Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Visitor From the Stars: ‘Oumuamua

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

The first confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system is a needle-shaped asteroid given the Hawaiian name ‘Oumuamua. Karen Meech leads the team that is learning as much about it as possible before it leaves our neighborhood, never to return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings, podcast listeners. It's Matt with another special message of gratitude. At this season when gratitude is everywhere, many thanks to those of you who have made a special gift to the Planetary Society in support of Planetary Radio. I think I've thanked all of you individually as well. I hope so. And I've got an invitation for the rest of you. We've created an easy way for anyone to support the show. Go to planetary.org slash give today. Then you can scroll down to where you see Cassini project scientists Linda Spilker and me with our hands over the plumes coming from a giant model of Enceladus. You'll know what to do next. And I won't feel hurt if you decide to support one of the Society's other great initiatives, but planetary.org

slash give today is the way to get started. Please join the other listeners and Society members who have helped us bring you Planetary Radio every week for the last 15 years. Thanks again, and happy holidays. A visitor from the stars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. It is the first object we've discovered that has definitely come from beyond our solar system.

Karen Meech leads the team that discovered and is studying Oumuamua. She'll tell us about this strange asteroid, the tool that allowed us to find it, and her own work toward understanding how life began on Earth. Have you heard? Elon Musk is sending a sports car into space. That's just one of the stories Bill and I will talk about. Later, Bruce Betts and I have got a cool new poster to give away that's going to look great in some young space explorer's bedroom. Let's get started with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla.

Welcome back, Emily. Tell us about these ambitious plans that India has for its next mission to the moon. That's right. We're talking about Chandrayaan-2, which is the second of India's lunar missions. The first one was launched quite some time ago. It'll be almost 10 years between the launches of the two missions. This one is much more ambitious. We have an orbiter, we have a lander, and the lander is going to deploy a cute little rover if all goes well. So it's a lot to achieve in the second mission to the moon. And I think that they should be happy if they even get partial success with the landing. But there's no particular reason to think they won't enjoy complete success.

And I hope they do because it would sure be awful cool to see wheels on the moon again. This is obviously something that would be a tremendous point of pride for India, but it's going to be doing a lot of science if it's successful. Yes, it's quite an ambitious package of instruments on all three spacecraft. Even the rover has exactly what I'd want to see on a rover, which are a couple of little chemistry instruments it could use as it's roving around, including an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, which is the same single instrument that Sojourner took to the surface of Mars. So they can use that to look at the composition of the soil. But I think that a success of the rover would just be icing on the cake.

The orbiter has a pretty neat complement of instruments, including one that will look at the plasma density of the moon, which is kind of a cool thing that hasn't been done a whole lot before. And that has to do with the problem of levitating dust, which would be an issue for future lunar landings. So it's a pretty cool science package, and I wish them every success. Well, certainly they've proven that they can put an orbiter around Mars, so hopefully they can do it a mere quarter of a million miles away as well. Is it difficult or is it easy to learn what's going on with the Indian space program?

Well, it's a little bit harder than it is for, say, NASA or ESA, because they don't seem to have a tradition of putting out their own materials for the press on their website. tradition of putting out their own materials for the press on their website. So almost all of the information that you get is either in peer-reviewed papers, and there are some describing the instruments and capabilities of this mission, or they come out through the Indian media. While I am a member of the media, I don't like to use media reports as a primary source for information because they are often wrong, and the same is true of media in any country. And so it can be a little bit hard to get specifics, but there has been enough published in papers, and I got some help from an Indian researcher

who managed to provide many of those papers to me that I was able to write a pretty informed article about it. Yeah, it's a pretty comprehensive piece, and it has great illustrations that will tell you all about this mission that is planned by the ISRO, the Indian Space Agency. You can even see that cute little rover as it crawls out of the belly of the lander that India plans to put on the moon in as little as four months. Emily, thanks so much. It's a great piece.

Thank you, Matt. It's a November 29th piece that you can find in the blog at planetary.org. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, it's a milestone in space exploration, space technology at least, albeit a small one, but still, turning the key after 37 years and the engine turns over? I know, I know. So this is the Voyager spacecraft, everybody. I had just graduated from engineering school in 1977. over i know i know so this is the voyager spacecraft everybody left the earth i had

just graduated from engineering school in 1977 this thing's been flying in space ever since then this set of thrusters has not been used in 37 years since 1980 and so then they just sent it a command by radio way the heck 16 plus hours at light speed out in space and the thrusters fired it's just cool it really is it's cool it's your tax dollars at work everybody it really it once again it just shows you that space brings out the best in us and by that i mean there was somebody in management who hired the right people to specify the right specifications, and people, skilled technicians, built these thrusters, mounted them on, and the chain of custody of every rivet and screw and wire and solder joint was managed well enough so that the

thing works almost 40 years later. Amazing. Speaking of turning the key, he said in another clever segue, Elon Musk has his interesting payload plans. So everybody, we at the Planetary Society are very much looking forward to the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket. The Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's rocket that is three Falcon 9s strapped together. Now, a Falcon 9 has nine engines,

so the first stage of the Falcon Heavy will have 27 engines. It's a very powerful rocket. And what does Mr. Musk want to launch into space? That's right, his first Tesla Roadster car. Now, some of you may or may not remember the roadster it was a rocket yeah it was a very big electric motor with a whole bunch of batteries and very very little else just two seats and the thing would go very fast a range of in u.s units 400 miles or something because the batteries were so big so he's willing to just shoot the thing into space and let it go.

While he's playing David Bowie, Space Odyssey. No, wait, Space Oddity. Came out the same year as the movie. He's going to send the thing off into space just to show how much he loves the technology. It really is exciting. So we at the Planetary Society are very much looking forward to the successful launch of the space launch of the Falcon Heavy, my word, the Falcon Heavy, because the LightSail 2 spacecraft will be on board. You know, our LightSail 2 is all set. The batteries are charged

up. The clock's running. We're just waiting for the green light. So it's exciting. More power to SpaceX. They are changing the game and they are making everybody think about rocketry a little differently, and that is a worthy undertaking. Absolutely. Speaking of changing the world, you have a piece, a nice one, and we'll provide a link to this on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. In the New York Times, they have a new magazine called Turning Point, and you wrote this

interesting piece called The Cosmos is Calling. What do we say? Well, they wanted me to write about what happened this year in space. And I suggested the TRAPPIST-1 discoveries, where it seems to be three out of seven planets orbiting an ultra- star we all know what those are not so uh where they the surface temperature seems to be suited to liquid water which for us earthlings just sounds like a place to have life it's really extraordinary so i wrote a piece it's heartfelt it's a derivative of my uh long ago professor carl sagan and I'm very proud of it. And I hope people who are inclined, check it out. And there's one more thing, Matt, this week, the Smithsonian has on display, Mr. Rogers's sweater. And wait, wait, there's more. Bill Nye's first lab coat.

first lab coat. They came to my house in Southern California and collected it. That's the verb. They collected my lab coat. They curated it. Well, and then a curator has decided to put it on display. Now, I haven't seen the display. I'm going there to see if it's really real. People say, Bill, how do you feel about your legacy as a science educator blah blah blah and i say all the time i really don't get it that in other words the extent the reach of the old show just seems to be it's global people in australia and britain and germany japan watch the show for crying out loud well if this lab coat really is on real display, okay, I'll buy it. It was a significant cultural moment. I'll buy it.

I'm very excited. Anyway, Matt, it's great to talk to you. It's an exciting time and space. Let's go. Bill, your lab coat will sure be in good company if it's anywhere near Mr. Rogers' sweater. Congratulations on that. I don't want to say a lifetime of accomplishment because I think you're still going to keep at it for a while. Yes, sir. Let's change the world. That's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, who joins us now and then here on Planetary Radio.

You asked for it, and I assume you asked for it because you're as excited about our recent interstellar visitor as all of us are at the Planetary Society. The discovery was made as this strange asteroid was already on its way back out of our neighborhood, but not before astronomers around the world, along with the Hubble Space Telescope, were able to examine it. Karen Meech is an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. It was one of her colleagues who first realized he had captured an image of something very strange. That was in mid-October. Within weeks, we knew it had come from far beyond Pluto, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud.

We'd also learned that it is almost certainly shaped like a needle, ten times as long as it is wide. As it headed back toward the stars, I asked Karen to join me via Skype for a conversation about Oumuamua, how it got that name, and the powerful system that imaged it. got that name and the powerful system that imaged it. Karen, congratulations to you and the team that has discovered and is now studying this fascinating new object. And thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. You're welcome. Tell us about this visitor from across the galaxy. Well, it was certainly very exciting when Richard Wainscote called me at home right

after I'd gotten back from the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting saying, it looks like this really is interstellar. I said, wow, we're going to have to get on this immediately. Although I had secretly hoped to have a week finally where I had caught up on everything, but it was not to be. No, so the cosmos didn't cooperate. No, it did not. And in fact, in the middle of all of this, Richard said, uh-oh, I think we have another one. And I said, please, not now. It turned out that it was just a long-period comet, not a hyperbolic orbit.

Oh, only one of those. Yes. Still not bad. And we're going to talk about the power of this instrument, Pan-STARRS, this system really, and the tremendous contribution it's making to discovering these sorts of much more typical near-Earth objects. But first, let's talk more about this object. Could you talk about how it was discovered and who was the first to notice it? There is a staff member who looks at the imaging data to verify that they really are streaked objects, not artifacts on the CCD. And Rob Warrick happened to be the one observing the data on the morning of the 19th. And he was the one to have discovered it. And he realized immediately its importance.

its importance. He and Richard looked back at the previous night's data and actually found two images from the 18th. Now, normally they don't go with only two images because you'd like to have a set of four to confirm that it really is an object that's moving. But given the discovery on the 19th, this was enough to show that we could extend the orbit back one day. So it was Rob Warrick who then realized its importance, and then they started to get more astrometry positional data, and by the 22nd, they were pretty certain that this was, in fact, an object on a hyperbolic orbit. You know, extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof. They must have worked pretty hard to make sure that this object is what it appears to be because it's the first of its kind, isn't it? Yes. And in fact, I know the ESA tracking station had observed it almost immediately after the 19th, and their data showed that it was perhaps a hyperbolic orbit, but the Minor

Planet Center rejected it as probably big errors in the astrometry. Wow. Because at that point it was showing 1.13 eccentricity, and anything that's bigger than one is hyperbolic. But up until now, we've only had five comets with slightly hyperbolic orbit, and the most hyperbolic was an eccentricity of 1.057,

and that was Comet Bol in the 1980s, but it was determined to have been perturbed by the giant planets. So to see something as high as 1.1 initially really was suspicious until you get enough data to confirm the orbit. And would you believe that that degree of eccentricity, that's actually the answer to our weekly space trivia contest. So we jumped on this as well. My colleague Bruce Betts was pretty excited about this, as is a lot of our audience. I got more requests from listeners saying,

are you going to cover this interstellar object? Are you going to talk to somebody than Than anything else that I've gotten recently. So they're going to be very pleased to be hearing from you. A lot of our listeners, maybe most of them, have probably seen at least some of the artist's concepts of this object. It is not a typical looking rock, is it? No. We were very surprised when we saw the light curve

having a brightness range of two and a half magnitudes. There's just nothing in the solar system that has a range that big. And of course, we were assuming that the rotation axis is perpendicular to our line of sight. We have no idea which direction the rotation axis points, but that will give you the minimum elongation. So if it's tilted over and there's foreshortening, this thing could actually be longer than 10 to 1. So this is really bizarre. So it's tumbling end over end as we see it, right? That's what's causing this enormous variation in its brightness and its magnitude? Yeah, well, if it were in a simple state of rotation, minimum energy, it would be rotating,

you know, if you can imagine a pencil laying on a table, you know, rotating in that plane. And so when you've got the small end pointing towards you, there's less light reflected. And then when the large side points towards you, you get a brighter amount of sunlight. And so that's the basic interpretation. But of course, we don't know where the rotation pole is pointing. And we don't know if it's in a simple state of rotation. It could be like a top that's wobbling. You lead what is now an international team of outstanding observers who've been trying to characterize this object. How did all of that come together? Is that just a natural function of people jumping on something fascinating like this?

Yes, and I've had a lot of experience running large observing teams because of my role with the Deep Impact Mission, the Epoxy Mission. So I was in charge of planet Earth's observations, if you will. So I do have a network of observers. And so the instant we realized this was important, we realized we had to get telescope time. So the first order of business is to write what are called director's discretionary proposals, where you're asking for some of the part of telescope time that the director has set aside. And typically you ask for a small amount, and typically that's available to the community as soon as the data comes in. So we got data on both eight meter telescopes in Chile.

We requested data from the Hubble Space Telescope and from several facilities on Mauna Kea. We didn't start with Mauna Kea because the weather early in that week was really bad in Hawaii. So that included the Keck telescopes or at least one of them on Mauna Kea? Well, the Keck telescope does not have director's time available at all. Luckily, one of the Pan-STARRS staff actually was planning to observe that week, and so he donated some of his time. Wow. That's a very big donation for somebody to give up some of their time, right? Yes. I think he gave up three hours out of one night. So that is a lot of time.

Man, he is to be congratulated. Somebody needs to bake that guy a cake. We've learned a fair amount about this object and we had to do it quickly, right? Because it was on its way out. Yeah. This thing was, when it was discovered, it was well past its perihelion on September 9th. Its close Earth approach was October 14th, and it was probably its brightest around the 16th or so of October. And then after that, it was fading by about four-tenths of a magnitude a day at first. So effectively, we had around two weeks when you could do a good job of trying to characterize it. We can still observe it now, but it's exceedingly difficult, and you're not going to be doing the main characterization that we've done early on in October.

I have read, though, that in these observations, we learned that it's sort of reddish, sort of a deep reddish object, which is not really reflected in the artist concepts that I've seen. Well, when astronomers say it's red, it probably isn't going to look red when you take a look at it out in space. This just means that it is more effective at reflecting the red end of the spectrum than the blue end. This object is very red in that sense. It would look similar to Comet 67P, the Rosetta target. And if you've seen some of those true color images where they've colorized the surface to make it look realistic, it's sort of a darkish brown. I think the

reflectance looks most similar to me to the dark side of Saturn's moon Iapetus. It's a very darkish brown color. But all of those things have a very low reflectance, around four to five percent. Just for context, charcoal has a reflectance of 10 percent. Imagine something darker than charcoal that reflects a little bit better at the red end. It's just going to look dark to the naked eye. So it's quite an accomplishment just that this was even seen with that being as dark as it was. I do have to state that that's an assumption. We don't know what its reflectance is. It's just that everything red in our solar system tends to be dark.

I see. This shape is so atypical compared to our local neighborhood asteroids. Has there been speculation already about how it might have formed? Well, there's lots of speculation about whether or not it's realistic yet. I think this will be one area that people will focus on scientifically once the frenzy has died down of trying to get the last bit of data. There has been speculation, maybe some process that ejected it from its solar system somehow affected its shape. And if you imagine that that's just collisions, we would wonder why we wouldn't have things

that shape in our solar system. Others have speculated maybe there was a supernova explosion which ejected material from a young star system and that could have stripped off some of the outer layers. So there's all sorts of ideas floating around and it will be very interesting to see which ones play out scientifically. Speaking of extraordinary claims, if you'll go with me for just a few moments into this sort of far end, the deep end of the Internet, there are, of course, those who are immediately claiming that this is an artificial object, shall we say, and that this is proof of Lord knows how many other crackpot theories that are out there. Extraordinary claims, right? extraordinary claims, right? Yeah, you know, I guess we can't prove it's not something artificial,

but if you really are going to go that route, you better be absolutely certain. And everything that we see suggests that this is of natural origin. The trajectory looks like it's simply controlled by the sun's gravity as it went around the sun, sort of a gravitational slingshot effect. The size is typical of small solar system fragments, relics of the formation. The color is similar to solar system objects. It's rotating with a period of around seven hours, which is typical of things in our solar system. You know, that lends you to believe it really is natural. in our solar system, you know, that lends you to believe it really is natural.

On the other hand, the spectrum is also consistent with nickel-iron metal. The shape, as people have noted, is very interesting from the science fiction point of view. But those are very weak associations with the extraordinary explanations. I think you have to go with the natural. That's fine. But now expect another call from me next week if this thing suddenly changes course. Now that probably would be definitive, but that's something unusual. You mentioned your involvement with that great mission, Deep Impact, that smacked into Temple One, Comet Temple One, back in 2005.

How much would you love to see a spacecraft chase this thing down, as has actually been suggested by some people at Caltech that one of Elon Musk's still drawing board BFR rockets could do that? I mean, would you like to get a close-up look? Oh, sure. I think it's certainly within technological possibility that we could do this. There's one big problem, though, that you would be catching up to it so far from the sun that most missions have at their end state some optical navigation to make sure that they're homing in on the object. Reaching this object between 1 to 200 astronomical units from the sun, it would be so dark that I think it would be very difficult to do that final end-stage navigation. I think a better

idea would be to have a spacecraft built and waiting for the next one that comes along, and hopefully the next one could be on its inbound trajectory, so you have a chance to actually meet it instead of chasing it. Do you have any doubt that this object has many, many brothers and sisters out there, some of which have to be headed in toward our solar system? No, I don't. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, and especially once the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online in Chile in 2022, I think there's going to be a lot of these things discovered. We had the opportunity to look at a piece of another solar system that entered our solar system for a brief period, and I think that's what's really neat about this.

When we return, Karen Meech will tell us why the naming of the first interstellar asteroid became a fascinating story in itself. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society, and I wanted to let you know that right now Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now. We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition 2017. Thank you. You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the

Planetary Society this holiday season or any time of year. Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. Because come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. University of Hawaii astronomer and astrobiologist Karen Meech heads the global team that continues to study and wonder at Oumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system. We're going to talk about how it got that name,

but also ahead is a conversation about the instrument that enabled its discovery. Karen will also share a bit about her attempt to understand how our own world and others get the water that is essential to life. The naming and classification of this object, it's a great story in itself. It's almost as if the International Astronomical Union, not typically noted for moving quickly, moved just about as fast as this asteroid and came up with entirely new classification. Could you talk about the progression it went through? Well, of course, the team first had a designation that was hard to remember and hard to type. And then it erroneously got a designation of C-2017-U1. And that was just a mistake.

Meaning that they thought it was a comet at that moment. It was a mistake. Right. It was purely a mistake. Nobody had reported a comet tail. Wow. So that was just a mistake. And then that got fixed. a comet tail. So that was just a mistake. And then that got fixed. And so it got a strange name of A slash 2017 U1, which was not the normal nomenclature. And then we decided we really needed to give it a name. And of course, we'd been shortening it to U1 internally because that was easier to type. And at that point, we said it got to have a Hawaiian name since it was discovered in Hawaii in honor of the facilities here.

And so we requested some input from the director of the Imaloa Center, the visitor center on the Big Island, and from a Hawaiian linguist. And we gave them only two days to come up with something because we wanted to have it submitted at the time we submitted the paper. And they delivered a name within a couple of days. They thought about this being a visitor from the distant past coming to the solar system for the first time. And so they, you know, this isn't a name that already existed. The pieces of the name existed as Hawaiian words. And so they put this together as a suggestion for the name, and we liked it. Before we started to record, I told you that I've heard three, four different pronunciations of this.

The latest from my colleague, Bruce Betts. You actually had a recording you played. What is your closest interpretation of what this is in the genuine Hawaiian language? Oumuamua. So the O part sounds a little bit longer. Oumuamua, which sounds far more like genuine Hawaiian than any of the others that I've heard. And very appropriate.

And then this designation given to it by the IAU of I, one I, the very first interstellar object of its kind. I mean, that's got to make people there and elsewhere on this team feel pretty good. Yes, it does. I want to get to the system, Pan-STARRS, that enabled this discovery. And before I do that, I have a quote for you, a little surprise. enabled this discovery. And before I do that, I have a quote for you, a little surprise. Knowing that we were going to be talking this morning, I wrote to Lindley Johnson,

who is the planetary defense officer, as you know, at NASA headquarters, sort of in charge of finding and doing something about near-Earth objects. I asked him for his comment, and he came back with this. We are fortunate that our Pan-STARRS Near-Earth Object Survey Project was able to capture this historic object as it passed so quickly through our corner of the galaxy. This serendipitous discovery is bonus science enabled by NASA's efforts to find, track, and characterize near-Earth objects that could potentially pose a threat to our planet, and Pan-STARRS is a leader in this effort. So congratulations from Lindley as well. Oh, thank you.

Tell us about Pan-STARRS. I will save you the trouble of spelling out the acronym. It's the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System. From a table that I saw, it looks like even though it only began to observe in 2010, already in 2016, it was discovering it looked like nearly half of the near-Earth asteroids that are being discovered each year. And roughly, we should give credit to the Catalina Sky Survey as well, which was doing just about as well. From my perspective, studying distant comets in particular, it has been phenomenal. It is doing an exceptional job at finding faint things that have just a little bit of cometary activity, as well as an exceptional

job at finding fast-moving faint things. So I think it's getting better each year, and I think we're going to be rewarded with lots of interesting discoveries. Physically, it's a couple of very special telescopes on a mountain. Physically, it's on the island of Maui on the mountain of Haleakala. Right now, Pan-STARRS-1 is operating. Pan-STARRS-2 is in its commissioning phase. And I believe it will start its main survey observations in February of next year. It has a very impressive camera. Something in the gigapixel range, right?

Yeah, this camera is huge. And so that gives it the ability to cover large fractions of the sky each night in order to survey the whole sky. I don't remember how many times each year, but at least half a dozen times each year. Talk a little bit more about how a tool like Pan-STARRS, as it meanwhile is discovering all these objects that might threaten our planet, how it's helping you in your work as you try to figure out how volatiles, which include water, maybe primarily water, how they make their way to planets like our own, our own little pale blue dot of Earth. Well, there's a couple of ways in which Pan-STARRS is helping. First of all, because it is exceptional at discovering faint comets that are active at

large distances, we get a heads up on something on its inbound leg and can watch the tail develop as the ices get warmed up by the sun. By doing that, we can infer what the comet is made of through models. And then there's a second type of object that Pan-STARRS has discovered, and we're calling these MANX objects. That's not a formal iau name and manx means in just ordinary plain english a tailless cat and so these things were nearly tailless comets the very first one that was discovered richard wainscott walked into my office and said i have a strange object on a long

period comet orbit with no tail are Are you interested? And I said, my God, yes, because we've never seen comets like that. And we think that this may represent inner solar system, rocky material that formed in the earth vicinity, but got kicked out into the Oort cloud where comets today reside. And then like Oort cloud long period comets, it gets perturbed inwards. Now, normally these comets have huge tails because these comets are rich in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, but these manxes don't. So we think they formed in the inner solar system and give us a glimpse at what earth building material was like. Great bit of naming there, Manx. Why is this study of how volatiles like water move around and get to planets like ours,

why is this so fascinating to you? Well, if it required some special process in our solar system to get the ingredients for life to Earth, then the fact that we've discovered 6,000, 7,000 exoplanetary systems, many of which have rocky worlds in their stars' habitable zones, that doesn't necessarily mean they are habitable. Because where Earth formed in our solar system, it was pretty warm, and we don't expect it was relatively easy for water to just accrete with the Earth. So either it was brought in from outside, or maybe the water as a gas where the Earth formed could kind of stick to the building blocks of our planet.

So we're trying very hard to figure out how water got to our planet in our solar system, because that will have big implications for whether or not there could be life elsewhere. How about one planet out for Mars, Mars, which was a good deal cooler than our world was during that period that you're talking about? Whatever process brought water to Earth certainly would have brought water to Mars also. Now, poor Mars is a lot smaller, and so it would have more trouble retaining that water. Yeah, as we've learned from the MAVEN spacecraft and through other observations, of course. I noted on the website, and we'll provide a bunch of relevant links to everything that we've been talking about,

on this week's show page that people can find at planetary.org slash radio. You're still very active in educational outreach to, I think, to high school students and teachers, and you teach some undergraduate courses there at the University of Hawaii. How does the discovery of an object like, I'll try it, ready? Oh, wow, wow. No, one more try. Ohah, muah. That's better. Got it closer that time. How does this affect your ability to reach young people? I think it really helps because you get them excited when you can tell students personal stories. They see ways in which they might follow a similar career path. There are opportunities for internships, and we have a research REU program, a research experiences for undergraduates program here.

This gets students thinking about, well, maybe I could work with the team in the summer on various projects. So I think it allows for very interesting real-time discussions with the students, and they can speculate on many of the same things that your listeners speculate or that we've talked about today. not just this brand new, first of its kind, interstellar object, but the work that you and others are doing to figure out how life became possible on planets like our own. Karen, thank you very much. And best of luck as this multifaceted work continues from there at the University of Hawaii. Thank you very much. Karen Meech is an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.

She's interested, as you've heard, in understanding how the ingredients that make a world habitable are delivered to terrestrial planets in their star's habitable zone. She leads the University of Hawaii's National Astrobiology Institute research team, where she's particularly interested in how so much water made its way to our own terrestrial planet. And she's a recipient of, this is just a couple of her awards, the Annie Jump Cannon Award in 1988, and much more recently, the University of Hawaii's Regents Medal for Research Excellence. That was in 2015. Time now to talk to another astronomer, the one we talk to every week on the show. That's Bruce Betts. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He's back once again with all of the great stuff that he brings us

every week, including a look at the night sky, which is how we'll get started, I'm sure. Welcome once again. Hi, Matt. How you doing? I'm doing pretty well. I do that sing-songy, old-timey radio voice when I start these segments. I probably do it all the time, don't I?

Yes, even when we're just talking over lunch. It's true. It's why my wife says, stop using the radio voice. Your wife still says that? I gave up on that years ago. No. That's just how Matt talks. She's very persistent.

Well, good luck with that. I would just celebrate that you have a radio voice. Yeah, thank you very much. And I also, speaking of celebration, we got a lot of lovely messages in response to your invitation to people to extend their congratulations for our 15-year anniversary. They came in by Twitter, they came in by email, and we are grateful for all of them. Thank you, folks. Yes, thank you all for doing that. All right, you ready, night sky? Why not? Pre-dawn is where it's happening these days. Pre-dawn, we've got Mars, reddish Mars near bluish Spica, but Mars is moving away from Spica and closer to Jupiter, and it's just going to be cool because you're going to have in the pre-dawn east,

if you go from lowest to highest, bright Jupiter, reddish Mars, and then bluish Spica. And if you look on the morning of the 13th of December, you will see the crescent moon with it. If I was Mars, I would move away from Spica and toward Jupiter as well, since I have read that Jupiter protects all of us in the inner solar system. Okay. Okay, go ahead. We move on quickly to this week in space history. It was 1972 that Apollo 17, the last human mission to the moon,

launched and landed on the moon. That's wonderful and sad at the same time. Speaking of wonderful and sad, let's move on to random space. It's nothing to do with the fact. So it's going to be a little less random for a little bit here because you've asked for more.

So I've come up with more. What things have happened in space since planetary radio began 15 years ago? Well, there's so much, I'm going to have to carve it up in a bit. We had the first Saturn orbiter, Cassini, of course, which you've covered so magnificently. You've covered all these magnificently. Huygens with Cassini, the first outer planet moon probe and lander. New Horizons, the first Pluto flyby and Pluto system.

And Juno, the first solar-powered outer planet's orbiter. All of them got to their destinations doing their things since planetary radios started. I'm impressed. And once again, it's all due to you, Matt. We established that pretty well, and there have been a couple of people on Twitter who thanked us for advancing planetary science. Part of what we do. All right, we move on to the trivia contest.

And I asked you who first proposed the theoretical existence of neutron stars. How'd we do? Got a very nice response, as usual, for this one. And I think a first-time winner, Alexander Thompson in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Now, he's at least half right, I think. Tell me if you'll accept this. He says that the discoverer, or at least the guy, one of the two people who first theorized that neutron stars were possible, was, as

Alexander puts it, crazy old Fritz Zwicky. I didn't know him personally. I can't comment as to his mental state. He was one of the two people who proposed it. You want to accept that? Do you want me to? Yeah, I think we ought to. All right, but it's on Matt's head.

Like my hat. Alexander, congratulations, therefore, or Alex. A great show, he says. Really appreciate you guys doing this. Alex is going to receive a Chop Shop Design Planetary Society T-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Stay tuned for a big Chop Shop prize news in the new contest. shop prize news in the new contest. But first, we heard from a bunch of people, including Devin Kremelbein and Joe Murray. They came up with both names. You didn't give the other name of the other guy. Walter, is it Walter Bod? Bod.

Yeah, Bod or Bod. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to he and his family and descendants. I have no idea how to pronounce it. Well, Devin and Joe were among those who also brought up the fact that they theorized, they hypothesized the existence of neutron stars only a year after the neutron itself was discovered by James Chadwick. Yes, it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Part of why I wanted to call them out on the show, because it's like, wow, that was quite

the leap that turned out to be valid. Here's one that you're going to love. Eric O'Day, Medford, Massachusetts. He says, according to my calculations and observations from my visit last year, if the Planetary Society's new Pasadena headquarters were made of neutron star material, it would weigh the same as five trillion Empire State Buildings. You know, I cannot verify that off the top of my head, but it sounds good. Currently, we only, we weigh as much as only, what, five or ten Empire State Buildings, I think. Finally, from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, twinkle, twinkle, neutron star, Zwicky knows just what you are. Walter Bod said with pride, man, get too close to that sucker and you're going to be spaghettified.

That's it. It ends there. All right. We're ready to go there. All right. We're ready to go on. All right. How many spacecraft have either flown by or orbited Jupiter? How many spacecraft have either flown by or orbited Jupiter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

I immediately started to count in my head, but I'm not going to share what's in my head. Well, I do all the head. We would appreciate it if you didn't. You have until the 13th. That's Wednesday, December 13th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And if you have the right answer and are chosen by

random.org, you will get a 200-point itelescope.net account that will allow you to do astronomy all over the world on that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes. By the way, we had someone who donated her 200-point account to a school, to a local school that had an astronomy club, and iTelescope was just fine with that. So if you can't use it yourself, there may be somebody around you in your community who would be interested. But wait, there's more.

Chop Shop, those great folks that make the Planetary Radio T-shirt and the Planetary Society T-shirt and all kinds of other great wearable and hangable art. They have a new series of posters for kids. art. They have a new series of posters for kids. It's from their Robots in Space series, but these are really, they're really fun. And there's one for Voyager, one for Cassini, one for the Mars rovers, and you can win one. We'll give you the choice of which one you want. You can check them out, of course, at chopshopstore.com. They're in the Planetary Society store at the Chop Shop website. Glowing in the dark is involved, I just want to say. That's right.

And they're really cool, too. If you look on the website, you'll see them in daylight and in the dark, and they are cool both ways. Thank you, Chop Shop shop for making that available. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about what highlights are been in your life in the last 15 years since the creation of planetary radio and how many of

those you can blame Matt for. I mean, uh, you know what I mean? Thank you. And good night highlights in my life. That was highlights magazine, which was the only good thing about going to see the doctor.

And that's the doctors you see in the last 15 years? I really like my pediatrician. He's Bruce Betts. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us here incredibly every week for What's Up. WFIRST is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, not Space Telescope, as Bill Nye said last week. I wish I could blame the science guy, but it was all my fault.

Don't tell him I steered him wrong. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its hyperbolic members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.