this great work. I look forward to talking again, or whoever is in

this seat, I know is going to want to talk to talking again, or whoever is in this seat, I know is going to want to talk to you again. Thank you so much. That's Cardiff University professor and astronomer Jane Greaves. I'll be back with Bruce in a minute with more to say about that Venusian penguin art invitation. Hello, I'm George Takei.

And as you know, I'm very proud of my association with Star Trek. Star Trek was a show that looked to the future with optimism, boldly going where no one had gone before. I want you to know about a very special organization called the Planetary Society. They are working to make the future that Star Trek represents a reality. When you become a member of the Planetary Society, you join their mission to increase discoveries in our solar system,

to elevate the search for light outside our planet, and decrease the risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid. Co-founded by Carl Sagan and led today by CEO Bill Nye, the Planetary Society exists for those who believe in space exploration to take action together. So join the Planetary Society and boldly go together to build our future. Hey, it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So here's the chief scientist once again, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. That is, please help me welcome Dr. Bruce Betts. Thank you. Thank you.

Good to be here again, Matt. It's good to have you back. Been a long time since we've talked. The secret word of the day is, can you guess? Penguin. Yes! He wins the Chevy Nova. Nova. Well, anyway, there are more penguin goodnesses ahead, but first, tell us what's up in the night sky. Is there a penguin constellation? Tell us what's up in the night sky. Is there a penguin constellation?

In the penguin culture of Antarctica, there is. Interestingly, the penguins have... Never mind. Focus, focus, focus. So focusing, there are no penguins in the sky because, you know, they can't fly. But there are planets spread all across the night. As long as it's not cloudy, you should be able to see a bright planet. In the evening, we've got Saturn just past opposition, so it's rising. Still right around sunset in the east, setting around sunrise in the west.

Jupiter rising a couple hours later in the kind of early evening. Not surprisingly, due to the rotation of the Earth this time, they're coming up in the east. Not surprisingly, due to the rotation of the Earth this time, they're coming up in the east. Mars coming up around midnight, middle of the night, and looking reddish. And super bright Venus still hanging out low, but hanging out in the pre-dawn east. And so it's a festival. Mars will be joined by the moon on the 19th. That's the night of the 19th. That's the night of the 18th and going into the 19th you can also, with or without the moon,

see the Pleiades star cluster kind of near Mars and the moon is in between them in the morning of the 19th. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One more thing, the moon is near Venus low down

in the pre-dawn east on the 25th. That's a nice bunch of combos. I was able to see Saturn last night, but it was the first clear night we'd had in ages, so I missed the Perseids, if I'd been able to see them from this urban skyscape in the first place. I saw a pre-dawn Perseid. Rare for me, since I used to stay up all night with friends and watch them. But the dogs nicely woke me up, and we were chasing some kind of animal out there around 3.30 in the morning, and got a meteor in.

That's great. A little side story. All right, let's go on to this week in space history. It was Voyager 2. Voyager 2 launched in 1977. Voyager 2, still going way out there. It's impressive. And we're going to celebrate the 45th anniversary of both launches in just a couple of weeks here. So we'll go back out to JPL. We're going to talk to Ann Druyan as well. One of the people behind the Voyager golden record, along with her

soon after it was created husband, Carl Sagan. Wait, after he was created? You know, if you want to create a Carl Sagan from scratch, first you have to create the universe. Wow, that was trippy, man. Kind of meta, the way you built in his lessons about the universe. Okay, so on to random space facts. That was trippy, man. Kind of meta, the way you built in his lessons about the universe. Okay, so on to random space fact. Dang it, I'm really off my game today.

Random space fact! Oh, I like that. This is something highly technical that you may not have thought of, or maybe you have. An anagram for astronomers is moon starers. That's a very hard word for me to say, but someone who stares at the moon. Anagram. Also, kind of backwards, it's also an anagram for no more stars. Oh, no.

Oh, well, after the heat death of the universe, I imagine. Oh, dude, you're bringing me down again. I'm sorry. Bring us back up again. Let's move on to the trivia contest. What solar system moon has the highest surface gravity? Something that I find not intuitive because it depends on a couple of parameters. How do we do, Matt? We got quite a few nice responses to this one.

Here is the opening salvo from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, in Kansas. Io is a spouting moon, volcanic, we can tell, a mass of vivid colors, a sulfuric burning hell. It's made of rock and silicate, so it's plain to see why Io ranks the highest with its surface gravity. Nice. Nice little ditty. Indeed, it is Io, moon of Jupiter, with a surface gravity of 0.183 g, so of the surface gravity on Earth. Or as David Chern in Missouri called it, that smoky little trickster.

You know, that is totally, in the planetary science community, they use that term. Because they couldn't decide, you know, it's like Io, Io. How about the smokey little trickster? Everyone agrees. According to Norman Kassoun, though, Io was hardly a trickster. He says that as was Zeus's want, he had an extramarital affair with the nymph Iot, whom he callously turned into a cow when his wife Hera discovered the illicit dalliance. Don't have a cow, man.

No wonder she's mad and filled with volcanic fury. Yeah, that would make me erupt. Christopher Trunk in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that would make me erupt. Christopher Trunk in Pennsylvania, Io deserves more Jupiter's nasty radiation belts caused by its spinning magnetosphere that it's really unhealthy for spacecraft. So even the spacecraft that do see it, typically the plan is to dip in, see it, and then dip back out again. Yeah, get the heck out. A couple of poems to close with

roger gown in new hampshire with bruce's instructions i sought to comply though i feared it might make me cryo but i just had to give it a try oh so my answer it's jupiter's io yeah it's including your name that got him in there. Yeah, that makes me happy. And then this kind of long one from Gene Lewin, another of our regular poets up in Washington. Dancing on the surface here, you'd be light on your feet. Still, your poor old trotters just couldn't stand the heat. The dance floor is expansive. Watch where you place your dogs.

It's covered in calderas. You'll need asbestos clogs. This place is radiating 3,600 rems a day. It smells a bit like sulfur. It's a small price to pay. So why be such a wallflower? Iowa is where we'll be. Let's trip the light fantastic.

Thank you, Arthur Murray. A very positive view on Io and its environment. Yeah. Arthur Murray, no relation to the great Bruce Murray, one of your mentors. We can neither confirm nor deny that. You know what? I never told you who the winner was, but I will now. They probably want to know.

It's Thomas Anceleri, who's been listening since at least 2016, and this is his first time as a winner there in Colorado congratulations Thomas you have won yourself a copy of that really beautiful book it's it's basically an art book carbon one atoms Odyssey by John Burnett it's still for sale all over the place we just happen to have another copy it does trace the sort of lifespan of one carbon atom as it proceeds across the universe and through various incarnations. It's just a terrific book, all with these beautiful drawings done by John. I think we're ready for another. This one's hard. I did a quick look at looking this up. Some of you might know this.

You might be able to deduce it. You might be able to guess it. The internet is vast. But with the penguin theme, I could not resist. What planetary society project, I'll give you a clue, it was a spaceflight project. That doesn't mean a spacecraft. It just means it's a project to fly something in space. What TPS spaceflight project had a penguin

as part of its logo? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Wow. I've been around for 22 years almost, and I don't know the answer to this one. So yeah, that's a good one. You got until Wednesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time on August 24th to get us the answer for this one. Here's the prize. It's another book that I discovered we have a spare copy of. We've given it away before, and I'm happy to award it again. The Spacefarers Handbook, Science and Life Beyond Earth by Birgitta and Urs Gans. And I hope I'm not mangling their names too badly,

but that's what I do. It's really good. It's from Praxis, Springer Praxis Books, and it's a neat little handbook, richly illustrated. And that's what will go to the winner this time around. Sticking with this week's penguin theme, I just want to bring up again that little, well, it amounts to a contest, I guess, an art invitational. I want to sweeten the pot a little bit on that offer to all of you to send us your artist concept of flying phosphine belching penguins in the Venusian atmosphere, which almost certainly are not there, will award at least one planetary radio rubber asteroid to someone who submits the art that they have created to go with this theme. More penguins, Bruce.

Your scientific caution is truly impressive. Almost certainly. Not in the Venus atmosphere. All right. All right, everybody, go out there there look up at the nice sky and think about would you rather see penguin poop from space or see penguins up close but have to smell it thank you yeah that's a tough one. I guess I would go for the former because I've been close to penguins without thick glass between us. And they're dirty little birds. I'll tell you, I don't know if that was phosphine I was smelling or not, but it really is. I've heard it's bad.

That's Bruce Betts. He's keeping us honest because he's the chief scientist of Planetary Society. And he 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 its penguin-loving members. But after all, who doesn't love penguins? It's not a requirement for membership in the Planetary Society, but it doesn't hurt. Planetary.org slash join.

Marco Verda and Ray Paletta are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser, Ad Penguin, I mean Astra.