Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern Puts His Stamp On Pluto

Episode Date: February 20, 2012

Alan Stern Puts His Stamp On PlutoLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alan Stern puts his stamp on 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. New Horizons is well past the halfway point on its long journey to the Pluto system. We welcome back the mission's principal investigator for a status report. And Alan will tell you how to get behind the creation of a U.S. postage stamp that will honor this voyage. He also wants to invite you to his conference on suborbital science. In just a moment, you'll hear Emily Lakdawalla and me introduce a new video series called

Snapshots from Space. The first one has just been posted to the Planetary Society YouTube page. That's where you can also check out lots of other videos, including the trip Bill Nye and I made to see the big SOFIA telescope mounted inside a 747 aircraft. We've got the link at planetary.org slash radio. There's a blog entry introducing snapshots from space as well. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, wants to make sure NASA continues to explore the solar system, and Bruce Betts will tell us why he leaves a few spacefaring nations off

the list of those that have gone beyond Earth orbit. It all begins with the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. Much to talk about as usual this week, Emily. I do want to begin, though, with a recommendation that people take a look at your new video series that we're going to be doing. It's available on the website, on our YouTube channel, and it's called Snapshots from Space. Yeah, it's kind of a scary new adventure for me to go into video instead of just audio,

but I'm looking forward to it, to being able to explain some things about what's going on in the solar system on video. So definitely check it out. And this very first one begins with Seasons on Mars. It's a simple little thing, but quite enjoyable. I think you did a great job with it. Well, thank you. I hope everybody else will feel the same.

Now, let's talk about some of the blog entries, perhaps beginning with this one. You asked a question. Where are all the big Kuiper Belt objects? That's right. I knew that there were eight of them. I knew that there was one out there called Eris that was as big as Pluto.

But that's pretty much all I realized that I knew about the Kuiper Belt. And I thought that the first thing that I needed to figure out was where are all these objects and where are they going? So I developed a new, as far as I can tell, a new way to plot some of their orbital characteristics that makes it a little bit more intuitive to figure out where these things are. And it turns out that most of them are on orbits that come quite close to Neptune. So Neptune is really in charge of the Kuiper Belt, even of Eris, which is 100 AU out. That's three times farther from the sun than Neptune is and 100 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. But even the orbit of that one comes all the way back into Neptune once on every 500-year orbit or however long it takes. So it was kind of an interesting way to get a handle on where all these objects are.

There's a couple of the big ones are on their own little orbits in the classical part of the Kuiper Belt that Neptune actually doesn't control, and that's Quawar and Veruna. But the other six big objects, Neptune's in charge. Just one other thing that I think we ought to mention, and that is this piece that you posted on February 16, The Scale of the Universe, Shades of Powers of Ten. Yeah, it's very cute. And, of course, the Powers of Ten idea is one that's been around for a long time, the idea being that you zoom way in on sort of a logarithmic scale from things that you recognize down to the level of quarks and gluons,

and then you can also zoom all the way out to the level of the observable universe. But the way that this 14-year-old team of twin boys implemented it is just great because it's got these cute little flash animations. You click on them, you learn about the various objects that they've represented there. It's just really well done, and I'm just so amazed that it was done

by a couple of teenagers. Very exciting. Take a look at it. Enjoy their work. That's again a February 16 entry in the blog. And that very same day Emily wrote about where are the big Kuiper Belt objects. And do take a look at snapshots from space. And we hope you'll be able to see those as we said on a regular basis. Emily, as always, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Up next is Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back to the show. There was big news out of Washington Monday, the 13th of February. That's right. The federal budget was released, and especially the budget for NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And we in the planetary community, we're concerned. We're disappointed. We're heartbroken. We're going to fight back, or whatever the expression is. Because there is a perception that space science,

or particularly planetary science, may sort of get pushed aside a bit? Oh, yeah. Well, budget's being cut. There's international crisis of debt and so on. So along with everything else, the NASA budget is being cut. Planetary science budget is being cut a little over 300 million U.S., which I know sounds like nothing to you. But if you do that every year for five or six years, as the saying goes, pretty soon you're like nothing to you. But if you do that every year for five or six years, as the saying goes, pretty soon you're talking about real money. We're talking about the cost of a flagship mission, something akin to the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity Rover. Or Cassini.

Or Cassini, exactly. So with that part of the budget being cut that much, we're really concerned that we'll lose expertise. As the saying goes, it is not a faucet. You can't just let these rocket scientists and engineers go and try to reestablish this ability, the ability to land on Mars, the ability to go to the outer planets, the ability to go to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter that might have liquid water that might harbor life. You can't, you'll lose the search for life. And this would be not in anyone's best interest. So Matt, you know, it's part of my job. We educate, we create, we make little projects, we make certain spacecraft

harbor, and we advocate. So I, as the CEO of the Planetary Society, have to get in there and mix it up with political people in the next few months. Much more about this at planetary.org. I've written an op-ed to the Washington Post. I'm sure they'll print it. We're hopeful. So we'll see if we can try to turn the tide. And there will be much more about this in the weeks and months to come. Bill, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. And there will be much more about this in the weeks and months to come. Bill, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt.

I'll be right back with Alan Stern of New Horizons spacecraft began its journey to Pluto and beyond back in January of 2006. So much has happened since then. For one thing, Alan served as NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, which basically put him in charge of all the agency's science activity. all the agency's science activity. Now he's back at the Southwest Research Institute, where he is Associate Vice President of the Space Science and Engineering Division. This doesn't even begin to capture the range of projects, missions, and research in which Alan has a hand. I recently got the New Horizons Principal Investigator on the phone for an extended update. Alan, welcome back to Planetary Radio. As usual, you've got too much going on for us to capture in one show. So if you don't mind, I think we're going to spread this across a couple of programs.

Sounds pretty good, Matt. Let's start with this effort that you've got underway to create a stamp, get the Postal Service to take us out to Pluto with New Horizons. Yeah, you know, the 1990 stamp that said, Not Yet Explored, all over it for Pluto, was a big part of the public's recognition that we ought to get a mission out, the Kuiper Belt, into planet Pluto. And we said a long time ago, when we won this project,

once we got it launched and we're getting close, we were going to petition the post office to update that with a modern stamp that talks about the United States and NASA actually exploring the Pluto system. So we're doing that. You've still got quite a ways to go. I mean, it's going to be more than three years before we reach that destination. But I guess you've got to get started now if you want to get this thing through the federal government. Well, it is a three-year process that the U.S. Post Office goes through. And three years from right now, we will already be in encounter. The encounter begins in January of 2015, and now it's February of 2012.

So planned by their rules, we need to get this submitted now, meaning next month. That is some beautiful artwork that your colleague Dan Durda did. I know that image has been up before, but seeing it integrated into the stamp design is pretty darn impressive. Yeah, Dan did a spectacular job. Of course, the post office will hire their own artist, but as a part of the proposal you have to do, besides writing up the justification for why this should be a U.S. postage stamp.

There are two other things they ask you to do. One is provide a concept for what it might look like. And, of course, for the space stamps, they're kind of easy. You know, if it's a mission to a planet, it's pretty much the spacecraft and the planet. But, you know, if they're honoring an individual or whatever, they want a real piece of artwork commemorating, you know, showing them what you're thinking. And Dan did that. And then also, they ask you to show that people out in the public support it. So they ask you to put together a petition and attach the results to your proposal.

So we're also asking the public, and today we're asking the Planetary Society's membership, to come and sign that petition. There is already a blog entry about this. Emily posted one back on February 9th if people want to read more there. But it's also easy to go to change.org. In fact, I'm looking at your page there right now. You go to change.org, you go to their search box and put in New Horizons or even Pluto, and there it is. This is where the effort is underway. How long are you giving yourself to pull together these 100,000 signatures that you're looking for?

Well, I've got to tell you, we want to hit the ball out of the park. A typical stamp signature will have 5,000 to 10,000, and we will probably have 5,000 by the end of today. By the time this airs, we hope to be further along the road. But we set a goal of 100,000. I don't know if we can accomplish it, but if every Planetary Society member signed up and told a couple of their friends to do it, we'd be there, since you guys are so large. We have until the 13th of March. And we set that date for ourselves.

It's actually the anniversary of the date that the discovery of Pluto was announced, in 1930. So we thought that was kind of a nice touch. Nice little tribute to Clyde Tombaugh there. That's great. We're going to talk more next week, I think, about Pluto and some really terrific discoveries that you and others have been making about that planet, even as New Horizons continues on its journey. But just give us an idea now of the status of the mission.

Well, we're doing really well. We're now in our seventh year of cruise out of a nine-year cruise to the Pluto system. We launched in January of 06. The spacecraft is in spectacularly good health. We got lots of fuel on board. We are coming up this summer on our first actual on-the-bird rehearsal of part of the intensive part of the encounter. We've been doing this on our first actual on-the-bird rehearsal of part of the intensive part of the encounter. We've been doing this on our mission simulator, but now we're going to have the spacecraft go through its paces on encounter day on May 29th. And then a little further down the road, we're actually going to rehearse the nine days surrounding Pluto that are the most intensive part of the flyby, but that'll come in a future year.

We're as busy as can be for a small team and a small spacecraft, and we are now just under 10 astronomical units to go. We've got 22 behind us and about 9.98 in front of us in the windshield. It's continuing to stream across the outer solar system. Alan, like I said, we're going to come back to this topic next week when we talk a little bit more, not just about New Horizons, but about Pluto. But if you would, stick around for a few moments, because I want to hear more about this conference that you've got going on up in Northern California.

Our guest is Alan Stern. He is the former Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate and the associate, right now is the associate VP, for the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division. This is Planetary Radio, and we'll be right back. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine.

That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and my guest is Alan Stern, the former associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. He is and has been for actually a long time affiliated with SWRI, the Southwest Research Institute, where he is now associate vice president in the Space Science and Engineering Division, with an amazing list of things going on. And I think we'll put up a link to just the recent SWRI press releases that involve your work. It's as long as my arm.

And we'll also put up a link to change.org, where people can back the stamp that you're trying to have created in honor of the New Horizons mission and Pluto. But I think we also need to put up a link to a conference that you've got coming up. Tell us a little bit about this and why you're so excited about it. Oh, well, Matt, this is really cool. We have all these tourist space lines like Virgin Galactic and XCOR and Blue Origin and others out testing their vehicles and that hope to enter commercial service, probably some of them by next year.

When I was at NASA running the science program, we realized that these vehicles can do more than just tourism, that they are spectacularly capable for advancing space science, technology development, and even education public outreach. After I left the agency, I decided to actually test that hypothesis and put together a conference for researchers and educators to come to to learn about the vehicle and talk about what kinds of applications they could see using these different space lines

and it was a smashing success two years ago two hundred fifty people showed up so we decided to make it annual we had in florida last year and uh... three hundred fifty people showed up this year it's going to be in palo alto we've broken all of our records from last year on number of papers uh... number of papers, number of registrants, number of sponsors. It's just two weeks from now. It's on the 27th of February.

It's a three-day conference at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Palo Alto by Stanford and NASA Ames. And NASA Ames is one of our co-hosts in this. And I think we're going to have 400-plus, maybe 450 at the meeting. And, in fact, if any of the listeners here have a chance and want to sign up, it's not too late. You can just walk in and register even at the desk. How would people find out more? What's the website? Well, we have a website.

You could Google the name of the meeting. It's called the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference. That's a mouthful. You could probably just put Next Gen Suborbital in and. That's a mouthful. You could probably just put NextGen Suborbital in and it'll find it, or you could go to the site itself, which is very simple. It's just nsrc.swri.org. And like I said, we'll put up that link on the show page for this program. People need to jump on that, I suppose, because it's going to be probably, for most people, just a few days after they hear this program, as you said, getting started on the

27th. You know, before we were on air, you mentioned this number of 400. You said 400 of your closest friends. Can you give us a few names of other folks who will be showing up? Well, I sure can. It's going to have researchers from everything from astrophysics and planetary science all the way to material science and life sciences. We have high-speed aerodynamics types. It's a really varied community that's looking at using these vehicles. We have some great keynote speakers come on Monday morning. We have one of the original suborbital flyers, a guy named Neil Armstrong, is going to be our keynote speaker. I've heard of him. Yeah, I thought you might have. He's done some planetary

work, too, in his life. And then following Neil will be David McKay, who's the chief test pilot for Virgin Galactic. He's already out flying Spaceship Two test flights. And then June Scobie Rogers, who's the widow of Challenger Commander Dick Scobie, is going to be speaking. Dr. Rogers is an educator herself, and she's hoping to fly as an educator through the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, which she founded. And so it just shows all kinds of people are coming towards this new kind of space flight, which is both less expensive and much more frequent, and I think it's going to revolutionize the way we think about human access to space. Well, and probably also do a lot for science, which is something that you're very involved with.

I know that SWRI has been chosen to do what's called payload integration for three of these companies that are leading this charge into suborbital space. Yeah, we're excited about that. We're a payload integrator for Virgin Galactic, for XCOR, and also for Masten Space Systems. And I'm very excited to be on the three winning proposals funded by NASA. But in addition, at Southwest, we also have our own flight project, internally funded by the Institute, in which myself and two of my colleagues, Kathy Olkin and Dan Derda, will make a total of nine suborbital space flights with three different experiments that we've already developed,

just to get out front in terms of competition and get some experience. And in fact, I believe we're the first private research institute in the world, I don't even think any university is in front of us, in being an early adopter for getting involved in flying our own scientists in space. We hope to start by next year. Very exciting times, Alan. Listen, you will be able to stick around, I hope, and we'll talk about some other stuff and air that conversation on next week's show. Great. Can't wait. Thanks, Matt.

Alan Stern, as we've said, is the former Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. He is currently the Associate Vice President of the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division. I will be right back for a look at the night sky with our friend Bruce Betts. That's this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is back on the Skype line. Welcome. Thank you. We're going to talk about what's up in the night sky and a slightly controversial trivia contest. What should we be looking at?

You should be looking at planets in the night sky. I know I say that a lot, but it's really cool what's going on right now. We've got Venus. This is the early evening. You got Venus in the west, super bright object low down, Jupiter above it, almost as bright. And the two of them over the coming weeks are growing closer and closer in the night sky. So there's point number one that's cool point number two is related you got the moon going to play with them on february 25th and 26th nice crescent moon making a beautiful conjunction and we got mars mars coming up on opposition opposition opposite side of the earth from the sun on march 3rd, so also almost about that time, its closest point to Earth on the 26-month cycle the two have.

So it's bright, not quite as bright as Jupiter, but nearly as bright as the brightest star in the sky. Not quite, but has that really cool reddish color. It will be by March 3rd, kind of by definition, rising around sunset and setting around sunrise. So you also you'll be able to check it out in the early evening, but look over in the east. That exciting times. And it was an exciting week for some civilization that came to an end many, many years ago, their local time. Oh, that's right and uh our observed time it was 25 years ago this week that we observed supernova 1987a uh yeah that was probably bad for the civilization of course it happened a long time before we saw it but you get the idea we put a

line through that star on the list of seti places to check disclaimer we're unaware of any civilization that was actually destroyed by 1987a all right let us move on to random space fact yeah rovers i have been thinking about rovers this week curiosity that's headed to mars 900 kilograms big dog mars exploration rovers 180 kilograms chihuahuas no okay all right uh poodles harsh dude no i like poodles uh sojourner, 11.5 kilograms. Clearly a chihuahua. Then what are you going to do with, well, those are the only rovers that have actually flown to Mars. We also have some on the moon from the Americans and the Soviets.

But Musa's CN that was planned to fly on what became Hayabusa but didn't fly was down at one kilogram. There you go. Because you know where I was this week? Thinking about those little rovers. Oh, yeah. You went to that meeting talking about micro rovers. I did as a follow on and somewhat growing out of our part of its origin, out of our micro rover project that we did with Cornell University. There was a micro-rover workshop at Brown University this week. They put it together and I presented what things we learned and evolved in terms of ways you could use small rovers from robotic uses alone

to using them with astronauts in the future. They're good things for reconnaissance and crazy high-risk stuff and they're just basically cool toys that are beyond toys. So it was a good time. I'll write up something for the blog sometime during this week after this airs, so check that out with a little more information as well as links to what we've already done. And you can always check out our planetary.org slash micro rovers page that includes our catalog of Earth and Mars and asteroids. And anybody who's played with real hardware preparing for or using it for micro rovers,

we've tried to include in that catalog. Is there a chart there that plots the size of various rovers against different dog breeds? No, but I think that's an excellent idea. Maybe you can put that together. I'll work on it tomorrow. Okay, thanks. Look for that, maybe. Or not.

Trivia. All right, trivia. I asked you, knowing it was tricky, what countries have had their spacecraft go beyond Earth orbit? How'd we do, Matt? Wow. A lot of dissension. Yeah, there was just enormous disagreement and great variety here. There are some that we need to explain a bit why they are not included.

Let's start with China, because there were several people who put in a vote for Chang'e 2 at the L2 point. China's Chang'e 2, which orbited the moon, they've now taken it to the Earth-Moon L2 point, which is a Lagrange point, a point of semi-stability in the gravitational well. But that is still in Earth orbit. So the Earth-Moon L2 point moves with the Earth and is still a spacecraft that is still bound to the Earth's gravity. So no on China. All right. Then you had some people who were advocates for Italy saying that it is separately listed

as part of the Cassini-Huygens mission, NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency. Why not? Wise one. Well, admittedly, this one is more of a judgment call, but this goes now I'm instead of picking on physics, I'm picking on how I phrase the question, which was countries had their spacecraft go beyond Earth orbit. The Cassini spacecraft was built by the U.S. The Huygens spacecraft was built by ESA and Italy provided components, including big ones like the communications dish, but they did not provide the spacecraft. So I'm going to go with

a no on Italy, except for as part of ESA. Now, any complaints about this sent to us in Italian, I will have translated by my wife, so I'll get back to you on that. Could you just have her answer them, too? I do want to mention the others obviously the u.s obviously the soviet union obviously isa the european space agency japan also with with several spacecraft and uh one that i don't know how many people came up with this but but the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, actually built two sun-studying spacecraft, Helios 1 and 2, in the 70s that were launched by the U.S. as part of a joint project. And then one that I really don't know how to call, though I'd be inclined to say no, which is Russia, post-Soviet Union.

They have two objects that escaped Earth orbit, but they're both upper stage rocket boosters without communications that helped in their launching of ESA's Venus Express and Mars Express. So there you go. There's the whole gang. Listing all of those, the USSR on its own, we had a few people who said USSR slash Russian Federation, but it was Troy Gustafson who won this time around. I believe a first-time winner out of Eagan, Minnesota. Congratulations, Troy. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. That one was exhausting.

Yeah. All right. I've got another one for people, which is at least shorter to say, but maybe a little tricky in response. What roving vehicle has roved the farthest on a body other than Earth? What roving vehicle has roved the farthest on a body other than Earth? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. Is it not human bodies? These are bodies in space. I'm going to go with yes on that. You have until the 27th of February, 2012, Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific time on the 27th to get us that answer. Hey, we're late.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about remote controls and how they make our lives awesome. Thank you, and good night. He is king of the couch potatoes, Bruce Betts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, joins us every week here for What's Up. Dun-dun-dun-dun! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.