Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern: The Busiest Man in Space Exploration?

Episode Date: March 29, 2010

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He may be the busiest man in space exploration, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Alan Stern has helped run NASA, he flies in high-performance jets, is preparing to go into space, and he's in charge of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. Alan returns to Planetary Radio to talk about all these things and more. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, marvels at the fight between two government agencies over which will regulate commercial spaceflight.

While Bruce Betts will join me on a sunny Pasadena afternoon to give away the complete fourth season of the universe. The fascinating series is available from the History Channel, and one of its stars is our man Bruce. We'll check in with Emily Lakdawalla in a minute, but I promised you more information about Planetary Radio Live on Friday, April 30. By the time you hear this, you may be able to reserve your seats online from Brown Paper Tickets. We'll put a link to Brown Paper Tickets at planetary.org slash radio.

If you don't find the link, check back in a day or two. Now, remember when I said the show will be free? Well, it turns out I lied. After all, we have to pay for the cookies, so we're going to charge the outrageous sum of $2.99, and that includes the ticket service fee. We have to control the size of the audience, so you really will need a ticket to get in. We're also proud to announce that Plan Rad Live will be recorded at the Moen Broadcast Center in Pasadena. That's the brand new home of Southern California Public Radio, and we're very grateful to SCPR. Joining me will be Bill Nye the Science Guy,

Jeff Rakiki of SpaceX, and space pioneer Jim Burke. Emily and Bruce, too. Don't be surprised if we have some t-shirts to give away during What's Up. All the details will be in our event listing on the Brown Paper Tickets site. Seats are limited. I've always wanted to say that. Please, no kids under 10. And if you can't join us on the evening of Friday, April 30th for the taping, don't worry. We'll have highlights on the show for the following week.

What has Emily Lakdwala been up to? Emily, a fair amount of good news to talk about today. Let's start with something you posted on March 26 about the Mars Science Laboratory, that big rover that we still hope is going to launch before too long. This is such a huge relief. The original design for the Mars Science Laboratory rover's mast-mounted camera, kind of like the pan cam on the Mars Exploration rovers, is this stereo camera with color capability. But this thing, it can zoom in and out, and it can take high-definition video, not quite that same frame rate that television cameras do, but still pretty high. We'd have high-def video from Mars. Well, during one of MSL's past budget problems, they

actually de-scoped the zoom capability on this camera, which meant that in order to redesign the camera, they decided to have one lens zoomed out and one lens zoomed back in. And you just wouldn't have been able to make the stereo color video the way that it was supposed to be on this mission. And it was going to be a real travesty, I think, to fly the spacecraft with that design of the camera. So I heard this week that they're actually scrambling to try to create the originally planned design for the camera system to fly an MSL. And it sounds like they're actually going to be able to make it. You know, you had one other factoid in there that I thought was interesting, which is a certain member of the science team who is used to even higher resolutions like IMAX 3D. That's right. James Cameron has been a member of the science team, and it was obvious why he was on the science team. It was to capture

high-definition stereo video from the surface of Mars. And you had to wonder how angry he was when this thing was de-scoped. So apparently his advocacy is in part what led to this thing being allowed to be rebuilt. And hopefully they will finish the new instrument in time for it to be incorporated into the rover. They have to get it done by December. All right, let's turn to another mission, which is not bringing back stereo video. But if we're all really lucky in June, we may find that it's brought back a bit of the rest of the solar system. I think anybody who has ever read anything about the Hayabusa mission is just hoping so hard that this mission will finally be successful.

It's suffered so many setbacks, yet engineering ingenuity has kept it going. It's limping home on its last xenon thrusters, and it looks like it's going to make it. It's going to return the sample return capsule to Earth. Now, we still don't know if the sample return capsule is going to survive the plunge, is going to be found, and if it's found, if it's going to have any samples from Itokawa inside, but I sure hope it does. And regardless of what happens,

the Japanese deserve some kind of engineering and operations award for what they've done with this mission. Amen to that. What's the date that you're hearing about? June 13th is what I understand is the sample return date, and it's supposed to land in the Woomera Desert in Australia. You're starting up your class again, and we want to let people know about that.

That's right. I got a little bit buried, so I stopped my imaging classes, but my next one is scheduled for Tuesday. If you've missed it, that's no big deal. The classes are recorded and available for you to watch them. This one will be on how to begin to get into the planetary data system and retrieve some of the older spacecraft data that is just waiting for people to explore. Excellent. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Emily Laktawal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. And she joins us every week here with a review of the Planetary Society blog. I'll be right back with Alan Stern. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of Planetary Society. And this week, exciting news. The government is fighting among itself. You say, well, that's not very exciting. People do that all the time.

Congress is at a standstill. The executive branch is fighting Congress. The judiciary is. No, no, no, no, not very exciting. People do that all the time. Congress is at a standstill. The executive branch is fighting Congress. The judiciary is... No, no, no, no, no. This is cooler than that. This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, getting in kind of a contest with the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. And what are they fighting about? That's right. Who gets to regulate commercial spaceflight? Now, this sounds like some arcane thing among a bunch of bureaucrats,

and indeed it is a weird thing among a bunch of bureaucrats. But listen, it means that they're taking it seriously. It means that the FAA figures there's going to be as many rockets as there are airplanes. And NASA, who's run the rockets for the last 50 years, thinks, no, no, we are the rocket guys. You can't bring it. And then the FAA is like, yes, we regulate flight, and we're going to regulate these flights too. And I must say, as Vice President of Planetary,

I'm not that invested. It can go either way. If NASA wants to run it, fine. If the FAA wants to run it, fine. But how cool that they're fighting about it. It means it's a real thing. Commercial space exploration is coming right up, and that will free up our resources, our national resources, our international resources, to explore new worlds, new places out beyond Earth, like sending humans to the gravity-balanced Lagrange

points, and then to asteroids to learn about the solar system's past and what we might need to do to deflect an asteroid. And then to Mars to look for signs of water and life. That could change the world. So NASA, Federal Aviation Administration, you go off and fight among yourselves. I got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. On the edge of the dark I feel your pull on my heart Cast out afar The sun just a star With none of its warmth Reaching out to your home

That's the alternative rock duo Grayscale with their tribute to Pluto and humankind's first mission to that faraway world. They've also got a musical tribute to Pluto's companion Charon in the iTunes store. I told Alan Stern he just might have an anthem for the New Horizons mission. Alan is the principal investigator for the spacecraft that is in the middle of its nearly 10-year trip to Pluto and its moons. The former NASA associaterator is back at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he is Associate Vice President of the Space Science and Engineering Division.

He joined me on the phone a few days ago. Alan, what a pleasure to get you back on Planetary Radio. Thanks for joining us. Well, thanks, Matt. Looking forward to talking with you for a little bit. Yeah, and I only wish that it was a longer bit, because I count at least seven lunar and deep space missions that you're part of, not even including a lot of the other projects that you're up to. We are never going to get through all of those, and I'm wasting time. What is the mid-mission report on New Horizons? The report is an A+. We are just past halfway distance from the sun to Pluto.

Not quite halfway in terms of the flight time, but way, way out there, more than 1.5 billion miles out, nearing the orbit of Uranus. The spacecraft's in just great shape. We're almost precisely on course, although we are looking at a sort of mile-per-hour class course correction this summer. And our payload's in good shape. We've even finished the main planning and simulation tasks on the ground for the flyby itself. And the spacecraft is mostly asleep nowadays?

Yeah, we sleep most of the year from August to May and then wake up in the summers to do maintenance activities, course corrections, some in-route science, that kind of thing. What's the outlook once you get past Pluto for taking a close look at some other Kuiper Belt objects? Well, we're designed to do that and we're hoping that when the time comes and we put in an extended mission proposal that it'll be approved. We have plenty of fuel on board, and the spacecraft lifetime is looking very, very good. In fact, we just looked at even a mission beyond the Kuiper Belt, and we're starting to think about the feasibility of exploring the deep heliosphere like Voyager, and we think we could run the spacecraft out potentially to near 100

astronomical units. Wow. How's that? That's pretty impressive. Nice footsteps to be following in there, Voyager 1 and 2. That's amazing. Tell us once again, when do you start serious observations? Well, for the Pluto system, the science really begins in April of 2015. There's a little bit that leads that, but that's when the excitement really begins, mid-April, five years from now. And it'll continue all the way through our July encounter on the 14th on Bastille Day, and then for several weeks afterwards as we look back at the Pluto system. And I didn't want to imply that this is the beginning of your observations, since I did a pretty nice job at Jupiter there a while back. Let's move to another mission that you're involved with,

and that is generally thought of as a European mission, but obviously with lots of American participation. And Rosetta has a big event coming up this summer? Right. Rosetta, which is a flagship-scale mission of the European Space Agency, has a large NASA participation, three NASA instruments, quite a variety of NASA-funded American scientists

on the science team. It's a comet orbiter, in fact, the first comet orbiter. It's been en route now for six years and will arrive in 2014. But along the way, there are various flybys, most of them with the Earth and Mars to do gravity assists. But in addition, we have two asteroid flybys. In September of 08, we flew by a tiny asteroid named Steins, about five kilometers across. The science papers from that have all been written up now.

about five kilometers across. The science papers from that have all been written up now. And coming up this July, on July 10th, we'll be flying by a very large asteroid called Lutetia. In fact, it's just about 100 kilometers across. It'll be the largest asteroid ever explored by a spacecraft. What's your involvement, or maybe I should say, what is the Southwest Research Institute's involvement? Well, we have two instruments of the three U.S. instruments on board Rosetta.

My boss, Jim Birch, has an instrument called the Ion Electron Spectrometer, and I'm the principal investigator for the ALICE Ultraviolet Spectrometer, both of which are on the big Rosetta spacecraft. And ALICE, not too long ago, made a flyby of Earth, right? And I guess you got to see some ultraviolet from our home planet. That's right. When we did our third and final Earth gravity assist, we used the ALICE spectrometer to study the Earth's upper atmospheric emissions in the ultraviolet

and also to look at the moon, and both very successfully. And I'm going to put aside consideration of all the other missions that are way out there that you're involved with to something that's happening much closer to home. And this is pretty cool stuff, too. You're becoming a payload specialist for suborbital flights. What's all that about? Well, it's pretty exciting. As you know, there's a private commercial suborbital industry that's really flowering now

with a whole range of different what we call providers, firms that are building suborbital flight systems to fly in space beginning as early as potentially this year. You've probably heard of Virgin Galactic. Oh, yeah. A little bit, yeah. Maybe you've heard of Armadillo Aerospace or XCOR or Masten. We could go on down the list. These are all real flight systems that are in development. And I've been very interested for some years now, since I was at NASA headquarters, in exploiting the capabilities of these vehicles for research and for education,

in addition to their basic mission for tourism. And in fact, there's now a lot of interest in that, both within NASA and within other agencies of the federal government, even overseas. At my institution, Southwest Research Institute, we've actually gotten a little bit out front, put our stake down with some internal research and development money to fund some experiments that we'll be flying, along with a couple of our own guys, myself included, as payload specialists on a number of the early missions. Alan Stern will be back to tell us more about the science he'll soon conduct on suborbital missions into space. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio.

We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen.

You can become part of the action action helping us fly solar sails discover new planets and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe here's how to find out more 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 Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Yes, he may be the busiest man in space exploration, yet Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute has still found time to train for some of the first commercial human missions into space.

Virgin Galactic, Armadillo, XCOR, and then there's Blue Origin, the somewhat mysterious company led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. And a lot of these folks that you've mentioned have been on the radio show, but of course we've pretty much talked about tourism. I don't think that this idea of doing science backed by real humans, it really hasn't been talked about very much. What kinds of experiments will you be able to conduct in the few minutes of zero-g or near zero-g that you'll have on these missions? Well, there's really quite a range of things that are exciting. What makes it exciting is not the short flight time, but the fact that you can fly so often that you could fly daily on these kinds of vehicles. The prices are low enough to support that,

and the flight rates will be high enough to support that. And that opens up all kinds of new science, from upper atmospheric research to space medicine research, even to microgravity and basic chemistry and physics of fluids in space. So there's a whole range of different things. Did you coin this term the ignorosphere? Matt, I wish I did, but I think the term is older than I am. It's from the mid-1950s when the IGY and the early robotic suborbital sounding rockets were getting underway. Yeah, the IGY, the International Geophysical Year, I think. That's right.

So what are you and colleague Dan Durda going through to train to go into space? Well, we're doing a number of things. to train to go into space? Well, we're doing a number of things. As you know, Dan and I used to fly high-performance NASA aircraft for about four years as back-seaters doing astronomy and F-18s out of Edwards Air Force Base in NASA Trident. Before that, I flew U-2 astronomy or a U-2 derivative. What we're doing to boot up for spaceflight involves some classroom work. What we were doing to boot up for space flight, it involved some classroom work.

We've gone over to NASTAR in the Philadelphia area and ridden their centrifuge at up to 6 Gs, taken that physiology course and also the altitude chamber training course that's much like we did when we were getting ready to fly high-performance aircraft. Then we went down to Florida, and we've just begun a program in which we're flying in F-104 Starfighters on ascent profiles that go from right off the deck up to 25,000 feet in about half a minute, as if you were riding one of these vehicles on its way to space altitudes. Of course, we don't go as high, but we get the same acceleration profile topped by a zero-g parabola. And we'll be doing more of that, and then we're looking forward to practicing our experiments in zero-g aircraft as well, just to perfect that. Yeah, I don't know, what a drag. I guess somebody has to do it, though, huh?

Yeah, well, come on aboard. There's plenty of room, and I think a lot of people will be flying in space before you know it. I certainly have dibs on my seat, if I can come up with the money. I'm looking forward to the opportunity, and I envy those of you who are going to be the pioneers in these flights. I don't know, I think I'd say you're in contention for a title of the busiest man in space exploration, but also as a former NASA associate administrator, I'd love to get your thoughts about the recent announcements by NASA and the Obama administration regarding strategic plans for the space agency and changes in direction, which not everybody is happy about. Well, you know, change is hard.

I actually think there are a lot of positives in the Obama administration's proposal. I like the increase in Earth and space sciences. I guess you're not surprised at that. I like the new emphasis on research and development for breakthrough technologies. I like the emphasis on commercial space as a way of diversifying and also bringing new ideas and new approaches into human spaceflight. Now, I don't like everything. I'd like to see us have a destination and a timetable for human exploration.

But I think we'll get there. I think we'll have quite an improved program as a result of some of these innovative ideas that the new administration has put in place. And I'm looking forward to seeing how Congress and the administration, working together, put two and two together and get something that might even be better than four. Just for anybody who hasn't already been made incredibly envious, tell people what you're going to be doing on the 4th of July. Well, you know, ever since 1979, I've had the opportunity to fly on zero-g aircraft,

often on many, many times over the years. And now that I'm preparing to fly in space, I thought that I ought to give my wife and kids a little taste of that. So we went out and bought ourselves five tickets to fly on Zero-G, and we're doing it on the 4th of July, and really looking forward to it. I asked each of my kids to design their own experiment to bring along, and they're busily trying to think of what they want to do on their first Zero-g flight. Those are lucky kids. And it's exciting to talk to you, Alan.

I hope we can do it again sometime very soon. Thanks, Matt. It's always a pleasure. Alan Stern is Associate Vice President of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division. He's a former Associate Administrator for NASA, the Science Mission Directorate there, and, as you heard, is involved with a slew of deep space and other missions and projects out there beyond our own planet, most prominently perhaps known as the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

We'll be right back to take a look at the night sky with Bruce Betts in just a few moments. The coldest place ever known. I see half that you've grown. We'll warm you up and carry you home. Another beautiful day in Pasadena, California. We're outside, ready for a new edition of What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. It's great to be here with you, Matt. You just want to go play, don't you?

I want to throw up my hands and run out and play. Tell us about the night sky first. All right. In the night sky, then can I run out and play? Of course. Oh, I seriously doubt that. We got Venus over shortly after sunset in the west, looking like an extremely bright star. Also, shortly after sunset, you can see Saturn rising beautifully and looking yellowish over in the east, and it will be high overhead in the middle of the night.

Mars still hanging out in the southwest in the evening sky, looking dimmer and dimmer reddish, but still like a pretty bright reddish star. And that's the party in the night sky. And now on to random space fact! Hi, it's okay. He's with me. Oh yeah, that makes them feel much better. Venus reaches a greatest elongation of about 48 degrees, meaning the sun, Venus.

Well, you know, it's how far off Venus is. Did you say elongation? Elongation, yeah. It stretches out into a long, thin-looking... No. Yes, greatest elongation. That's the angles we talked about. What it basically says, in practical terms, is things like Mercury and Venus,

being the two things that are inward of us in the solar system, you're not going to see them in the middle of the night. Ah, okay. You're only going to see them over on the sunset, by the sunset horizon, over by the sunrise horizon. All of Venus can get, you know, up in the sky a ways, but it's not ever going to get overhead, which by the way, is my one great, I can't remember if I mentioned it here, my one great edit on the Harry Potter series is that they see Venus

in the middle of the night overhead. First of all, you never see it in the middle of the night, and second of all, you never see it overhead. I of the night and second of all you never see it overhead i did not i don't think you ever have mentioned that that's great there you go there's my random potter fact i hope you've mailed this to uh what's her name in england no i haven't someone else is gonna do it and make a fortune can we retape this can we re-record it not at all let's go on to the trivia question all right we asked you who was the first non-Soviet, non-American to do a spacewalk, an EVA, extravehicular activity. How did we do, Matt? Well, we did have one listener who said it was probably the fruit flies that were sent up in 1947, I'm sure on a recycled V2. But no, they didn't reach orbit, so they don't count.

I can tell you who. It was Jean-Luc Chrétien of France. In 1988, December 9, 1988, he was spending three weeks on the Mir space station. That is indeed correct. And we got this answer. We got the answer from a lot of people because a whole bunch of people wanted to win the universe. As well they should. Well, the fourth season of the universe on DVD or Blu-ray from our friends at the History Channel.

And indeed, it was Craig Journet, a regular listener, regular entrant in the contest, who sent us the winning answer as chosen by random.org. Congratulations. You got anything else interesting? Yeah, a little bit. This is really interesting. Jean-Luc, he had a good history in space. I think he flew four times. He once on the shuttle at Atlantis. It was STS-86, 1997. Do you know why he stopped being an astronaut? No, I do not. Are you ready for this? He was at a big, you know, big box warehouse home improvement store, and a drill press fell on him.

Oh, my gosh. No, I had no idea. No, he's fine. It just meant the end of his astronaut career, apparently. Wow. I'm going to be careful. You should, and all the other astronauts out there. Man, watch out for that drool for us. What do you got for us for next week? It's not funny, I'm sorry. What do you got for next week? All right, for next week, pull out the calculator or your arithmetic book.

How many Saturn masses go into one solar mass? Our sun, solar mass. How many Saturn masses would fit into one solar mass. Our sun, solar mass. How many Saturn masses would fit into one solar mass? So you've repeated the word mass a lot because that's important. We're not talking about the diameter. We're not talking about the diameter. Yeah, it's not a volume thing.

It's a mass thing. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And the prize this week is a Planetary Radio t-shirt. You've got until Monday, April 5, to get us your answer. Hey, you're going to join us on April 30th. Of course you are. I know the answer to that. When we do Plan Rad Live.

Oh, I wouldn't miss it. Oh, come on. Show real enthusiasm. Seriously, you've never invited me. Of course you're invited. We're going to do What's Up in front of the audience. I'm kidding. Of course we are. It's going to be exciting. Well, good. I'm glad you'll be there. And we hope you'll be there, too. Say goodnight, Bruce.

We'll engage them. We can have them do random space fact. All right, everybody. Go out there, look out for the night sky, and think about how not to get stuck by the thorn on the rosebush. Thank you, and good night. You know, I was thinking we'll have to do some live stuff there and throw some T-shirts out to the maddening crowd. Ooh, can we use this as a reason to get one of those T-shirt-firing guns? So we can launch them into the massive stadium?

I knew you were ready to play. He's Bruce Bet betts the director of projects for the planetary society he joins us every week here for what's up that's our show for this week don't forget planetary radio live on the evening of friday april 30 we'll have details and a link for tickets at planetary.org slash radio very soon, maybe even right now. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Planetary Radio Thank you.