Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern and the Rise of Pluto

Episode Date: May 12, 2015

Humankind’s arrival at Pluto is barely two months away. The science and images have already started to flow from New Horizons, according to the mission’s Principal Investigator, Alan Stern. Alan returns to Planetary Radio this week.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 the Rise of Pluto, 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. Last week it was the head of the Messenger mission. Now we go from the innermost region of the solar system to nearly the outermost, as we welcome the principal investigator for New Horizons, the spacecraft that will finally reach icy Pluto in just two months. Bill Nye is back, and he's counting down to the launch of LightSail, with a word for the

mysterious X-37B as well. Bruce Betts also returns, this time with an absolutely magnificent tribute to absolute magnitude. Let's start our journey on Mars with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, when I saw your recent piece about Curiosity, I thought, wow, we haven't talked about that in a while. So now's good timing. How is the mission doing? Well, the mission's doing great. They wrapped up, I think, more than six months exploring Pahrump Hills, driving around that outcrop about three times. But now they're finally on the road again, doing what a rover is designed to do,

and that's rove across Mars. And Curiosity is really roving into absolutely glorious landscape right now. The topography is getting just bigger and bigger as she approaches Mount Sharp. And we're seeing glorious layered rocks in the walls of these small canyons. And the view is just getting better and better up ahead. So it's really fun to be driving again. I liked your interesting principle you stated here. Good views generally mean good geology. That's right. And it works just as well on Earth as it does on Mars. You know, if you look up ahead of the mountain, you say,

wow, look at those cool layers. And you can see them from miles away, that's going to be a good place to go up and explore in situ for the geology. So we're doing exactly that on Curiosity, sighting things several hundred meters away and then driving up and poking them with the arm. Well, we don't have much time, of course, but let me get into some specifics. There is a terrific image here. At the risk of starting a new series of nasty, misleading Mars myths, this image appears to show, some people might say, ooh, petroglyphs. Yeah, you know, maybe it looks like that if you're not as excited about geology as I am. But to me, this looks like exciting geology. It shows these white veins poking up out of the rock that tell you, I mean, those veins are just trademark.

Water was flowing through these rocks and a lot of it because there are a lot of veins depositing a lot of mineral that had to be flowing through there over a long time, but after the rock was already solidified enough to break into these chunks. And so I look at that and I say, wow, that's some exciting geology right there. It's a great shot. Just one of many included in this May 6th entry from Emily. Tell us a little bit about this side trip the rover made that has come to be called Logan's Run. Oh yeah, this was really interesting. So Curiosity was headed toward a spot that they named Logan's Pass. They navigate the rover primarily using images that they take from orbit, because Curiosity can see things well when she's close to

them, but it's actually not that great a camera compared to the amazing high-rise instrument that we have in orbit. And so out after a few hundred meters away, the orbiter sees things better on Mars, and so we plan the long-term drives based on orbital images. But Curiosity saw this spot in a hill just a couple hundred meters away where they saw what they called incised valley fill. That's a place where there had been a stream that cut into rocks and then more material got deposited. And they said, this is exactly the kind of sedimentary geology we'd like to investigate. We saw it in rover images. They planned, they had an argument about whether they should go over there or keep on their original course. And they did. They ran over

to Logan's Run. They investigated these really gorgeous rocks. They put the arm down and then they got back on their original course. It was kind of a neat little side trip. How about this image that was taken on this little run? They're really exquisite layers that are visible in color in the shot. Yeah, in general, the images of outcrops that Curiosity gives just show you the relative importance of wind erosion compared to water erosion in this particular spot on Mars compared to Earth, where on Earth, you know, even if it only rains once every thousand years, that's still a lot more than it rains on Mars. And so you never get these incredibly thin plates of sand, rich rock material eroding the way they seem to here in Gale Crater. It's just gorgeous.

Gorgeous, spectacular, and just one, as I said, of the many images in this May 6 report from Emily. And I take it you're going to have more to say soon about said, of the many images in this May 6 report from Emily. And I take it you're going to have more to say soon about the condition of the rover, including its holy wheels. Yeah, I've been keeping a close eye on the wheels, and they are acquiring more damage, but not at any rate that's any more than has been expected now since they figured out what the problem was. So I'll try to get an update on that out pretty soon. All right, Emily. Thanks again, as always. Thank you, Matt.

She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Up next, Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, welcome back to the show. Days to go, maybe very few days, as some people hear this, maybe right on top of the launch of LightSail. I know. You can reckon it this way, 39 quick years since Carl Sagan was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson talking about the solar sail mission to Comet Holly with a square sail, a square solar sail. Well, now the planetary side, which he started, we're going to launch a square sail, solar sail. And it's citizen funded, Matt. It's a fantastic thing.

Our members supported it. Pointing a double negative for comedic effect. If nothing don't happen, we're launching on the 20th of May. We are a secondary payload and the primary payload, Matt, you know, is the Air Force X-37B. Oh, my. Are you allowed to say that? Ah, it's on the mission patch online, I guess so. But this is, for those of you unfamiliar, it looks like the space shuttle times 0.4.

That's a good way to put it. And then so they're going to fly some materials. Is that right? To see what happens in space? That's NASA's little piece of this. They're sending stuff up with the X-37B. What the X-37B will be doing?

Don't tell us that. You'd have to kill us all. Don't tell us. Don't want to know. But that aside, who cares about an X-37B? We're flying light sail. This is a solar sail mission. We're going to see if it deploys properly, see if we have a healthy spacecraft and we can beep back and forth. And the big question, you know, is will the sails come out properly? This is what's gone wrong with other solar

sail missions in the past, is getting those sails to unfurl properly. Seems like a trivial thing, but when you're trying to cram all that 32 square meters of sail into a 10 by 10 centimeter gizmo you got to really think carefully and we you know we have some proprietary mechanism uh and software on there that feel really excited about and i think it's going to be it's going to advance space science and exploration matt that's our mission at the planetary society i am so looking forward to the opportunity, just maybe, to see that deployed sail, maybe as a naked eye object as it circles the

Earth. Yeah, yeah, at sunrise and sunset, it's quite reasonable. And this was something that Carl Sagan used to talk about in the 1970s, seeing it from the Earth's surface. It's really going to be an inspirational thing. I'm going to put that link up to that bit on the Carson Show with your former instructor, Dr. Sagan, where he brings out that model of the solar sail. It's very entertaining. And of course, part of that is the intro that you provide. It's proven to be very popular. Don't miss it if you can, as we like to say. But we're on a real rocket. It's an Atlas V, a Boeing-Locke Martin rocket. Let's go. Let's change the world.

Great talking to you, Matt. You too, Bill. I will see you at the Cape. He's Bill Nye, Bill Nye the Science Guy, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Let's head to Pluto next. That's what New Horizons is doing. We're going to talk to the head of the mission, Alan Stern. Nearly a decade has passed since New Horizons blasted off for Pluto. It has been a mostly uneventful trip, sure a close encounter with Jupiter, but the spacecraft has slept over most

of its journey. Not anymore. On July 14th, it will hurtle through the collection of worlds known as the Plutonian system, giving us our first ever close-up look and sending back an enormous trove of science data. In fact, as you'll hear from Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, the science and image harvest is already well underway. Alan has been one of our most frequent guests, but he has never had a more exciting update than the one we recorded a few days ago via Skype. Alan, welcome back to the show. Nearly nine and a half years in space now, and as we speak at least, just 67 days left till closest approach.

I don't know how you manage to sleep at night. We're pretty excited on the New Horizons team. It's been a long time coming and we are just just raring to go. Amazing stuff already happening. Emily Lakdawalla, my colleague, posted a terrific blog about these images that you just published. We talked about them, in fact, about these images that you just published. We talked about them, in fact, on last week's show. I got to tell you that I stared for I don't know how many minutes just watching these two little objects spin around. Yeah. Isn't it cool?

Pluto's becoming a real place for the first time. And the fact that we see a persistent feature at the North Pole is very, very suggestive of something very familiar. There may be a polar cap. Wouldn't that be something to travel three billion miles and find another place with a polar cap? We're just beginning to see these details that you've started to talk about here. What do these tell us other than this possibility of a polar cap? I mean, there aren't many pixels there yet. Are we able to learn something from this? We can learn things from this, Matt. One of the

things that anybody can notice by looking at the rotation movie that we released last week with NASA is that there are big albedo or reflectivity spots on Pluto, bright spots and dark spots. If they were on the Earth, they would be called continent-sized. Now, the interesting thing is, if you compare those images that New Horizons just released to very low-resolution images of other planets, Venus or Mars or Mercury, for example, you wouldn't find anything like this. Pluto's surface seems to have a much more interesting character at low resolution than most places. And that bodes very well for what we'll

see at high resolution in just a few weeks. That is exciting. So how long then, a few weeks, before we get substantially better images? Yeah, it's going to get better every week. You know, we are now 10 weeks out. In fact, on Tuesday, we'll be nine weeks out. You know, in a month, we will be twice as close as we are today. So we'll have four times as many pixels on the place. In six weeks, we'll be proportionately closer. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger in the windshield. OK, so you're monitoring now.

Have the other science instruments also kicked in? Or is that still ahead of us? Well, some have and some haven't. We have seven scientific instruments on the spacecraft. instruments also kicked in, or is that still ahead of us? Well, some have and some haven't. We have seven scientific instruments on the spacecraft. Three of them, which measure the local plasma and dust environment, are working every day. They have been operating since we began the encounter back in January to characterize that environment. And we've been getting great data from all three instruments.

The long-range reconnaissance imager is the instrument with the biggest telephoto capability, and that's the one that produced the images we were just talking about. It's not being used every day just yet, but by the end of May, it'll be on Pluto every single day. The Ralph color camera began its work in April, and we have released a color image of Pluto and Charon. They're not individually resolved. You can't see surface features. You can simply see that our color camera works. But very soon, we'll be taking images from closer range. And although that instrument's lower resolution than the telephoto telescope called LORRI, it should start revealing surface details

in June in color. And then the last of the instruments to come online are the ultraviolet spectrometer and the radio science. They simply have to be much closer to the Pluto system in order to get useful data. There was a press release about one of these instruments on New Horizons not too long ago, and it's significant for other reasons as well. But it's also been awake for a long time, apparently. Tell us about the student dust counter. You know, that's one of my favorite topics on this mission. New Horizons is the first planetary mission to launch with a student-built instrument.

And it's a part of our education and public outreach program. Students at the University of Colorado here in Boulder built a dust counter, students at the University of Colorado here in Boulder, built a dust counter, basically an impact counter that measures the distribution of fine particles called dust across the solar system and into the Kuiper Belt. It's very important science, and it's something that even Voyager didn't carry. So it's brand new science to have a dust detector so far from the sun. This is an instrument that we have been using in crews all the way, essentially since launch back in 2006. The principal scientist for that, Mihaly Harani, he's a professor at the University of Colorado,

along with his graduate students and undergraduates, have been publishing really interesting results. What a terrific experience for them. Remind us of what we can expect as we lead up to and during the encounter, the closest approach, and what will be happening soon afterward. Start with spacecraft activities and then tell us how everybody else will be able to join in through the media and maybe directly with interacting with you and others on the mission? Well, I'm glad you asked about that, because as we begin to draw close to the system in June and throughout the month of July, the spacecraft will be training all the remote sensing instruments and the in-situ instruments as well on the Pluto system

and making not just daily observations, but as we get close, we'll have three times a day imaging suites. And then, in addition, once we're right on top of it in the day's right-around-closest approach, the spacecraft will be making observations essentially around the clock. Of course, at the planet, we have a chance to do some really unique things because the observing geometry changes as we sweep around from one side to the other. So we'll also be doing in-s situ measurements to sample the atmosphere when we're

close, to look at all the satellites and to search for new ones, to search for rings, to perform occultations in which Pluto or its big planet-sized moon, Charon, get in the way of the Earth or the Sun. And we can use that, the Earth setting through Pluto's atmosphere or Charon over Charon's limb to make a very sensitive probe of what those atmospheres are made of. We can also, by watching a signal sent from the deep space network on Earth four hours previously, which will be arriving at Pluto just as the Earth sets and then as the Earth rises behind Pluto, probe the temperature and pressure structure of Pluto's atmosphere. That's Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission that is just two months away from its close encounter with Pluto. He'll tell us more when Planetary Radio continues.

Greetings, Planetary Radio listeners. Bill Nye here, inviting you to become part of our citizen-funded LightSail project. LightSail is at the center of our very first Kickstarter campaign. Help us realize the fantastic potential of this innovative spacecraft for as little as $1. We've got terrific rewards for those who can afford even a little bit more. How about a square centimeter of the sale? Or lunch with me? Learn more at planetary.org slash kickstarter.

Together, we will change the world. Random Space Fact! Together, we will change the world. is and hilarious. See, Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new random space fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetary society. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, talking this week with the leader of the first ever mission to Pluto, Alan Stern. The excitement is rising fast as New Horizons closes in on the world that many still think of as the ninth of our solar system's planets. With tens of millions of miles to go, the spacecraft is already returning images that are nearly as good as the best captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Its suite of powerful science instruments is also coming online. The climax will arrive on Tuesday, July 14th, when it will pass right through the Plutonian system. It will be a very, very busy time for the robotic probe. In fact, there are over a thousand observations planned around closest approach by the different instruments. It's going to be really jam-packed. Here on the Earth, there are a variety of ways you can follow it,

through our website, through our social media, on Twitter, for example, on Facebook, other channels. You can also follow some blogs that we're writing about New Horizons. You can sign up for news alerts. NASA will be having fairly extensive coverage beginning in June on NASA TV. And then there will be, of course, press conferences, news releases, and almost continuous NASA TV coverage during the week closest approach. And I think we're still formulating plans, but the Planetary Society hopes to join into this little celebration at Pluto as well. You've talked about this in the past, but remind

us, I mean, this mission is hardly over after that day of closest approach, July 14th. That's right. There are really a couple of things that I think people will be interested in. First of all, we continue to study the Pluto system in detail and intensively for the rest of the month of July. And when we're close to the system, we can look back in this special circumstance of being behind the planet, where we can do things like search for hazes and rings with more sensitivity than you can on approach. Then we will begin a very long period, 16 months, of data downlink that will last until late in 2016. We take so much data at the Pluto system that it takes a very long time to get it all home, which means that we're going to be making new discoveries for quite a long time, as if we still

had a spacecraft there and orbiting. Our science team is looking forward to that very, very much. And then late next year, we hope to hear from NASA after we write a proposal as to whether an extended mission to go and explore small Kuiper belt objects a billion miles beyond Pluto is approved. If it is approved, we have the targets and the flyby would be in 2019. That would not only be a record setter for distance of any object explored in the solar system, break the record we're setting at Pluto, but from the standpoint of understanding the origins of our solar system, it should be a very, very important step scientifically. So much to look forward to.

Alan, when this closest approach takes place, we will have visited all nine of the classical planets in our solar system, along with hundreds of moons and a handful of asteroids and comets. Would you agree that this is the real golden age of solar system exploration? I agree with you, Matt. It's historic. It's something that Planetary Society founder Carl Sagan spoke about quite a lot. We're very proud on New Horizons to be the capstone event to the first era of reconnaissance of our solar system. And we hope that your readers recognize the significance of this and that your listeners do as well, that in the space of really well less than a lifetime, just 50 years since the first Mariner probes were dispatched, the NASA program has been first to every planet in the solar system,

as well as making big strides in terms of studies of small bodies like comets and asteroids. It's really something I think the United States is going to go down in history forever for, and it was all done in our lifetimes. I think you can rest assured that our audience for this show are almost as excited as you and the other team members on New Horizons as we look forward toward that truly amazing day coming in July. We've already started the discoveries from New Horizons. Just one more thing as we get close to running out of time. Give us a little update on that

instrument you have on Rosetta called ALICE. Thank you for asking. ALICE is one of the instruments on the Rosetta Comet Orbiter. It's an ultraviolet spectrometer. In fact, there's another ALICE on New Horizons. They're very, very close designs to one another. The job of the UV spectrometer on Rosetta, which is, by the way, a NASA instrument on a European spacecraft, is to study the composition and dynamics of the atmosphere of the comet called a coma. ALICE is working really well. We've already, in fact, had papers accepted revealing new emission mechanisms that we didn't know about in comets, telling us about the composition of the

coma, the reflectivity of the surface, and there's a lot more coming because it's an orbiter mission. We're collecting dozens of spectra every day. Alan, it is exciting, as always, to talk with you, especially as we enter this most exciting period in the decade-long and perhaps much longer mission of New Horizons. Thanks for taking the time, and I look forward to the next opportunity. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. My guest is the busiest man in space. Former NASA Associate Administrator Alan Stern is the principal investigator for New Horizons, humankind's first emissary to Pluto,

making its closest approach, as you've heard, on July 14th of this year. Alan has had a piece of countless missions of exploration, including service as the PI for ALICE, the ultraviolet spectrometer that is now orbiting Comet 67P on Rosetta. He's also deeply involved with commercial space efforts, and he co-founded Uingu, the private company that gives everyone the chance to unofficially name Mars craters as they support space research. I'll be right back for a poke around the solar system with our friend Bruce Betts in this week's edition of What's Up? Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He joins us once again right now for What's Up? here at the end of this episode of Planetary Radio.

Welcome back. Thank you. We have much to talk about, and we will get to the trivia contest and clarify some magnitude, questions of magnitude in a moment. But tell us what's up, first of all. Venus and Jupiter, super bright in the west in the early evening, both brighter than the brightest star in the sky, getting closer through the end of June, where they'll be ridiculously close. And also in the early evening, Saturn rising over in the east, hanging out just above the constellation Scorpius.

We move on to this week in space history. In 1973, Skylab was launched. And in 2009, the Herschel and Planck spacecraft were launched to study the universe. Very good. On to study the universe. Very good. On to random space fact. Shh. Shh. The Dark Ages ended in Europe with the Renaissance,

but the Dark Ages in the universe ended with the first star formation, bringing light to the universe. Let there be light. The universe's Dark Ages lasted a few hundred million years and ended very approximately about 400 million years after the Big Bang or about 13.4 billion years ago. Yeah, then things really got interesting. Yeah.

Speaking of interesting, we move on to the trivia contest, and I asked you what is the absolute magnitude of the sun, and I was a little less specific than I should have been. Should I clarify that now, or do you want to? What the heck? Yeah, please, because we did get this from a number of people who gave us two numbers. Right, and there you could actually define more, but the two most common ways. Absolute magnitude is a measure of brightness, but it's a standardized brightness. So you have a parent magnitude that's the brightness you see, absolute magnitude is a distance of 10 parsecs away, how bright would it be? You can characterize that in different

wavelength bands so the two most common ways to do it are bolometric, which is all wavelengths observed and not observed, guessed at, added together and then the other one is visual magnitude using a well-defined filter right in the middle of the visible wavelength band. So we will happily take either a bolometric absolute magnitude or a visual absolute magnitude. They're not radically different. How'd we do, Matt?

Quite well. A lot of people got this. There's a sharp group out there, as you know. Our winner, if he got this number right, Clifford Ducharme. Clifford Ducharme, he is a first-time winner, but I know he is someone who owns a telescope, so I bet he's going to enjoy

not only his stylish Planetary Radio t-shirt, but his 200-point itelescope.net account, which we are giving away along with the shirt. Tell me if he got it right. The absolute magnitude of our sun is about plus 4.83. That is indeed correct. Okay, Clifford, you got all that good stuff coming. He says it's not to be confused with the apparent magnitude, which is minus 26.7, which is why it's a good idea not to stare. Which means really, really bright in qualitative terms.

Cliff wrote to us from Washougal, Washington, up in West Toluca Lake, not far from us at all here in California. Dustin Hess, he came up with the same number for absolute magnitude of the sun. He did want to make sure we understood, though, that this measurement diminishes greatly at night. Yeah, no. Sorry, a scientist in me. No, it doesn't. No. That's the nature of absolute magnitude. Sorry, I'm not being humorous enough.

No, it's the old joke. Apparent magnitude, yeah, I know. You're good with the mission to the sun, it's okay. The absolute magnitude is the same no matter what, because it's theoretical. All right, I'm just too caught up in my numbers. Shall we move on? Can we?

Mark Smith said brightest sometimes naked eye star in absolute magnitude, Eta Carina at minus 12, and this from Hudson Ansley, who said that some quasars apparently have an absolute magnitude of more than minus 25. Yeah, and we usually go with quasars,

although quasars are good, particularly with some ham and butter. I was just going to say, wear your sunscreen if you get, you know, within, oh, I don't know, a billion light years of one of those. Yeah, not likely. You can go on now.

All right. What galaxy was named after a larval stage of an amphibian? What galaxy was named after the larval stage of an amphibian. What galaxy was named after the larval stage of an amphibian? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You will have this time until the 19th of May, May 19 at 8 a.m. Pacific time, to get us the answer.

And we'll give you, if you win, a Planetary Radio t-shirt and another of those 200-point, worth a couple hundred dollars, U.S. accounts with itelescope.net so that you can use their network of telescopes all over the world including the southern hemisphere and we might give them a larval amphibian although i doubt it you all right everybody go out there look up in the night sky and think about window blinds All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about window blinds. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts.

He is, as we often say, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Oh, wait, I have a joke for you. Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon? No, I didn't. Oh, it's got great food, but no atmosphere. You can blame my friend Ron Vogel for that joke. But you have to blame me for Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its light-sailing members.

Daniel Gunn is the associate producer. Our theme was created by Josh Doyle. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.