Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alyssa Rhoden and the Rise of the Europa Underground

Episode Date: November 25, 2013

Alyssa Rhoden studies Jupiter’s moon Europa…from a distance. She, many other scientists and millions of space exploration fans around the globe want to see a mission to this ice world that hides a vast, warm ocean. That’s why she and several colleagues have created Destination: Europa, and they want your help.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings, podcast listeners. It's Matt with a special Thanksgiving message for all of you around the solar system. After all, we all have something to be thankful for. Me, I'm thankful for you and for the opportunity to bring you this show each week. But, this being a highly non-profit effort, you have to expect us to ring our bell now and then as we ask you to please consider throwing something in the Planetary Radio pot. I'm very proud of how inexpensively we produce this series, but the cost of supplies, bandwidth, and a hundred other things adds up, especially the special shows we bring you from around the world. That's something we'd do much more of if we had the resources. Can you help? It's easy. Just go to planetary.org slash radio

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Underground, 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. We need a mission to Europa. That's the message from planetary scientist Alyssa Roden and her colleagues. They've started Destination Europa to drive that point home. Alyssa is my guest on this week's show. The rest of the gang also returns to their usual haunts, including Planetary Society senior editor Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, welcome back. It's not in one of your posts, but people can go to planetary.org for an update on what's been going on with Curiosity. Is there a reason to be anxious? Well, I think there's always reason to be anxious when you have things happening that you don't expect. And we did have that over the last week with Curiosity, where there is this difficult to understand voltage fluctuation inside the rover's electronics. But they do appear to understand it now and don't appear to be concerned about it. And the rover is now back to work. It has meant that over the last week, a little bit more than a week, the rover hasn't gotten a whole lot done.

And I'll be eager to see the rover back on the road toward Mount Sharp. This is posted by one of our guest bloggers, and we get lots of terrific people. Can you say something about Ken Herkenhoff? lots of terrific people. Can you say something about Ken Herkenhoff? Sure. Ken Herkenhoff is the principal investigator on one of the spectrometers on the Mars Exploration Rover mission. He's a geologist at the USGS who has just been doing a great job writing really brief updates about what's going on with Curiosity. He also serves as what's called a SOG chair. That's an acronym, S-O-W-G, Science Operations Working Group, which means that he's a scientist who works on the Curiosity mission to help plan each day of rover's activities.

He coordinates the science team to work closely with the rover drivers, the engineers, to make sure that the scientists' intentions get turned into actions for the rover that make sense scientifically and are also safe for the rover to accomplish. So he's highly involved. He's one of the many leaders on the mission. And it's just great to have his blog entries and perspective on what's going on with this rover. Let's turn now just very briefly to one of your latest. It's a November 25th entry.

Reviews of toys for kids of space geeks. Anyone we know? Yeah, especially me. I remarked that it's real fun. My older daughter is now seven, and the kinds of toys that I can buy for me, I mean her, are now getting much more fun. And so I've had a lot of fun playing with new toys with her that explore our inner and outer space geeks. Even if you're not looking for toys, of course, my question would be, why not? But you really should take a look at this so you can see the adorable photo

of little Sanaya in her space suit. Emily, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, your planetary evangelist too, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, Bill Nye, the CEO. Bill, I opened up the November 18 issue of Space News. And here in the centerfold, or is it not quite the centerfold, is their top five companies to watch, something that they apparently do every year. They say they're not ranked, but they say that if they were, one of these companies listed here would have to be number one, and that's Virgin Galactic. Taking people above the Kármán limit into outer space. It's fascinating because they say it's not because of their great business success.

After all, they haven't made any real money yet. But they've sold 500 tickets, right? That's true, actually. They have made money, come to think of it. But just what this is going to mean, changing sort of the human spaceflight paradigm, if you'll pardon the expression? Oh, no, it's fine. Just that people will not be going into orbit, which is what many people think of as space travel. But they will be where the sky is black and you can see the curve of the horizon of the Earth.

It's going to be amazing. And I guess in rough terms, almost 600 people have flown in space. If this Virgin Galactic business plan is successful enough, I guess they'll double that number in no time, which is really something else. The other companies in the top five are... Well, let's see. Global Star at Inmarsat, there's a startup weather company, GeoMetWatch. But another one that we talk about a lot is SpaceX. SpaceX. You would think by not having to move rocket parts all around the country to a dozen or more NASA centers in order to manufacture rockets, they could keep the cost of rocket manufacturing down.

So we'll see if that works out. You know, I was just at the launch of MAVEN, as you know, Mars Atmospheric Volatile Evolution Mission. And that was on an Atlas V with a Centaur upper stage. These are venerable old rockets. Well, pretty soon SpaceX hopes to get all that business. That would change things. If the cost of getting to Earth orbit or getting anywhere in space were lower, it would change the world. It's an exciting time.

I hope some of the listeners or one or two of our listeners, Matt, have bought tickets on Virgin Galactic. And they can tell us how it is to fly with them. Wow, I would love to hear from those people. Write to us, people, at planetaryradio at planetary.org if you've got a ticket. Maybe we can get Richard Branson to tell us. He's got a ticket. Yeah, I understand he does. He knows people. Bill, I think that's it for this week. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you, Matt.

He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Oh, and if you're listening to this early in the week, watch for his triumphant return to Dancing with the Stars. Things are tough all over the solar system, but the pickings are especially thin in the outer reaches of our neighborhood. Cassini at Saturn is threatened, and the only other mission underway, or even planned, is New Horizons. To Alyssa Roden, her colleagues, and many fans of exploration, this became intolerable. Alyssa is a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where she tries, from far too great a distance, to figure out what's happening on Europa, the icy moon of

Jupiter that conceals a vast liquid water ocean. She and several equally frustrated friends have now created Destination Europa, a nice new website that explains why a mission to that moon is so important. It also explains how all of us can help. I wanted to hear more. Alyssa, thanks very much for joining us here on Planetary Radio. Thank you for having me. So what first fired your imagination? What captured your imagination about this moon, Europa? Actually, I came to Europa just out of serendipity. I applied for a position as an intern through the University of Arizona NASA Space Grant Internship Program,

which is a wonderful opportunity for undergraduate students to get involved in planetary research. And I was selected and paired with a scientist at University of Arizona. And at the time, I had an interest in planets and planetary science. I honestly didn't know anything about Europa. But I started working with a professor named Richard Greenberg, who unbeknownst to me, was one of the world's experts. He taught me really everything that I know. He showed me these beautiful images of this surface that I had never seen before, fractures and these strange areas of broken up terrain that almost looked like someone had punched through an icy lake and these rafts had floated around and refrozen. And he inspired me as a physicist, that was what I was pursuing

at the time, about how amazing this world was because everything that happened to it seemed to be governed by tides. And tides are just simple physics phenomena. It's just simple gravity that causes all of this to happen on this tiny little world and manifests in these amazing structures and surface processes. So I think just that introduction, working alongside Rick for all of those years, was what really got me excited about planetary science. The images that I used have all come from Galileo. They were taken before I even started in the program. I even started in the program. Even the images that we have, which were so inspiring, we only had the resolution to do geologic mapping and really understand the surface for about 10% of the surface. There were two things that I think really highlighted for me the importance of getting involved and having a mission. And one of them was when I did a summer internship,

my very brief experience working on Mars. I went to my mentor and I said, I see something funny in this image of Mars. I don't understand what it is. And he said, oh, well, is it in the other images? And I thought, there are other images of the same place? This was like mind blowing to me. And so just seeing the level of detail that we have, the amount of data for other bodies made me realize just how little we have for Europa and how much more we could do, how much better science we could do. You know, everybody says, oh, I'd love a mission. But it wasn't until I sat down at a meeting of outer planet scientists and we saw this presentation about the Europa Clipper mission. And it seemed like everyone in the room

was agreeing, yeah, this is a great idea. This is something we can do. This is something that we really think we could sell to the public. And we all kind of had that sense that this was the right direction to go in, but it wasn't clear how to do it. So I just decided we should do it. to do it. So I just decided we should do it. So now you have this little organization that can be found at europa.sedi.org, because the good folks at the Sedi Institute said that they could host this for you. What will people find there? Well, they'll find a lot of information. We wanted the site to be a place where anyone could go and learn about Europa, which you will find a lot of information about the background of Europa, what we know, how we know it. Obviously, the Europa Clipper mission, what the concept studies are showing, what the timeline is for hopefully

getting it selected and funded and flown to Europa. And then finally, a lot of information about how people can get involved. And when I say people, I mean everybody. It doesn't have to just be science and planetary experts. We need anyone who has an interest in planetary science research, who is interested in seeing us as a nation pursue science at Europa, can get involved in supporting our mission. I want to come back to this citizen advocacy concern, but there is another section of the site that says, why Europa? Now, I don't know that very many people listening to this show would even ask that question because so many of us are very excited about the possibilities. Let me ask it in a different way.

Why Europa instead of, let's say, some other icy body that is likely, almost certainly has water underneath that ice like Enceladus? Part of the answer to that question is that we shouldn't really have to choose between all of these fantastic places right ideally we would send spacecraft everywhere there's never been a place we've gone in our solar system where we haven't found really interesting and novel activity and new questions to ask. So yes, it's why Europa first or why Europa next? That's really the question. And I think Enceladus is a large part of the answer to that question. So we went off to the Saturnian system with the Cassini mission,

which has just been stellar. And we found this tiny little body. I mean, if you drew it on a map of Earth, it would fit over the British Isle. Okay, I mean, it's a tiny little moon. It's active, it has these jets of water and ice erupting from the South Pole. And all the models, the theoretical models said this would never happen could never happen. Such a small body would have cooled off too quickly, it shouldn't have a lot of heat. It shouldn't be active. It should be frozen. And now we know so much more. So while Cassini is still there getting data on Enceladus, those of us who are used to thinking about Europa are going, wait, this could be happening on Europa too. We just don't have the data to know, is the surface active? Are there eruptions?

What's going on in the ice shell? There's so much we don't know. So I wouldn't pose it as why Europa at the expense of Enceladus, but more, Enceladus has given us even more motivation to go back and see what is really going on at Europa. Planetary scientist Alyssa Roden will tell us more about destination Europa. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Rodin will tell us more about Destination Europa. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week.

Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Planetary scientist Alyssa Rodin is telling us about Destination Europa,

the movement and website she and several like-minded colleagues have created. You can check it out at europa.seti.org. That's europa.seti.org. She told us before the break about just one of the reasons a mission to Jupiter's beautiful, mysterious moon should be a high priority. I suppose another reason to push for Europa as the next step is that there is this mission, which has come up on this program before, the Europa Clipper. What will it do for us if it can get the support that it desperately needs? It's going to do a lot for us. It's going to do some very basic things to begin with, right?

We're actually going to get image coverage, global image coverage. That to me is huge right off the bat, being able to see all the different surfaces at very high resolution and in three dimensions. We're going to be able to get topography. We're going to be able to get stereo images. Another hallmark of this mission concept is ice penetrating radar, which is really exciting, especially for people interested in habitability. The idea is that the radar is transparent to the ice, but it wouldn't be transparent to water. So if you have subsurface lakes, which have been proposed as part of these chaotic trains that we see manifested on the surface, if there really are lakes in the ice shell of Europa, the radar should be able to ping down and find those. And we would be able to start

mapping out the plumbing of Europa's ice shell. To clarify, this is based on this hypothesis that not all of the water, not all the liquid water is deep, deep down in the ocean, but some of it may be quite a bit higher, quite a bit closer to the surface in these lakes that you mentioned. Exactly. So shallow subsurface lakes could potentially exist on Europa in the ice shell. Those might be really great places to find organisms if life exists there. That's really exciting. I would be irresponsible if I didn't also ask the question, would Europa Clipper possibly be able to tell us that there either is or was life on this moon? Well, I think it couldn't rule life out per se, but it could certainly identify organic compounds. It could

identify salts, which would suggest that perhaps there is an interaction of nutrients between the surface and the subsurface. So I think that there are a lot of pieces to the question of, is there life on Europa that we would be able to answer? And then another thing that we would be able to do is by getting all this data, by collecting all this data at Europa, we would be able to set ourselves up to be in a great position to send a lander subsequently. For example, if we found an active fracture that appeared to penetrate to a water layer, or we found one of these subsurface shallow lakes, we would know to go there the next time with our lander. And that would be where we would focus our efforts in order to find some evidence of life. Tell me about some of the things that

have been happening at the professional, the scientific level. I mean, you have quite a session planned for the imminent AGU, the American Geophysical Union conference. Yes. So about two and a half weeks from now, we put together a session called Destination Europa. Andceladus is a very hot topic right now. And so I think it shows that Europa, despite our lack of new data, still people are really enthusiastic about this moon. There's a lot of good science still being done. And we have everything from seismologists trying to figure out how we could detect things in the ice shell using seismometers on the surface, to regional mapping studies, trying to piece back together the surface of Europa. And in one of those studies, they think they have found evidence of subduction zones. So it's possible that Europa's

ice shell is broken up into plates that move kind of like the Earth's plates, and even sometimes one will dive underneath the other. So we've got a lot of really cool, interesting science that will be presented in just a couple of weeks. Okay, so what are some of the recommendations that you have on the website for folks like me who are not going to be going to AGU but want to get involved, want to help this mission become a reality? The first most important thing to do is to tell your elected officials that this is something you care about. Most of us vote every four years. A lot of us vote every two years. But we could be voting every day, every week, every month, just by calling or sending an email to the members of Congress that we elect to represent us. You know, it's very intimidating, at least it was to me, to call up a senator and say, I care about this cause. But they really

do listen. We've gotten feedback in our community from lawmakers saying as little as three or four letters from their constituents is enough to make them reconsider a vote. That's our power. And when we choose not to use it, then our government can't possibly represent us the way it's supposed to. So we need to be making those calls, sending those emails. And we have a lot of information on our Destination Europa site that can help you draft that letter or make that phone call or even just find the contact information for your representative or your senators. But I encourage everyone to get involved. The first time you do it, it's really scary, and after that, it's easy.

Alyssa, we're just about out of time. Is one of those 32 presentations at AGU going to come from you? Yes, I will be presenting a poster on my recent work on fracture modeling on Europa. So a lot of what I do involves mapping out fractures that we see in images and then trying to explain how those patterns formed based on our understanding of tides. And one of the things that we've noticed is that systematically all of the features we've investigated have shown evidence of a small tilt of Europa's spin pole, which we call obliquity. And very exciting, recently Europa's obliquity was measured

through Earth-based radar technique, and they confirmed that they do see a tilt to the spin pole. So that's been very exciting. Well, Alyssa, I wish you the best of luck, not only with your research, but with this effort that you began, Destination Europa, that folks can find on a beautiful little website at europa.seti.org.org. We'll put the link up on this week's show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio as well. Alyssa Rodin, thank you so much. Really appreciate this. Sure, thank you. Alyssa is at the NASA Goddard

Space Flight Center where she's a NASA postdoctoral program fellow, and she studies the kind of stuff that we've been talking about, the dynamics and geophysics of icy satellites, as well as dwarf planets and asteroids. And she's the founder of Destination Europa, which I think I want to call, Alyssa, if you don't mind, I think I'll call you guys the Europa Underground. That's fantastic. Although, we'd have to be the Europa under ice. Oh, I like it even better. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

Welcome back. Thank you, Matt. So can we see that comet yet? Yes. Well, you could, and now it's going to be tough. But maybe not. Here's the deal. Comet ISON is getting really close to the sun, and in fact, this week, November 28th,

will be closer to the sun than one solar diameter away. So that's seriously close to a really, really big hot ball of gas. That's needing like SPF, what, a million? Yeah. So if people, right after this comes out, there's a chance you can still pick it up, but it's so low on the horizon in the pre-dawn east, it will be very challenging because it is heading really close to the sun. So the real question is, will it break up? Will it be destroyed by its past by the sun, or break apart but actually make it brighter, or will it just be unfazed because it wore 1 million spf sunscreen we still

don't know you can get more information uh the planetary society website planetary.org and in fact you can go to planetary.org slash comet that puts all the recent blog updates in in one place i'm still hoping for a big show me too uh. We've also got planets that are there just keeping us company. In the meantime, Venus low in the West, actually not even that low, but kind of low in the West after sunset, looking super bright.

Jupiter coming up around the 10, 11 p.m. hour low in the East. And it's hanging out in the same parts of the sky with things like Orion and Castron Pollux, the twins of Gemini fame, go out 10, 11, and look over in the east. And the brightest object over there is Jupiter. Over to its right is the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. So lots going on. Mars coming up a little later, still dim, will get brighter as time goes on. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1954 that Elizabeth Hodges in Alabama was hit

by a 10-pound meteorite falling from the sky through the roof of her house and then bouncing off her on its way to the floor. I think she was napping on the couch or something. Yeah, it caused quite a bruise but no other damage. Still, as far as I know, the only person to be hit by a meteorite. Yeah. On to random space birds. The Orion Nebula, also known as M42, is a fuzzy blob around the middle star in Orion's sword.

You can actually theoretically see it from a really dark sky with just your eyes, but certainly with binoculars as a fuzzy patch. It's huge. It's estimated to be 24 light years across. Ginormous. And this actually, my son helped me figure this out because he's mildly terrified of how huge nebula are. There's a word for that, fear, but I'm not sure what it is.

Nebulophobia. Anyway, it also, I'll throw in a bonus fact, has a mass of about 2,000 times the mass of the sun. We'll come back to it because I just enjoy doing that. But first, let's get to the previous trivia question. What observational technique was used to first discover the rotation periods of Venus and Mercury? How'd we do, Matt? People surprise me.

I said that nobody would be able to have much fun with this one, and they proved me wrong. They did have fun. Darn them. Our winner, Stephen O'Rourke, who said he's been out of the loop on Planetary Radio listening for a while, but getting back into the swing of things. By the way, he also says thanks to all of the planetary people for the wonderful work that you do, or I suppose I should say we do. And he says it was radar that was used to determine those rotational periods.

Is he correct? He is correct. Ground-based radar. So using radio antennas to send radio signals, bounce them off these objects tens of millions of miles away, and then look at the radar signal that came back. By analyzing that, you could use Doppler shifts, go in different directions. And it was the first way we figured out the accurate rotations. Big surprises on both accounts, Venus being really slow in retrograde

and Mercury being in a 3 to 2 resonance with the Sun. All the more surprising to me, anyway, that this kind of stuff was being done in the 1960s. And Steve is apparently aware of this because here's a picture of him with his wife or someone standing over the big dish at Arecibo. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful photo. Thanks for sending that, Steve. Okay, like I said, other people had fun with this, too. It was Randy Bottom who said that it was a little challenging to get that radar reading off of Mercury. But JPL did discover that it was speeding and pulled it over. And then Pietro Carboni sent jokes that he had found. Freddie Mercury, Venus Williams and Bruno Mars walk into a bar.

But they didn't plan it that way. All right. and Bruno Mars walking to a bar. But they didn't plan it that way. Ah, I got it. All right, then finally one that we can't really share unless we figure out how to share it visually. Maybe we'll put up a link to his Tumblr blog. It's from Torsten Zimmer, who says, Little wonder that early astronomers had not much success because the real movements of Venus proved to be particularly bizarre. Yes, bizarre is right.

What Torsten sent us to is this truly disturbing image of the Venus to Milo with multicolored pseudopods swinging around where its arms should be, where her arms should be. It's creepy. Yeah, that was disturbing. Yeah. All right, next time. Pretty sure it's a different Venus.

Anyhow, back to the Orion Nebula. How far away is it from Earth? Approximately. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Find out how to enter. And this is why your son should not be too worried. That's not giving too much away, I don't think. But anyway, you have until Monday, December 2nd.

That would be Monday the 2, December 2nd. That would be Monday the 2nd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and win yourself a brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt in time for the holidays. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what famous statue could terrify you. Thank you and good night. Well, I have stood beneath the statue of David in Florence, and that's scary in its own way. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the icy-hot members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.