Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern and a Big Milestone on the Way to Pluto

Episode Date: August 26, 2014

New Horizons passed through the orbit of Neptune on August 25th. By cosmic coincidence, this was the 25th anniversary of Voyager 2’s flyby of that big, blue world. We catch Principal Investigator Alan Stern right after a celebration in Washington.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All over the solar system with Alan Stern, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The New Horizons Principal Investigator is back to tell us about another milestone passed on the journey to Pluto. This one was a heck of a coincidence. But Alan is a busy guy, so he'll also talk about Rosetta reaching its comet after a 10-year trip and a brand new project from his company called Uingu. Bill Nye will report on why a test of the light sail solar sail has been

delayed, and Bruce Betts will help me offer up another opportunity to win the coveted Planetary Radio 2.1 t-shirt. I realized after we had finished editing last week's show that Emily Lakdawalla and I never mentioned the name of a comet that will be swinging past Mars on October 19th. It's 2013 A13 Siding Spring. And you know that coincidence I was just talking about? Emily also has something to say about it. Emily, I know that like me, you just watched this conversation by Voyager scientists, people who were early in their careers when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune and were reminiscing on this interesting and provocative, really, anniversary.

Yes, it's the 25th anniversary of the Neptune flyby, and all the scientists who are on the panel that we just watched were young postdocs or young scientists on the Voyager flybys, and now they're much more senior scientists on the New Horizons mission. The outer planets community is really a very small community. the New Horizons mission. The Outer Planets community is really a very small community. Anybody who was on Voyager is now, most of them are working on New Horizons or are astronomers studying these things from a great distance. But there's not very many of them. It's a very rarefied community. It is quite a coincidence, as Alan Stern will tell us in our conversation with him in just a couple of minutes. He swears he did not plan for New Horizons to reach the orbit of Neptune on this 25th anniversary.

But what is not a coincidence is the release of this really gorgeous image that you've just put up on the website. Yes, it's another wonderful work by an Icelandic amateur image processor named Bjorn Johnson, who is really well known in the amateur community for doing absolutely stunning work with Voyager and Cassini images in particular of the outer planets. And here he's created the highest resolution mosaic of Neptune that really anybody has ever seen before. The Voyager data is very difficult to work with because by the time it was passing Neptune, it was very far from Earth. That's 30 times Earth's distance from the sun. And it was transmitting images in real time back to Earth. So it had to take many minutes in between each photo. And so the point of view changed dramatically from the beginning to the end of a mosaic. And

it really took quite a lot of work for Bjorn to get this mosaic together. But the work was totally worth it. I was also fascinated to hear from one of the panelists in this discussion that just ended that stated in today's terms the camera on voyager was about 0.6 six tenths of a megapixel that's right the camera was digitized at a resolution of 800 pixels square but you know on top of that the camera was just not as sharp as modern cameras are and it was also TV camera. It was not a digital camera, didn't have a CCD. So the images, they have a lot of distortion. They had to take really long exposures at Neptune's distance from the sun. So many of them are smeared. It's amazing how much they managed to get out of that technology at Neptune. What we're going to see at Pluto with New Horizons is just going to be so

much better. Take a look at this beautiful picture of Neptune, the best ever delivered from that planet. It's in an August 25 edition of the blog that you'll find at planetary.org, Emily's blog, that is. Anything else we should be looking forward to? Well, something else momentous happened today, and that's that the European Space Agency announced five possible landing sites for Philae on the comet that Rosetta is currently orbiting. So I'll have a post up on that shortly. Great. Again, at planetary.org. Thanks so much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. Here's the CEO, Bill Nye, with a report on what was to be a test of our light sail,

solar sail up in San Luis Obispo, didn't exactly go according to plan. Bill, I regret that I was not able to travel with several of you up to San Luis Obispo last week. What happened in this, what was to be at least, a big test of the light sail? Well, we decided to postpone it because there was problems with the radio and the antenna again, and I say again, there were problems with this thing over the years. But it has to do with connecting the transmitter to the antenna. Something happens in this cable, which is about as long as the distance from your thumb to your index finger. And there's something going on in that cable. And maybe by now, they've got it fixed

because we had everybody together there and we're going to diligently address the problem. After that, it's going to work. We're going to run the test. And what is this test? It's so-called day in the life. The day in the life test, D-I-T-L, diddle. And this is where you run the spacecraft as though it were in space, as though it were receiving commands from the Earth, and as though it were transmitting them back and taking pictures with its cameras. And of course, the main event, deploying the sails. The spring-loaded booms are unsprung. And so everybody wants to get video of that because it's dramatic. It's cool looking.

So we are not too far off, it sounds like, from giving this another shot. Oh, yeah, yeah. It'll be any minute, as they say. And so they built this very large table to support the sails as they deploy horizontally. I was impressed. Go to great lengths to get it absolutely level to simulate, to the extent possible, zero gravity or just supporting the ends of the booms. It's going to be cool. I look forward to it. Sure hope that I can go next time. But I hope everything will be working.

What do you say? Not 10-4. Loud and clear. We could say 10-4. We could say Roger that. We could say sail on! Thank We could say, sail on! Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you, Matt.

He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, who joins us almost every week here on Planetary Radio. Coming up next, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, Alan Stern. No one in space exploration is busier than the Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern. We'll talk with him about just three of his many projects,

beginning with New Horizons' steady progress toward Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. As principal investigator, he heads that mission that launched eight and a half years ago. But Alan is also the PI for one of the important instruments on Rosetta, the European Space Agency probe that has been in space even longer. As you've heard here on Planetary Radio, Rosetta has just reached that bizarre comet 67P, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The former NASA deputy administrator has also cooked up a scheme to raise money for space science by sending public messages to Mars. Alan and I recently talked over a subpar Skype connection. Hey, Alan, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. Good to be back. As always, a lot to talk about.

As people hear this, you have just passed this pretty amazing milestone, a really serendipitous coincidence in space. Tell us about what happened on the 25th. Well, we crossed the last fence line, if you will, on the way to Pluto, the orbit of Neptune. And it was the 25th anniversary of the Voyager flyby? Isn't that amazing? We designed the mission without knowing that. It's a cosmic coincidence. celebrated the achievement of Voyager and its 25th anniversary of having explored Neptune by

crossing the orbit of Neptune on that anniversary, precisely to the day. How is that for amazing? We have heard the solar system is a big place. I don't know. If I believed in omens, I would say this was one. Well, get this. We'll arrive at Pluto next July on the 50th anniversary of Mariner 4 at Mars, the first mission to Mars. Awfully good timing. Tell us what happened in D.C. for this event. Well, we had a great event. It was two parts. The first part was kicked off by Jim Green. Jim is the director of planetary and solar system exploration for NASA. And then Ed Stone, who has the analogous role to my own for the Voyager mission. And I spoke, Ed spoke about the achievements of Voyager

at Neptune, and really exploring all the giant planets, just history making in every way. And then sort of handed the baton of exploration off to New Horizons with myself representing the mission. And I spoke about the encounter that begins in January, culminates next July. Then after some Q&A, we had a really neat panel led by Dr. David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist. Some of your listeners may know his books. David led a panel of New Horizons co-investigators, four of them, who had been young scientists on Voyager at the Neptune encounter. And so they talked about what it was like to be a graduate student or postdoc exploring a new place for the first time, and then what it's like to be a senior scientist now going to yet another new place, to the Pluto system, and that evolution in their careers and in the maturity of the field. And then we closed it by introducing the young postdocs that are on New Horizons and

wondering what missions they'll be in charge of 25 years from now. Great event. I wish I'd been in town for that. We're all looking forward to July. And of course, the Planetary Society will be celebrating that in some way. But hasn't the science already more or less begun? Well, it has a little bit. We are already observing the Pluto system this summer, or we were before we put the spacecraft down.

We're going to be hibernating now until early December when we wake up for encounter. But we've made the first approach movie. We've begun to study the photometry of the system from afar, and we're studying the interplanetary environment that Pluto lives in with the plasma and dust sensors in our ultraviolet spectrometer. But the pace is really going to pick up in January with very intensive optical navigation to help us hone in on the target point at Pluto, more environmental measurements. And then we start the spectroscopy and the mapping in the spring. And for about 12 weeks, it just gets more and more intense every week leading to the middle of July.

middle of July, when this culminates with a deep dive between Pluto and Charon into the heart of the Pluto system, with cameras, spectrometers, and all other sensors just blazing away, collecting data as fast as we can to spool back to Earth following the encounter. Can't wait, Alan. I think you're going to light up this planet the way New Horizons is going to light up that system out there, not just a world, that one world that we're visiting. Speaking of lighting things up, let's move to a different mission that you have a big part in, and that's Rosetta. Congratulations to you and the rest of that team on having, after a decade of flight through space, reached your destination.

Thank you, Matt. The team has worked on this really since 1996 when the mission was formulated and then, of course, launched in of this science is going to be done by things that don't do images. You are a part of this because you're the principal investigator for that instrument called ALICE, which, remind us, what's that about? I know it doesn't really stand for anything. Just a name you like? It's just a name we like. We couldn't find a good acronym, so we picked the name from a baby book back in 1995. ALICE is the ultraviolet spectrometer on board Rosetta.

It's provided by NASA. It's not much bigger than a shoebox, but it sure packs a wallop. It's a very sophisticated imaging ultraviolet spectrometer. It's going to teach us a lot about the composition of the comet's atmosphere, called a coma, how it varies, about the formation temperature of the comet, we hope, through the discovery of noble gases and their various ratios, and teaches about the surface as well by mapping the surface of this comet. I have to say, the great thing about Rosetta is it's the first comet orbiter ever. So we're actually going to be able to stay with a comet

and see it evolve through an orbital passage. So it's the first mission to really study comets in the time domain, if you will, to see not just a single frame in the movie of a rapidly evolving object, but to actually make the movie of how the object evolves. And this comet, it's very complex. It's really exciting. But I told my team, I said, you know, we had a team meeting just a week or two ago, and I said, you really wish the first time you had time domain to sort of show up at a grade school comet that you could figure out.

This one's like dropping directly into graduate school, I'll tell you. Rosetta is still kind of settling in there. Is there science underway? And when it does get started, how long is this going to go on for? Good questions. Rosetta is taking data every day, and it's bristling with instrumentation like other big orbiters like Cassini and Galileo were for giant planet orbiters. All the instruments on the orbiter are operating. The lander team is busy doing site selection for the landing in November. After the lander mission is complete, the orbiter will focus on the comet, its nucleus, and its coma

for over a year, all through the rest of 2015, and maybe, if there's an extended mission, as the comet starts to draw away from the sun, into early or even mid-late 2016. Alan Stern will return to tell us how to send a message to Mars and have it reach the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, too. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society.

We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat,

we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash B-E-N-N-U. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash B-E-N-N-U. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Alan Stern has returned to our show. He has already given us updates on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Rosetta probe's arrival at a comet, but that's hardly all he has going on. Alan, in the time we have left, let's turn to yet another of your activities, and that's Owingu that we've talked about in the past, but you've got something new going on. Yeah, thanks for asking about that. Owingu's just launched a fantastic project, I think it's called Beam Me to Mars, and it celebrates the fact that this is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first Mars mission on November 28th of this year. They'll travel at the speed of light and reach Mars in 15 minutes flat, and we're getting a lot of interest.

It's getting a lot of press. It's getting a fair amount of radio, like this show. And we're seeing celebrities like Bill Nye of the Planetary Society. But we're also seeing celebrities like George Takei of Mr. Sulu from Star Trek. And Seth Green, the actor, and his wife Claire Grant have sent the first message from a married couple. Laurie Garver, that was deputy administrator of NASA. Homer Hickam, that wrote October Sky, that great movie. Davis Sobel, the author of Galileo's Daughter and more, are all getting in on it to commemorate this anniversary,

even more so to speak to what their hopes are for the future of space exploration and Mars exploration. And at Owingu, we not only want to raise awareness, but we want to raise money for the Owingu Fund that's already this year given over 20 grants to planetary researchers and edgers and students. We'd like to do a lot more good. Through this project, as well as some of our others, we're hoping to have some big positive effect on the funding front as well. Anyone can go to our website, thewingoo.com, and take part in Be Me to Mars. And you can socially share it. You can search the database. You can do all that for free.

And for as little as $5, be a part of this global shout-out to Mars that will happen in November. All right, full disclosure here, the Planetary Society is not, at least not yet, benefiting from this. But Owingu, it's a private company that you and some neat colleagues put together. Who are some of the groups that have received grants so far? Oh, there's a slew of them, ranging from SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, to Astronomers Without Borders, to individual PhD students that we selected for travel grants to go to scientific meetings and report their results. The Galileo Telescope Teacher Project is another recent grantee. And if you go to our website, you can look down a much longer list than those I just rattled off.

So, Alan, when we talked last week, I told you that my first impression was, this is crazy and it's going to do incredibly great. You are sending the signal out on that anniversary date in November. There's nobody there to hear it, not even a spacecraft will be listening for it. But it is this symbolic representation of putting ourselves out there in the solar system, which I think is exciting to me and is obviously exciting to many others. So good luck with it. Well, thank you very much. And by the way, all the messages are going to be hand-delivered to NASA, to Congress, and to the United Nations.

So there may be no one on Mars to hear it, but we think it's going to be heard loud and clear back here on Earth. Alan Stern describing Uingu's new Beam Me to Mars project. Let's go back for a couple of minutes to Alan's leadership of the New Horizons mission. You heard him describe the twin events in Washington, D.C. on August 25th. They celebrated the spacecraft's passage through the orbit of Neptune on the anniversary of Voyager's flyby of that beautiful blue planet. Here is how Alan closed the gathering, right after David Grinspoon finished leading the discussion among several distinguished planetary scientists.

Well, it's been a pleasure for all of us to begin to tell you the New Horizons story today and to start to involve you in this great mission of exploration. You know, New Horizons has so many aspects. It's about high tech, and it's about exploration. many aspects. It's about high tech. And it's about exploration. And as I said at the outset, it's also about a generational change. It's a handoff from Voyager exploring the middle zone of the solar system to New Horizons, going even farther and faster to explore Pluto and dwarf planets for the first time. And in this wonderful panel that David just ran, you had a chance to hear from people who, at the beginnings of their career,

were young scientists taking part in cutting-edge exploration at the Neptune system. In their 20s and early 30s, scientists who had whole new worlds to explore, they were seeing them for the first time and applying all the technical skills in physics and chemistry and programming skills and other things that they had learned to make the most of all the ones and zeros, the data coming down from space. And then you've had a chance to hear what it's like two and a half decades later as senior scientists to be a part of New Horizons, having a second chance to be on a mission of raw exploration like this.

But one thing about planetary science and about space exploration is that it is truly generational, and it truly is not just about the machines and the technology, but also about the people. And just as we have heard from young scientists who have now become senior scientists, young people from the 1980s and 90s, we also have with us today a set of young scientists who are the postdocs on New Horizons. They don't have as long a hair as the Voyager team did in the 80s,

but they are at least as talented and every bit as energetic and as much excited by the chance to be a part of something larger than life like this, as these scientists were at the start of their career. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you another part of the core of discovery, meet the postdocs of New Horizons. Please stand up. New Horizons. Please stand up. And I'll close by posing a question. Think about the next 25 years and ask yourself, what missions will these scientists be principal investigator of in the 2040s? What will NASA in the United States and the world be doing to explore the universe then with these scientists at the helm? Thank you again, everyone.

We've really enjoyed the afternoon, and we look forward to bringing you this encounter with Pluto next year. Alan Stern in Washington on August 25th, closing the celebration of the Voyager-Neptune flyby 25 years before and the coming arrival of New Horizons at Pluto. Bruce Betts and What's Up are next. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line waiting to tell us what's up in the night sky here at the end of Planetary Radio. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be back.

It's always great to have you in the house. I do want to mention one thing that I forgot to mention last time, and I think it's appropriate to say that our winner on last week's show will be getting Rob Pyle's new book, Curiosity. Curiosity, an inside look at the Mars rover mission and the people who made it happen. And along with the Mars Science Laboratory, Mousepad. So what a nice prize package. That's it. I just wanted to get that in because Rob Pyle deserves the attention for this new work. So does the night sky. Tell us. Oh, nice segue. Yeah, Mars, Saturn, evening sky. Depending on when you listen to this, they're getting closer together until August 27th, and then they separate. You can nicely see it night to night over the course of the next couple weeks. They are in the southwest in the early

evening. Interesting because they happen to be very similar in brightness right now, but very different colors. You got reddish with Mars, yellowish with Saturn. Pre-dawn, Jupiter is getting higher. You might still be able to catch Venus. It is getting lower, dropping away over the next couple weeks. Low in the east shortly before sunrise. Jupiter will just keep getting higher over the coming months and even easier to see. We move on to this week in space history. In 2003, the Spitzer Space Telescope was launched, still doing science. Yeah, I know you discussed 1989, Voyager 2 flew by Neptune the same day, eight years earlier, it flew past Saturn.

This is just, what is up with these cosmic coincidences? This is kind of frightening. I don't think it's actually frightening, but it is a good question. I'll run some orbital mechanics Monte Carlo simulations and get back to you. Yeah, you're going to do that in Monte Carlo, by the way, because I'll give you a few bucks to put on red for me. Yeah, please do. We move on to...

The New Horizons spacecraft, perhaps you've heard of it, has about half the mass of the Curiosity rover. Not the biggest, for sure, but it's not the smallest either. No, it's not. I thought it was interesting. Going out exploring the planets, but on the small size. It uses up fuel over time, but Curiosity, about 900 kilograms, New Horizons started out with its wet mass of 470 kilograms. And a good deal smaller than the Voyager spacecraft as well, right? Yes, much smaller. Okay, well, I think we're ready for the contest. I asked you, what two chemical elements discovered in 1803 were both named after asteroids? How'd we do?

We got a very good response. Responses have been up lately, and I think we have a first-time winner. I'll let you confirm that. It's Noah Mahalsky. Noah Mahalsky of Columbus, Ohio, who said that those elements are cerium and palladium. Indeed, that is correct. Named after Ceres and Pallas, the largest asteroid and the second or third largest, depending on how you measure it. Well, congratulations, Noah. We're going to send you that version 2.1 Planetary Radio t-shirt. Wear it proudly there in the middle of the country.

A couple of others that I want to mention here. Lindsay Dawson, regular listener down there in New South Wales, Australia, who said, I fondly recall using cerium oxide for polishing the telescope mirrors that I made as a teenager in the 1970s, which I think that's kind of fun, kind of comes full circle. Maybe he looked at Ceres with that. That is cool. And finally, this from Daniel Allen, who got the answer right and added, finally, after 45 years, that degree in chemistry is useful. Yes.

Glad we could help. All right, we're ready to move on to this week's question. Perhaps a kind of easy one, but in honor of today's show. In Earth years, how long is a Pluto year? How long is a Pluto year? How long does it take it to revolve around the Sun one time? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I'm just going to make a wild guess here that it's longer than an Earth year.

Stop giving hints. You need to get us that answer by Tuesday, September 2nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And that's it for this week. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what your pet would want to put on their own business card. Thank you and good night. I've had pets on my business cards. In fact, it was just a few minutes ago, the cat.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Congratulations to NASA's Solar System Ambassador and retired astronomer Patrick Wiggins. The charter member of the Planetary Society just received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal. Planetary Radio is produced by the Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Cool Blue members. Clear skies. Thank you.