Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern and a Triumph at Pluto

Episode Date: October 25, 2016

Alan Stern of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond was in Pasadena for the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. He joined Mat Kaplan for a very special conversation down the street at Planetary Society HQ.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alan Stern, and a triumph at Pluto, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Join me at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences and a special conversation with the human being who led the team that took humanity to Pluto. As always, Alan Stern has much more to share. We'll also hear Bill Nye give the Cosmos Award to Alan, and we'll wrap things up with Bruce Betts outside the DPS meeting under the night sky. The first plenary session has just

ended at DPS for 2016 here at the Pasadena Convention Center. I'm at a Planetary Society table right across from the exhibits and the poster room. People are still flooding in here. To get us underway though, I'm joined by Emily Lakdawalla, our Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist. Welcome. Thank you. Why DPS? Why is this something, Emily, that you look forward to so much every year? Well, DPS is a meeting.

It's the Division IV Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. So it's an astronomy-focused planetary science meeting. We have a lot of people here who track small, faint objects, asteroids and comets, centaurs and K track small faint objects, asteroids and comets, centaurs and Kuiper belt objects, and people who study the atmospheres and surfaces of really distant worlds. So at this meeting in particular, I'm looking forward to learning more about the results from New Horizons at Pluto and Rosetta at comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, at Cassini at

the moons of Saturn and Saturn itself, and other places all over the solar system. What did you hear this morning in the plenary sessions, which were sort of the all-star meetings? Well, it was a nice tour this morning. We heard about results from Rosetta and also Japan's Akatsuki mission to Venus, as well as some of the latest stuff from New Horizons. All three of these were kind of overview talks, getting the crowd up to speed about what's been happening on these missions. There was a couple of tidbits of new information from New

Horizons. For instance, they're going to be all done transmitting all their Pluto data back to Earth as of Sunday. So that's a really big milestone on the mission. They're also starting to report information about their future Kuiper Belt target. We now know, thanks to Hubble, that it's much redder than Pluto, which means it's probably an even more, it's a more ancient surface. It's been weathered by its experience in the solar system. I miss the Rosetta stuff because I was here setting up microphones. Emily, you said Matt Taylor was there.

Yeah, Matt presented a really cool animation showing the entire orbital tour that Rosetta took. And it's a nutty path. I mean, this is not a circular path around the comet. It zigs and zags all over the place. And, of course, he reported about two sad events, the very end of the Rosetta mission, as well as the recent death of Klim Churyumov, who was one of the two discoverers of the comet target.

So it was sort of a sad moment, but then he lightened it up by showing the animation that we created at Planetary Society headquarters of Bill Nye and me simulating the landing of Rosetta on the comet. I missed that. I can't believe it. The Planetary Society is a sponsor of this event, and we're going to be participating tonight and again Thursday at the public night, giving away the Cosmos Award to the last guy who spoke this morning. Yes, this year we're presenting the Cosmos Award for Public Communication About Science

to Alan Stern and the whole New Horizons team. And Alan always does a good job of emphasizing how large a team, not just scientists but engineers it takes to make that mission totally successful and they also I noticed are working really hard to make the data that the mission gathered accessible to large quantities of scientists as well so he talked a lot about their planned data releases beautiful color maps of Pluto and things like atmospheric profiles showing how gases and temperatures and pressures vary. The goal is really to make as much as possible out of the

data set by enabling as many members of the public and scientists to access it as possible. And it's really, I think, in Carl Sagan's spirit to share that with the world as much as possible. Emily could be found in presentation sessions and catching up with friends and colleagues at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting last week. You heard us mention the public event at DPS. That standing room-only gathering heard, among other things, Alan Stern deliver one of the best-told stories I've ever heard from a stage.

After he had finished telling the tale of Pluto and New Horizons, he was joined by the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. I am honored to be here, everybody. This is an extraordinary mission. When I was a young man, I had a picture of the solar, I had a poster of the solar system, I had a picture of the solar, I had a poster of the solar system, and Pluto was represented as this icy world with sort of upside-down icicles. And it was whimsical, and no one, when I was young, imagined anybody ever going there.

Can you imagine a space program without cameras? Can you imagine anybody caring about a space program without cameras. Can you imagine anybody caring about a space program without cameras? I am honored to be here presenting this award because we went to Barbara Mikulski's office, Senator Barbara Mikulski's office. Once was in the year 2000, we had 10,000 postcards from members, people like you. And then we went again in 2005 and presented our Save Our Science thing.

And so it was Senator Mikulski who believed in the Applied Physics Lab, who believed in Dr. Stern's vision for this extraordinary mission. And everybody just, I know we're here talking, preaching to the choir, but what an extraordinary thing it is for humankind to build these spacecraft. In these missions is this inherent optimism that 17 years, nine and a half years from now, two years after that, these data will come back from this remote world, Two years after that, these data will come back from this remote world, and these images and these scientific measurements will give us insight into these two deep questions. These two questions that you cannot answer any other way without spacecraft.

Where did we all come from? And are we alone in the cosmos? And if you want to answer these fundamental questions, you have to explore space. So it is my honor to present the Cosmos Award to the New Horizons team and especially Dr. Alan Stern. Thank you. Bill Nye presenting the Planetary Society's Cosmos Award to Alan Stern. Society's Cosmos Award to Alan Stern. Earlier that day, Alan and I walked the short distance from the DPS meeting at the Pasadena Convention Center to the home of the organization that produces this show. Alan, welcome back to Planetary Radio. The first time sitting across

from each other here at headquarters for the Planetary Society. It's delightful to have you. Thank you, Matt. And what a beautiful headquarters building it is. I'm glad that you could get the tour before we came in here into the bank vault, literally. You're a big hit at DPS, no surprise. Or maybe I should say the work of your team, one of your teams, the New Horizons team, huge hit at DPS. Yeah. And Pluto's a hit too. I'll say. Yeah. You think? I was in the plenary session, standing room only. I was also there on what's known as agency night when you accepted the Cosmos Award from the Planetary Society.

Yeah, such an honor for, and of course it was presented to our team for our efforts at communication to the public, which we worked very hard at, and we were very happy with the results. It's truly an honor to receive that Cosmos Award. And I said so in the acceptance speech that so many people on our team were, in their early days, inspired by Cosmos and by Carl Sagan, even before Cosmos, in his writings and his TV appearances. And in a real way, I think we would not have had the team we had had it not been for him and Cosmos. You were very gracious to do that and to say nice things about the society as well. It was also a nice touch bringing other members of the team up on stage with you and giving that

special salute that you now do. Yeah, nine fingers and all held up proudly for the ninth planet. And we won't go into that major controversy to any great degree, but you did just tell me that you got a major 180-degree change in opinion by someone who has been working, shall we say, on the other side. Yeah, it's an old friend of mine. I've known him since his first week of graduate school. Maybe some of your listeners have heard of a guy named Neil Tyson. Yeah, faintly familiar.

There you go. And we may use a piece of that because you said you've got a recording. So you had many other things to say about this mission, but one of them has to do with a certain analog that's led you to sort of a new motto? Yeah, well, at the time of the Pluto flyby, we started referring to Pluto as the other red planet. But as time has gone by and we've gotten more and more of the data back, we found just an increasing number of analogies to the geology on Mars. And so we've started taking that a little bit further and calling Pluto, Pluto is the new Mars. And it's really true.

Mars. And it's really true. There are so many analogs and similar kinds of geomorphological expression in terms of, for example, the glaciers, the incised terrains, the dissected terrains, the basins like Sputnik versus Hellas. Even the color is similar. So it's the new Mars. If anything, Pluto has Mars beat for the title red planet. It is certainly giving it a run for its money. No question there. Since we're there, let's talk more about Pluto and what New Horizons has revealed to us. This could take up an hour-long discussion, but what are some of the highlights from across the entire mission, particularly, of course, the flyby? Well, you know, we've learned a great deal about Pluto's satellite system, about Pluto's geology and its atmosphere, about the origin of the Kuiper Belt from studying this.

But I think the big headlines are three. One, all of us on the team, even those who really expected it to be good, were surprised at just how good. Sometimes we call Pluto SOPHIE, which is an acronym that stands for something for everyone. It's really much more complex than we thought a small planet could be. The variety of geomorphological and atmospheric expressions rivals the Earth and Mars and is unparalleled in all the billions of miles of space in between. Secondly, I think we've learned something that has really stood planetary geophysics on its head, how active a small planet can be in the absence of tidal forces. Io and the other Galilean satellites, satellites of Saturn

like Enceladus, Triton, many of those are active. I name the active ones, but they all have tidal sources of energy from their giant planet and the surrounding satellite system. In the case of Pluto, it's in isolation. And the binary has reached tidal equilibrium, so it's not generating energy or heat. That's the relationship with Charon. That's right. And thank you. And yet we see from age dating using crater counts that there are very old ancient terrains on Pluto's surface, 4 billion years old, even older. There are brand new terrains like what we call Sputnik Planum informally, a million square kilometers of born yesterday.

Wow. informally, a million square kilometers of born yesterday. And then we find intermediate age terrains across the planet that are several hundred million to a billion years old. So it's clear Pluto is somehow making a living energetically and has been doing it for four billion years. And that was just not expected. Yeah. This little world so far from the main source of energy in our solar system. Where is it coming from? I mean, isn't that one of the big remaining questions? It really is. It really is.

And people have ideas, and one of them may be right or none of them may be right. That's part of the fun. I think the third thing, New Horizons was the first mission in a generation since Voyager 2 at Neptune to go to a wholly new place of really a planetary scale. We worked very hard to make that opportunity known. We told people this hasn't happened in a generation and nothing like it is planned to happen ever again. And the third surprise was how spectacularly engaged the public became at the flyby. The previous record holder, this is NASA's statistic, the previous record holder in the modern era was Mars Curiosity Landing. It had over 100 million page views in a day.

New Horizons was north of a billion. Wow. We were on the front page of the New York Times the next day, above the fold, as predicted, but we were also on the cover of 458 other newspapers around the world on that same day. And I used to say from six continents of the earth until I got an email from the guy that is the editor of the only newspaper in Antarctica.

And he attached a PDF of the front page saying, us too, us too. Yeah, I suspect it was big news off-planet on the ISS as well. with an astronaut wearing a New Horizons shirt, holding the New Horizons bumper sticker, and twirling a New Horizons spacecraft model and saying what our bumper sticker says. But as a NASA astronaut, he said, my other vehicle is on its way to Pluto. I think it is so significant that in your top three, you include the influence, the inspiration that this mission has provided worldwide, especially to young people, wouldn't you say? I have to include that, and I see it all the time. And across our team, we do a lot of public speaking.

I do a lot of it myself. And I have literally had experiences that, as a planetary scientist, are unparalleled. I had a mother come up to me after a talk. She stood in line for probably 20 or 30 minutes, shook my hand, and she was crying, literally in tears down in Florida. And she said, you know, my son was completely failing in high school. He watched the New Horizons encounter and said, I want to be an engineer. And he's been straight A's ever since. You're there with Carl Sagan now, providing the inspiration that work with so many members of your team and to a degree yourself.

You're giving back. Well, you know, I was just barely old enough to remember Apollo, moon landings, and how that engaged my whole generation of kids, kids older than me and kids right down to my age, maybe one year younger and then you can't remember it. And most of those kids didn't go into space exploration or anything to do with space, even though that turned them on. They ended up fueling the tech revolution of the 80s and the 90s. A lot of them became Internet or computers. Our society, it's a technology-based economy. I hope that New Horizons did a little bit to engage kids in the excitement and thrill of science and technology. And I don't think most of those will end up in space exploration.

If there's a good parallel, a lot of them will end up fueling the tech revolution of the 30s and 40s in this century. I don't think we could make a bigger impact or do something more important than that in the course of exploring the farthest worlds that humans have ever seen. And there is some evidence that exactly this is happening, that there is a generation now moving into STEM careers, but at least, as you say, we'll have science-literate people. And what an important thing for our society. Absolutely.

You know, I gave a talk in Vermont, and at the end a college woman came up to me and said, we often hear in our generation that we missed the boat, that we weren't part of winning a world war, we didn't get to see Apollo. And she just named a litany of things that, you know, she was born in the early 90s and she couldn't see. And she said, New Horizons was the first thing in my time that rose to that occasion. And thank you for making it happen. It's the best thing that's ever happened in my lifetime.

Wow. I was a scientist that, you know, I thought I was going to lose it. I mean, we did this for science, but look at the derivative benefits. That's Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of the Ongoing New Horizons Mission. Much more of our conversation at Planetary Society Headquarters is a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society Board Member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter.

There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show.

I hope you'll join us. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you?

Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team.

That's planetary.org slash STEAM team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye. and help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're visiting with one of the last of its 2015 Pluto flyby

data to eager scientists and science fans here on Earth. He has more to tell us about that tremendously successful effort, along with just a little about some of the many other space exploration projects he has a hand in. You didn't come to DPS just to be celebrated or to celebrate, although those are good reasons to be here. You have more science that you've been revealing this week. Yeah, our team, the Rosetta-ALIS ultraviolet spectrometer, which is one of NASA's three instruments on the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet orbiter, also reported a lot of important results. Alice, and I was thinking of New Horizons, but since you've brought up Alice, there's an Alice instrument on New Horizons, of course. You also have Alice on Rosetta.

I didn't realize, how many Alices are out there exploring the solar system? Well, we have four that are in space and two that are being built. Rosetta, which has now completed its mission. We like to say Alice doesn't live here anymore. Some people will know what that's about. New Horizons Alice, it's now on its way to a corporate belt flyby in 2019. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has an instrument called LAMP, which is really an Alice. The A in that sometimes stands for ALICE because that's what it is.

It's essentially a carbon copy of New Horizons ALICE, studying the lunar atmosphere and lunar surface and spotting water ice deposits, for example, at the poles. There's a fourth one, which is now in orbit around Jupiter on Juno, studying the aurora and airglow of that giant planet and other phenomenology as well. And then we have two that are in build. One is for the European Space Agency mission JUICE, which will travel to Jupiter in the 20s in order to study the satellites and magnetosphere and the environment around Jupiter. And then Europa, which is our newest win for the ALICE line of UV spectrometers.

And we are really looking forward to being the plume hunter on that mission. Has any other instrument built this kind of legacy? Well, I'm sure that there are cases of other instruments, even planetary instruments like that. But I know that in our little corner of the world, in ultraviolet spectroscopy, which is a very powerful technique for studying surfaces and atmospheres, I think the ALICE line has become the record holder. So what has the ALICE on Rosetta revealed to us about that and maybe other comets? Well, we obtained over 70,000 spectra during the two-year orbital tour, studying the coma and its outbursts.

That's the atmosphere of the comet, the way it outbursts, the individual geysers, studying the surface. And we learned some interesting things. For example, we learned that the primary atomic emission mechanism in close to the comet isn't what we thought it was from all those distant observations from the Earth. It's not resins fluorescence pumping by photons, but it's actually electron impact onto the gases in the coma that's driving

the brightest emissions. We learned that the surface is so dark that, frankly, it's so black that it's blacker than the stuff that we put on our optical baffles that we pay extra for just to make them black. And that's taught us that the comet's surface is not only made of black material, but it has to be frothy like a light trap to get the reflectivity so low. Get all those photons trapped inside. Right. We found that despite the fact that the comet, most of its activity is driven by the sublimation of water ice, that that water ice is not exposed on the surface except in rare places, that most of it's beneath a dark, relatively

inert surface and is either diffusing out or bursting out from time to time as water. But it's really not an icy body on the outside. And you have to look very hard to find the ice on the surface. It's only in small patches, and they're rare. And we've made other discoveries. For example, we've been observing molecular oxygen in the coma, which is a completely unpredicted gas. It was first detected by the mass spectrometer on board Rosetta called Rosina. As soon as we heard about that discovery, we started looking

and we had to use a special technique called stellar occultations to find it. And every time we looked, it was there. It was ubiquitous. In fact, it had even been hiding in data that we'd already taken in some instances. And surprisingly, it's such a volatile gas, it's hard to imagine how it could have stayed in that comet over billions of years. It may have been created recently by radiolysis effects near the surface, but we're finding it's so prevalent that sometimes it's almost half as abundant as the water in the coma, which is the primary driver of all the cometary activity. This makes me think of what may be the most frequently recurring theme that comes out in discussions like this on this

program and elsewhere. And that is, no matter where we look around the solar system, there are going to be things that surprise us. That's absolutely true. And I'll tell you the lesson I learned at Pluto is it doesn't matter how hard you try, you're just going to be surprised. For all those nine years we were flying to Pluto, I would say to the science team on New Horizons, you know, let's take all those lessons they learned from the heydays of Mariner and Pioneer and Voyager and all the first missions to the inner eight planets. And see if we can process that and understand what we know about Pluto from afar and try and get the last one right. Because they sure didn't get Mars right. It's a much more spectacular object than expected, with river valleys and past volcanoes.

And didn't expect Venus to be completely resurfaced. Didn't expect Mercury to have its mantle stripped away and be sort of a cork crust only planet. Didn't really expect the geysers and volcanoes across the outer solar system. And we could go on. So let's see if we can get the last one right. And of course, we didn't.

So I like to say that we got an A for exploration and an F for scientific predictive capability. Back to New Horizons. You're not done. You're headed toward a brand new target. We are. We just got approval this summer to fly New Horizons on a new five-year mission. Sounds like Star Trek. To explore strange new worlds. Yeah, seek new worlds across the Kuiper Belt. We'll be studying about two dozen Kuiper

Belt objects as they pass by in the distance. You're already imaging some of those. We are. We've already got about half a dozen in the bag. And then to fly right down on the deck over an object that's orbiting about a billion miles beyond Pluto called 2014 MU69. It'll get a better name before we get there, I promise. We expect to even come much closer than we did to Pluto and to get very, very high resolution imaging if we're successful with that. And Lord knows what we're going to see until we get there. No one's been to anything like this. It's in an orbit that's clearly never been close to the sun. It's always been very cold. So it makes a very good time capsule from those early days of the origin of the solar system. But it's also an

interesting intermediate size. This thing is something like 10,000 times as massive as Rosetta's comet and 50,000 times less massive than Pluto. So it's this intermediate size. Rosetta orbited something the size of a small mountain. Pluto orbited something the size almost of North America. And here we're headed to one of those building blocks of the small planets of the Kuiper Belt, like Pluto and Eris and Makemake and Ixion and the others, something the size of Chesapeake Bay, but old and ancient. And what is it made of? And is it geologically evolved? And what does it tell us about the cratering record?

Will it be active? We don't know. We've never been to anything like this. Stay tuned. We'll be there on January 1st, 2019. And after that, across the galaxy, just like the Voyagers. The spacecraft is escaping the solar system. It has power to run into the 2030s, maybe even we'll make 2040. We hope to go on and continue exploring. It'll take us about a year and a half, maybe a little longer to get all the data back

from the MU69 flyby, similar to Pluto. And NASA approved our goal of exploring the sun's heliosphere, the sun's outer environment, all the way out to 50 astronomical units, 50 times as far from the sun as the Earth. That's the very most distant edge of where Pluto orbits. And that environment is important for understanding how the surfaces of both Kuiper belt objects and small planets like Pluto evolve over time. And we're going to map that out with instruments that are, in some cases, a thousand times more sensitive than the technology they could put on Voyager. And at the end of that, which will be the spring of 2021, I hope that we will have written another extended mission proposal and been

approved to go on exploring. Maybe we can even get one more flyby in, but even if not, to do some really unique planetary science and astrophysics out there at those great distances. You have been part of so many of these robotic missions. You were telling me that you have a shot, along with some of your colleagues, at finally getting up at least a little ways up into space yourself. Right. Well, I'm excited about that at the Southwest Research Institute, where I work. We have a very forward-looking program to start to fly scientists with their payloads and turn spaceflight into the same thing as an astronomical observing run. So we've built several instruments and trained three payload specialists, myself, Kathy Olkin, and Dan Durda. We've purchased flights on suborbital spacelines like Virgin Galactic.

We're ready and raring to go. We've been going through training on F-104 jets and centrifuges and zero-g airplanes and getting the checklists ready. The experiments are built and calibrated and when the space lines are ready in 2018 or so we're looking forward to space flight and getting some great data too all right if we talk any more about that i'm going to die of envy so we we can almost stop there you want to say anything about a wingoo before we quit sure and you know the holidays are coming and no call to action there you Sure. You know, the holidays are coming.

No call to action. There you go. Well, you know, gift the universe with a wingoo. The best part about a wingoo is not that we let people touch space in new ways by helping to populate a new map of Mars or suggesting names for exoplanets or by just getting our Daily Space Explorer image of the day service, which you can give as a gift. Any of those you can give as a gift or you can buy for yourself. But the best part is that we generate grants with that. We've generated dozens of grants to students, to startup companies in space, to researchers, to nonprofits. We love doing a social good.

to researchers, to nonprofits. We love doing a social good. We love helping space inspire people, but we also love being able to help make the science enterprise go a little faster because of the grants we can give. Inspiring and enabling. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Alan. Oh, by the way, thanks for the pin as well. Thank you, Matt. And thanks for the pin you gave me, the Planetary Society. Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, and so many others around the solar system that I think he has retained that title that I gave you ages ago,

the busiest man in space exploration. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much. Keep up the good work here. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, closing out our coverage of the Division for Planetary Sciences here in Pasadena, I am joined by the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Batts. Welcome. Thank you, Matt.

It has been a hell of a week. It has indeed. All sorts of great science, great stuff from the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting. And we just saw Alan Stern accept the Cosmos Award after telling one of the best stories I've ever heard told on stage, the story of the New Horizons mission. And he had really pretty pictures and data and science too. We're ready to hear about the night sky, which is right over our heads as we speak. Well, I can't actually see anything through the lights and haze, but I'm

sure it's up there. I'm convinced. But you can see pretty easily Venus in the early evening sky, low in the west shortly after sunset, and it's doing kind of a groovy thing over the next few days. It's moving between the red star Antares in Scorpius and Saturn, looking kind of yellowish. So on the 27th, it'll be right about lined up between the two of them, but it'll be moving through, so look for that. Pre-dawn sky, low in the east, shortly before sunrise, check out bright Jupiter.

It will have the moon hanging out next to it on the 28th, making for a lovely view. A great sky. It is. It's a wonderful sky, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. We move on to this week in space history. 2001, Mars Odyssey arrived in orbit at Mars. And it's still working 15 years later. Still doing science. It's amazing. I wonder why they gave it that name.

Oh, yeah, 2001. 2001, yeah. And one more on long missions. 2004 was the first Cassini-Titan flyby. Wow. Still orbiting, still doing flybys, but not for much longer. Yeah, not much longer. We're in the last year. It's the final countdown.

It's the final countdown. Random space fact. The closest approach of the New Horizons spacecraft that we just heard about, closest approach of that to Pluto was about one Earth diameter away from the surface of Pluto. Wow. That's close. That's very close. It is when you're billions of kilometers away from Earth. Yeah.

And that's how we got those wonderful snapshots that Alan showed us tonight. It is indeed. In the trivia contest, I asked you, what moon in the solar system has the longest orbital period around its parent planet. This actually, this was amazing to me. You got a lot of questions. This one blew me away. I had no idea.

The moon Neso around Neptune has an orbital period around Neptune of 26.67 years. Years. It's a really big orbit around a planet of a moon. We have some other interesting facts to share, but I will tell you that our winner this time, first-time winner, is Ben Yanaian. Ben Yanaian of Gaithersburg, Maryland. He said, indeed, 9,374 days with a semi-major access of 48,390,000 kilometers.

Several other people wrote in to point out that that is farther than Mercury is from the sun. Wow. This from Mark Sulfridge. Nesso and Samthay? Sam Nesso and Samanthay? I'm sure you pronounced it perfectly. I bet. It's a sister moon up there circling Neptune in retrograde orbit,

nearly equal in duration and inclination. Some people think they started out as a single body. And we did get a lot of people who said Samanthay. I'm sticking with that. They thought that that was it. But no, it was its nearby sister, Nesso. From Eric Bruner in Cary, North Carolina. He says he's between one and two Nesso months old. I thought you'd like that. Interesting concept since month is derived from the moon orbiting the moon. Never mind. Finally, from Michael Unger in Vancouver, British Columbia, he also said,

Nesso, he said he confirmed this answer with his colleague, Brett Gladman at the University of British Columbia, because Brett was one of the co-discoverers of Nesso. Wow, that's pretty cool. Not bad. It's kind of cheating, but what the hell. I don't know. I think it shows initiative. I didn't

say that we are going to give our winner this week, Ben. He's going to get that copy of Andrew Fasakis' book, Star Trek, the official guide to the universe from National Geographic that we talked with Andrew about a couple of weeks ago on this show. Also, a

Planetary Society rubber no, sorry, rubber asteroid and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. This time we're going to go back to giving away a Planetary Radio T-shirt, oh boy, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and another one of those itelescope.net accounts, about a 200-point account worth a couple hundred dollars American to explore the universe with their worldwide network of non-profit telescopes. That's a pretty cool prize package, and you're wearing most of it.

I am, yes. You've got your planetary radio t-shirt, you've got your rubber asteroids, you look like a telescope. And I spell like one, too. I don't even know what that means. Okay, let's go on to the next question, shall we? Yes, please. What science instruments on New Horizons have the names of characters from the TV show The Honeymooners?

Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. radio contest. And you have until Tuesday, November 1st at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and be eligible for that fabulous package of prizes. We're done. Oh, I see a star. Where? Oh, yes. Look at that. Are you sure it's just a star? If only there was an astronomer around to tell us. It's just a star.

Oh, look. There's one with rotors and blinking lights. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about the wonderful planetary thoughts of goo. Did you say goo? Goo. Okay, goo goo. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week and tonight outside the Pasadena Convention Center, where the DPS conference just celebrated the Award of the Cosmos Award to Dr. Alan Stern. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its plutocracy of 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.