Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Very Good Year: Looking Back at 2007

Episode Date: December 31, 2007

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Looking back at 2007 with Emily and Bruce, 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. Today, something we've never done before. That was the year that was in space. There was news from every planet in our solar system and even some from a few planets outside our neighborhood. I'll be joined by two of my favorite people for a review of just a few of the stories that made 2007 such an exciting year in planetary science.

You know them well. Bruce Betts is the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, while Emily Lakdawalla is the Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. They are also my partners in this weekly half hour, and I can't think of anyone who is better suited to walk us through the last 12 months. We'll forego the Q&A segment, but Emily will return next week with another fascinating response to a question one of you has sent her. And don't forget that next week will bring us the premiere of our weekly commentaries by Bill Nye the Science Guy. Join us for a planet-sized helping of his PB&J, that's the passion, beauty, and joy of space

science. We didn't use up all the news from around the universe last year. As always, a good place to see the latest is in Emily Laktawalla's space blog at planetary.org. Among other things, she lets us know that the Deep Impact probe has been spotted in space. The craft raced past Earth on New Year's Eve. It's the first of three flybys that will send the accomplished invader of Comet Tempel 1 to yet another comet. Can you believe it has been two and a half years since those deep space fireworks were generated by the impactor portion of the craft? By the way, Emily has also prepared a nice picture show for you. It strings together many of 2007's most spectacular space

images collected from all over the solar system. It's also at planetary.org. Christmas came a bit late for the current occupants of the International Space Station, another Progress cargo vehicle docked on December 26th. It delivered all kinds of goodies, including a few essentials like, oh, oxygen. Let's finish with a handful of heavenly highlights that didn't make Emily and Bruce's list of planetary events. Astronomy magazine picked its own top ten space stories for 2007. They include the declaration that a recent supernova was the brightest ever seen. Then there was the first 3D map of that mysterious universe-bending material called dark matter. That's something we talked about on this show not too long ago.

And the updated prediction of the mother of all collisions. Two researchers now say that our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy sooner than had been thought, possibly in just five billion years. I am totally holding my breath for that one. I'll be back a whole lot sooner with Emily and Bruce. Space and radio, two of my favorite non-human things in the universe. Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts, the two humans who help make space and radio so much fun. You know Emily from her regular Q&A contributions to our show, and probably also from her always fascinating Planetary Society blog at planetary.org. And Bruce Betts is much more

than my partner in the weekly What's Up segment. Dr. Betts is a planetary scientist and the science editor of the Planetary Report, the Planetary Society's terrific magazine. Bruce and Emily, welcome back to the show and happy new year. Happy new year. This is a Skype conference, which we have not tried before, but it definitely beats the telephone or we'll see if we agree with that in a few minutes. The idea, of course, is to talk about what you folks think are some of the highlights of 2007 in space exploration. Bruce, as director of projects, let's start with you.

I guess you want to talk about some launches that took place. I do indeed. We had an exciting year of starting new missions for planetary launches. Had Phoenix take off and head for Mars. It'll get there in May of this coming year. Two international missions off to the moon. We've got Selene, known as Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya?

Kaguya. Kaguya. You got a corrected pronunciation on that, Emily? I was told that Kaguya means furniture store, although I'm not sure that that's true. All right. So lest we send a love seat to the moon, we'll correct that. Right. We've got furniture going to the moon, and then also the Chinese Changya, which I'm sure I also mispronounced, is also headed to the moon.

Emily can tell us a little about some of their data coming back from both. But then we also had Dawn, which started its long voyage off to the asteroid belt. We'll visit the largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, and actually go into orbit around both. So it bodes well for an exciting few years of new exploration. So Emily, tell us a little bit about Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya. Well, both Kaguya and Chang'e, which I also don't know how to pronounce, so I'm going to have to ask our Chinese listeners to tell me about that one. The advantage of lunar missions is that they are already in orbit and returning science data. Both spacecraft have gone through their shakedown phases and are now sending back spectacular images. Kaguya in

particular has on board a high definition camera, actually two cameras, and is sending back high definition video from the moon that shows the lunar landscape coming towards you as the spacecraft goes around the moon. And once in a while, you even get an Earth rise or an Earth set. It's really quite spectacular. Yeah, those are very cool. Bruce, let's go back to you. I think you've got a couple of objects in mind, at least a couple that aren't getting visited by any spacecraft, but still put on quite a show.

They did. We had a couple of very nice comets during 2007, started out early in the year with Comet McNaught, which for our southern hemisphere listeners was a spectacular object and one of the brightest in decades in terms of comets and beautiful tails spread across the sky and segmented. And then at the end of the year here, we've had the amazing outburst from a very dim comet comet holmes that had a massive outburst of brightness and went from being quite the telescopic object to being a naked eye object basically overnight and we've been enjoying that in the the northern hemisphere and to some extent in the southern hemisphere for a while now and it's actually still up a little bit more of a

binocular object than naked eye right now but still a nice fuzzball and in perseus so it's been fun to have some bright comets return to the sky it feels like it's it's been a while we also had normal mundane so to speak type things going on including a total lunar eclipse which was fun for me because i dragged my poor children out of bed in the middle of the night and took them out on my shoulder one at a time and showed them the total lunar eclipse. Of course, a regular thing, but not that regular. So fun stuff in the night sky, including for naked eye astronomy this year.

Yeah, and Mars getting pretty close just a couple of weeks ago, but we'll save that for this week's edition of What's Up. Emily, back over to you and a sort of whistle stop that was made on the way to Pluto. That's right. I think one of the most exciting things that happened this year was New Horizons' flyby of Jupiter. The flyby was a gravity assist that'll speed it on to Pluto in several years. It's going to take a long time to get out to the outer solar system. This being such an important phase of the mission, they didn't actually have to do any science at Jupiter. But, of course, they couldn't give up the chance.

And they saw some amazing things. Jupiter is in the middle of a global upheaval right now, which means that all the bands and storms are shifting and changing color and changing width. And it's been very exciting to observe from Earth. And then New Horizons got to go see some of those storms in action up close. I think one of the most significant things to come out of the New Horizons encounter was something that they didn't find. They spent a long time looking at the ring system, just staring at the rings, trying to see if they could spot any tiny moons moving around. And in fact, they didn't spot anything. So they can now rule out there being any undiscovered moons at Jupiter larger than one kilometer in diameter, which I think is a pretty big deal. Wow.

But I think that the most visually exciting thing from Jupiter was Io. The innermost moon of Jupiter is just always undergoing volcanic eruptions. But they were very lucky this time to see that Tvashtar was erupting. That volcano is near the north pole of Io. So the entire time that New Horizons was looking at it, the plume of Tavashtar was against black space. You can see it in absolutely every single picture that New Horizons took of Io. And they even accidentally took one video of the volcano erupting. And you can just see all of this frost material falling back to the moon.

It's absolutely amazing. And I'm going to bet that people could find some of those images at planetary.org. You can also check out, I encourage people to go and check out, Emily's put together a wonderful This Year in Pictures on the website that's up there right now at planetary.org and includes some of the things we're talking about. Bruce, while you're there, take us up to the break. Let's stay in the outer solar system and talk about Uranus. Speaking of observational, Uranus has had those uranophiles have just been giddy with excitement,

all three or four of them. No, I'm kidding. It's actually been really neat. Uranus has been at its equinox, which only occurs every few decades. Don't get us in trouble. All right, I'll try not to. With the Iranians, you know. Oh, stop. So it has this multi-decade seasons, and it's been neat because it's been flipping

from one hemisphere to the other. So you've got one of the poles seeing sunlight for the first time in 40 years. And astronomers are, as I say, giddy with excitement. And also we've had ring plane crossings. So we've been seeing the rings edge on, which is a way you can learn different things about it. So it's been a big, big year for Uranus observations. And I think we'll see in the next year, probably start seeing more and more of the results coming out of the many observations that have been taking place looking at Uranus. All right, Bruce Betts and Emily Lakdawalla have joined us, and we're about halfway through our best of 2007 space exploration review,

and we're going to have more of that when Planetary Radio continues in just a minute. Stay with us. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into the show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do, too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails,

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Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. It's Planetary Radio celebrating the best of 2007 in space exploration and a bit of astronomy in there as well. Kind of unavoidable.

I'm Matt Kaplan, joined by my two regular teammates here on the show, Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, and Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, and Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. And we're going to pick up again about halfway through here by going first to Mars with Emily. And Emily, there's an awful lot going on out there. Well, there's five spacecraft at Mars, so there is a lot going on. But I'd say that all five spacecraft were affected by a big weather event on Mars this year, which was a dust storm. The dust storm blew up at the end of June, and it quickly engulfed the entire planet in dust, which crippled the rovers. The rovers are solar powered, and with all that

dust between them and the sun, they were getting less than 1% of the amount of sunlight that they are typically used to. So they basically had to park and just get into survival mode and try to stay warm enough until the dust began to settle and the sun came out again. The problem with the dust beginning to settle is that it settles on the rover's solar panels. So for a while, they were gaining just about as much sunlight as they were losing with the dust collecting on the solar panels. But they're out of the woods now, and they're both operating again, although they're heading toward winter with a lot of dust on their panels,

and it's going to be interesting to see how they manage to cope with all of that as winter progresses. How about the orbiters? Well, the orbiters were not so directly affected by the dust, and in fact it was really the first opportunity that Mars orbiters have had to study a dust storm as it starts and progresses and finishes. And there were several instruments up there that are specifically designed to look at Martian climate and weather. So that was very exciting for Mars scientists. And one thing that I think was kind of amusing is that while most of the imagers couldn't take very many of the pictures that they wanted to of the surface because they had the same problem the rovers did.

They couldn't see through all that dust to the ground. There were a few things that were poking above the dust that they could still take photos of several of mars's volcanoes were well above the layer of dust and the orbiters could still take pictures of them just fine i think that one of the most exciting things from orbiters this year has just been the tremendous glorious detail in the data from the high-rise imager aboard mars reconnaissance orbiter but then when you combine that with the data from the high-rise imager aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But then when you combine that with the data from the imaging spectrometer, which can tell you what all the minerals are on the surface, and put those two data sets together, you can tell incredible stories about the history of Martian geology. And I think that one reason that we haven't seen a lot

of news about that yet is because the stories that they can tell are so complicated it's going to take scientists a long time to figure them out. Okay and more coming from the red planet in the coming year but we're going to get to that as we look forward to 2008. First Bruce can we look back 50 years to what could arguably be called the beginning of the space age? Indeed 50 year anniversary of the beginning of the space age, Sputnik, October 4th, 50 years ago. A variety of celebrations going on and looks back at things. We also have coming up shortly in 2008 the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, 50th anniversary of that. So a lot of looking back and looking ahead. We've come a long way from the tiny spacecraft just sending out its beeps going

around in orbit that kind of changed the world 50 years ago to now talking about details of dust storms on Mars from five spacecraft. It's kind of cool. Are we well into now what the Planetary Society and others are calling the International Lunar Decade? We are indeed. With the launch of Selene, we had Kaguya, the International Lunar Decade? We are indeed. With the launch of Selene, we have Kaguya, the International Lunar Decade that we've talked about because you've got those two missions and you've got two more missions scheduled to launch this coming year, one from India, Chandrayaan-1, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from the United States. And then there are a series of more missions going out with landers and eventually

humans by 2020. So we've kicked off this international lunar decade, a whole flurry of international exploration of re-exploration and whole new sets of instruments and capabilities being carried out at the moon. Emily, take us to Saturn. Well, Cassini is still at Saturn. It's nearly nearing the end of its primary mission. Actually, the primary mission ends next July. And it's just been sending back beautiful photos. It spent a lot of the year going high above and far below the plane of Saturn's rings, which means it got these tremendous top-down views on the Saturn system. So you see the globe of Saturn floating like a yolk in the middle of the rings, like egg white around

it. It's kind of cool. These studies have allowed scientists to get a look at the entire ring system going all the way around Saturn all at once. And they're really beginning to develop some detailed ideas of all of the dynamic ways that Saturn's rings are changing all the time. There's little propellers moving in Saturn's rings. There's tiny moonlets forming and breaking apart. And yet with all of this things in Saturn's rings changing all the time, still they've also found evidence that the rings have been there since Saturn first formed. So it's quite an interesting story. They've also been flying by Titan regularly, as they always do, getting some beautiful radar images that allow us to see through Titan's clouds to the surface. And being so far above and below the plane of the rings means that we're going above Titan's North Pole with each of these flybys.

And the North Pole is where those lakes are. And so the radar team has produced this map showing where all of these dark, dark black lakes filled with methane and ethane are all over the north polar regions of Titan. Some of them are very small. Some of them are huge. Many of them have what look like rivers emptying into them. It's really a pretty amazing landscape that's both alien and familiar in many ways. I'm going to wear my surf Titan t-shirt again today. Just made me decide. Bruce, let's go back to you just for a couple of seconds and a venture outside of the solar system uh the discovery of exoplanets planets circling other stars uh continues apace we're discovering more and more uh exoplanets

faster and faster so we're we're up over 250 planets elsewhere in the universe and growing quickly. And we also saw the French satellite Corot is now in space and carrying out its own look. In 2009, Kepler will launch, which promises to discover lots and lots of new planets. And the Earth-based techniques are getting more and more advanced. of new planets and the earth-based techniques are getting more and more advanced so really we're getting closer and closer to the grail of earth-like planets and trying to discover those still a challenge still discovering mostly the the big ones and seeing all sorts of weird solar systems out there and one system during this last year we've upped it to five planets that we've been able to detect in one system in 55 cancries. So it really is, considering the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995,

it's amazing how far we've come since then in terms of being over 250 exoplanets discovered now. It really is a cutting-edge field. And how. Emily, we'll give you the last word with only about 30 seconds left. Take us forward into 2008. What should we be watching for? Early in January, we've got Messenger flying by Mercury for the first time, seeing a lot of the landscape that Mariner 10 never saw.

So that's going to be our first look at an undiscovered planet. It'll be very exciting. Then Cassini is going to have its closest ever flyby of Enceladus in March, going right through the edge of the south polar plume. We've got two launches, as Bruce mentioned, later in the year to the moon, one from India and one from the United States. Phoenix is landing on Mars in May, and Rosetta will be flying by an asteroid Steins later in the year, so it's going to be pretty exciting. We are out of time, you two. Bruce, you stick around because we're going to be back with What's Up in just a moment or two,

but I do want to thank you both and tell you what a pleasure it has been for more than five years now to work with both of you and look forward to all the excitement that we'll be covering in 2008. Great. We're excited. It's going to be another great year. Looking forward to it. Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, who will be back next week with a Q&A. Also next week, as we premiere our regular commentary by Bill Nye,

the science guy, vice president of the Planetary Society. Bruce, as I said, will be sticking around for What's Up, beginning... I can hardly wait. That's just moments away, right here on Planetary Radio. All right, as promised, Bruce Betts has stuck around on Skype to share a bit of the night sky with us and maybe a new space trivia contest on this edition of What's Up. Hey there. Hey there. Hi there. Ho there.

Emily was just saying before she left us that she left one thing out. I guess it was Iapetus? Indeed. Mentioning among the other things Cassini's been doing, it got some great data at the moon Iapetus. This is the one that's really bright on one side and really dark on the other. And just spectacular views and spectacular science coming out of that. Still a puzzling mystery of a beast with this incredible bright, dark contrast on it. But pretty pictures and lots of good data to try to bring us closer to figuring out the mystery.

Okay, what else is up? Well, up in the sky, you can indeed see its parent planet, Saturn. But what's a better thing to go check out right now is Mars. We're just past opposition. Mars looking very bright. Go out in the evening, look over in the east, that bright reddish thing, looking about as bright as the brightest star, is indeed Mars. We also have in the middle of the night, as I say, Saturn coming up and looking

slightly yellowish and coming up in the east in the middle of the night and then high overhead before dawn. Venus, brightest star-like object over there in the east in the pre-dawn sky, can't miss it. You can still check out comet Holmes and Perseus. If you go look with some binoculars, you'll still see a fuzzy blob. Soon we'll get Jupiter reappearing, maybe a little early, but it's going to be coming up in the pre-dawn sky pretty quickly here. And that's the quick sky roundup. I bet you've got other things for us.

Glad you asked. Let's move on to this week in space history. Of course, big happy birthday celebration for Isaac Newton's 365th birthday, you know, if he were still alive. Newton mass, as some people call it. And we also have the ever popular Earth at perihelion on January 3rd. It will be 0.983 AU from the sun in our slightly elliptical orbit. Every year around this time, Earth at its closest point in its orbit to the sun. And we have a 10th anniversary of Lunar Prospector being launched to the moon. As we talk about all these other lunar orbiters, we'll take a quick look back at one from the 90s. We move on to random space fact. We move on to Random Space Fact.

Maybe we should have you do Auld Lang Syne instead this week. Random Space Fact. Okay, that was a joke. Oh, you don't want the Christmas Carol version either? We'll wait until the end of the year. All right. Hubble this year, another thing coming up, is the last Hubble repair mission scheduled right now for August of 2008. Hubble's mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter. Not big by ground-based standards anymore, but still pretty big and certainly huge by space-based standards.

It can see ranging from the ultraviolet through the visible and into the near-infrared. It'll get some spiffy new instruments and some upgrades, and they're going to put some racing stripes on the side in August. We have one more thing to look forward to today, and that's the trivia contest. And we asked you about the Mars opposition, how big in arc seconds was Mars at its closest approach this year, just a couple weeks ago. How'd we do, Matt? I am so glad to see who won this time out, randomly chosen, because it's someone, one of these folks who just has been incredibly faithful,

entering every week, and finally his name came up. It's Himanshu Sekhar Fathasingh in the state of Orissa in India, where we have a perhaps surprising, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, number of fans. Maybe not surprising with the space exploration activity getting underway there, or actually well underway there in India. But Himanshu said that Mars on December 18th, at its closest to the Earth, was 15.9 arc seconds. Can you maybe explain that for us? I can try. An arc second is a measurement first of angular diameter. And so you take degrees and you chop a degree into 60 and you get arc minutes. And you chop that into 60 and you get arc seconds in this wonderfully

non-metric type of unit system that's commonly used in astronomy. And so still kind of small, but what it means is if you look with a small telescope, you can actually see a really nice disk for Mars. And also it gives an idea of Mars because of its elliptiptical orbit. Each opposition is very different in terms of how bright it appears and also how large it appears. And so we're kind of at a middle-grade opposition this time around. It's just going to get worse for a few years. Then it'll get better. And in about another decade, it'll come back to where it is. And then by the end of this coming decade, it'll get close to where it is, and then by the end of this coming, well, end of this coming decade,

it'll get close to where it was in 2003, where it was, I believe, up towards 25 arc seconds at the historic closest approach in tens of thousands of years. We'll be very similar late in this coming decade. Alright, well, we're going to send Himanshu a

Planetary Radio t-shirt. I think that you are going to have a different prize for somebody next week. In fact, I know you are. Next week, a year in space calendar for our winner. Is that what we're going to give away again in the new question? We are indeed. The fabulous year in space weekly calendar that we will be giving away, the official source of this week in space history,

and just lovely pictures and articles by clever people like you. And you. Right. Anyway, it's good stuff, and we'll be giving that away for those of you, whoever the randomly selected correct answer to the following question. What instruments on Phoenix, Phoenix launched, headed to Mars, get there on May, landing on May 25th of this coming year. What instruments on Phoenix are copies of ones that flew on the failed Mars Polar Lander?

So which ones are from Mars Polar Lander? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and compete for your beautiful weekly year in space calendar. Get that entry to us by 2 p.m. Pacific time, Monday, January 7. Monday, January 7. All right, Bruce, we're off on a brand new year for Planetary Radio. And as I said to Emily, it has been a pleasure, and I look forward to doing, oh, I don't know, let's do 51 more of these this year. Wow.

That sounds both really exciting and intimidating when you say it that way. Oh, we're up to it. There's so many stories we're going to cover and it's going to be great fun. No, I really am excited about this coming year, both new things happening from launches to encounters to analysis of data we got from this last year, because some of these things take a while to figure out. It's going to be a really good year so happy new year everyone happy new year matt everybody go out there uh look up in the night sky and think about dogs thank you and good night well he's bruce betts not talking about the dog star this time but he's certainly serious about what's up in the night sky every week here on what's up i hope you'll spend the next year with us as well.

And be sure to join us next week when we'll introduce you to Bill Nye. He's a science kind of guy. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week and a wonderful new year. Thank you.