Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Amateur Astronomers Work to Save Earth!

Episode Date: October 15, 2012

The Planetary Society's Bruce Betts provides an overview of the Shoemaker NEO grant program, and we meet two dedicated grant recipients.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amateur astronomers up all night protecting Earth, 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. This week we'll get a report on the Shoemaker-Neo grant program that is helping many amateur astronomers, and a few pros, discover and track the near-Earth objects that could threaten our world. It will begin with an overview from our own Bruce Betts. Emily Lactuala is on her way to the annual meeting

of the American Astronomical Union's Division for Planetary Sciences, or DPS. So we'll jump directly to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. By the way, we'll have a special report from DPS next week. Bill, I want to welcome you back from Italy, and you've already dived right back into, what do you call this, an advocacy campaign? Advocacy, that's what we call it, trying to restore or make sure the funding for planetary science is in the budget in the coming fiscal year budget for fiscal year 2014. It's talking about about 300 million U.S. dollars every year for the next five or six years, which is by U.S. budget standards, Matt, not that much money. But if you're one of

the people who make spacecraft that go to extraordinary destinations in the solar system, it's a big deal. We're encouraging our members of the Planetary Society to take action. And we've got suggestions. You know, we've had people write to Congress. That was very effective, the U.S. Congress. We had people write to the Office of Management and Budget, which in Washington we call the OMB. And now, Matt, did your mother tell you you could grow up to be president? Yes. No, she only told me I might get to interview the president someday. So you can write to the president.

We want people to write to the U.S. president. Even if you don't like the guy, we want you to write to him to try to influence his views on planetary science. And what we think is if he said the right thing And the approval for the bucks emanates from there. So it's kind of an exciting time. This is to say we're at a crossroads in planetary exploration. This is the same reason the Planetary Society was formed back in the winter of 1979, 1980, because people felt that, Carl Sagan especially, felt that public interest in space exploration was very high, but government funding of it wasn't so high. And so this is the same situation.

We just got to give them a nudge. Hey, you guys, planetary science matters. It gives you a fantastic value. Every time we send a mission to another world, we make astonishing discoveries, and we subtly stimulate the economy in wonderful ways. What's it all about this fall, Matt, in the United States? Jobs, jobs, jobs. So I say if you want jobs, not just the people who are employed in planetary science, it's more pervasive than that.

It raises everybody's expectations of what's possible and people in our society achieve more. I really, I strongly believe that, as you know. So that's political advocacy, Matt. And we're out of time, but I do want you to confirm. You mentioned this is something where you've been asking members of the society to do, but can't anybody go to the website? Well said, well said. Check out our website, planetary.org, and you can participate, if I may, member-sh-member.

All right, Bill, we're out of time. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. He'll be back here again next week with this segment of Planetary Radio. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. All right, Bruce, this is not the first time that we've had you on early in the show, an unnatural position in the program, if you'll pardon the expression, to tell us a little bit about the Shoemaker-Neo program, if you'll pardon the expression, to tell us a little bit about the Shoemaker-Neo program, which is quite appropriate because that's one of many projects that you direct for the Planetary Society. So welcome to this unnatural position. Thanks, I think.

It's nice to be opening. You're opening for yourself, in a sense, because we'll still be doing what's up later in the show after we talk to one or two of the actual awardees of Shoemaker-Neo grants. What's this all about? How did it start? Well, it got started 15 years ago to honor pioneering planetary scientist Gene Shoemaker, who is a giant in the field, particularly having to do with impact, including things like asteroid impact, and going ever since quite successfully. How does it work? Who actually is eligible for these grants?

Anyone's eligible, but who typically makes sense for the grants are really hardcore amateur astronomers, professional astronomers, particularly in developing countries, but even elsewhere if they need some little something. elsewhere if they need some little something. And all ones who are already basically have established programs that need something to take them to the next level, whether it be a new sensitive camera or something to make their observatory robotically controlled so they can operate it more, that type of thing. And I have seen a lot of these people have gotten cameras because I guess that's a technology that has come so far in the last few years? It has. It keeps improving in the sensitivity but also in price. But it still remains out of range for a lot of these observatories on their

own. And so to be able to get to more and more sensitive light levels, to be able to do follow-up observations, for example, for asteroids discovered by the big surveys, they need to get new equipment, new cameras. So how successful has the program been, which I guess to put it another way, has this really resulted in the discovery or tracking of a lot of near-Earth objects? It has. In fact, there have been some significant discoveries lately as well as before. The co-discoverer of Apophis, the big asteroid we've talked about before coming by in 2029, was a Shoemaker-Neo winner. We had just a few months ago a discovery by a Spanish team who got a grant recently using their camera in a way that they

couldn't have without this new wide-field camera to find fast-moving objects. They found 2012 DA14 that will fly by about the distance of geostationary satellites this coming year, February 15, 2013. And there's another discovery that just happened in the last couple of weeks by Gary Hug in Kansas. And I've got some blogs online. You can read about some of these things if you look on planetary.org.

But what's also significant, those discoveries tend to get the most press, so to speak. But what the program really focuses on these days, more so than in its beginnings, is the follow-up observations, the tracking of asteroids. Because now there are some professional surveys that are doing a lot of the finding. But it doesn't help you to find an asteroid if you don't know if it has Earth's name on it as a target. The only way you can know that is lots of observations in a very short period of time, typically.

And that's what these observatories excel at. And they also have been very successful at characterizing asteroids. Some of them focus on determining which asteroids are binaries, two objects rotating around each other, which, if you ever have to deflect something, is going to be rather important to know. So let's say we've got some crazed amateurs out there,

guys who are out there every clear night, and they'd like to get in on this. How do they do it? Is it open right now? We don't have an open call right now, But the good news is it's coming soon. And by soon, I mean, probably in the next month to two months. So you can look on our website, planetary.org. I will certainly blog it when it happens. I will tweet it on random space fact when the call is out. And you can also go to planetary.org and go to our Shoemaker and NEO section and look for it at any time. There will be two to three months for the proposals to be written and turned in,

so you don't have to catch it the day it comes out. And you'll also find out there what we're really looking for and the types of things we're looking to fund. So then what? Is there a committee that reviews these? Yeah, it's one of the testaments to the program, I think, is the quality of the committee members that we get. People who, professional astronomers, who volunteer their time to judge these proposals. And we're actually just in a transition. In fact, this is the first announcement of it publicly. I'd like to thank Dan Derda, a professional planetary scientist who's been coordinating the panels for us for many years, practically since the beginning of the program. And now he's

stepping down because he's awfully busy with other things. And taking over is Tim Spahr, and I welcome him on board. He's the director of the Minor Planet Center, which is exactly the kind of person that we like to have on the panel, because that's where all these astronomers, whether professional or amateur or otherwise, submit their observations of asteroids. It all flows through the Minor Planet Center. So he and his colleagues, including the ones we've had on the panel before, have a really good idea of what's really going to help, what's going to kick start or move those observatories to the next level where they can make meaningful contributions to the asteroid threat assessment problem? All right. Well, thank

you, Dan. And congratulations, Tim, on this new position, helping us out with awarding these Shoemaker-Neo grants. And Bruce will tell people, keep an eye on planetary.org. Of course, even if you're not interested in picking up a grant, there's much more information there. And as you heard from Bruce, he's done a couple of recent blog entries about this program. Bruce, I'll talk to you again in a few minutes after we hear from one or two of those awardees. I look forward to it. He is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He'll be back with What's Up, and I'll be back with more Planetary Radio in a minute.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that

people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. 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. As promised, we're going to hear from a couple of amateur astronomers who have received Shoemaker Near-Earth Object, or NEO, grants from the Planetary Society. Like a lot of grant recipients, Gary Hugg was able to buy a powerful new camera. Gary and his Sandlot Observatory used that camera to discover a NEO just two weeks ago.

You can read about the discovery at planetary.org. Unfortunately, our Skype connection was not the best. Gary, I want to thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio, and I also, like a lot of other people, want to congratulate you on this most recent discovery from the Sandlot Observatory, Asteroid 2012 SY49. You have reason to be proud. Well, thank you, Matt. It was quite an adventure for me. You know, I spend a lot of my time doing a real follow-up,

and that's really kind of my big thing to do. I spend months and months doing that without any discovery at all, and then all of a sudden, it just popped up. So it's fun to do. It's pretty exciting for the moment. I guess at the bottom of that nice 22-inch reflector that you built is this new camera that you were able to get because of your Shoemaker-Neo award grant. How important has that camera been to this latest discovery and others that you make?

Well, it's been monumentally different. The help here is that I have four times the area that I'm searching at one time. If I've got a NEO follow-up, for example, that I'm trying to do, and this thing's off a little bit, if it's off its predicted path a little bit, I've got a much better chance of locating it in a shorter time. You can spend all night looking for one of these Earth objects because you have to shoot so many fields and spend so much time in each field that you can spend virtually hours trying to get one guy found again.

So the idea is that the wider the field you've got and the bigger the camera, the bigger the chip in the camera, you can search a pretty wide area at one time and you'll find him a lot quicker. Well, I want to thank you for all those long nights, late nights out there catching these objects for us because who knows? It may not be this particular one, SY-49, 2012 SY-49, but Lord knows one of you guys may just

give us the early warning we need to avoid that rock that would take us out otherwise. So, Gary, keep up the great work and clear skies. Thank you, Ben. Gary Hugg is the builder and operator of the Sandlot Observatory. You can check out his website. We'll have a link to it from planetary.org slash radio. And from there, you can even hear the little piece that National Public Radio did with him just last June. We go now from Gary Hugg in rural

Kansas to adjust his rural spot in Illinois. Robert Holmes is president of the Astronomical Research Institute. He won Shoemaker-Neo grants in both 2009 and in the most recent cycle. ARI has built a record of observations and discoveries that is just short of miraculous. has built a record of observations and discoveries that is just short of miraculous. Bob still has no Internet service at ARI, so we connected the only way we could, by cell phone. Bob, it's great to have you back on Planetary Radio. Third visit, but it's been a little bit over two years. Have you guys been pretty busy out there at the Astronomical Research Institute? Been real busy this year, Matt. Things have been really good.

We've had a lot of dry weather. So our observations are way up for 2012. So you guys are the silver lining on the drought in the Midwest. You bet. We sure are. We noticed it. Does make for clear skies, I guess. I've got the little description that Bruce Betts wrote up about some of the recent activities.

And I'm just looking at 2011. You got two telescopes, and yet you made almost 11,000 targeted observations of near-Earth objects. That seems truly amazing. We work at it really hard. Every clear night, the telescopes are running, and everything's done as efficiently as possible. I can go even beyond that, because according to Bruce, your two cameras have made more than 50,000 observations. That puts you second only to the program called Linear, which is run by a couple of not-so-amateur organizations, MIT and the Air Force, the U.S. Air Force.

That's right. You're in good company. Yes, I am. I'm very fortunate. How do you manage to do this? Is it just dedication? It's your dedication and work. That's what it comes down to. If you put in the hours, you'll make the observations. So how busy are you out there? I asked this same question of Gary Hugg a few minutes ago.

On any clear night, are you going to be out there or one of your colleagues observing at ARI? I run all the telescopes here at ARI. I have no one else that runs them with me. Last night we ran for 11 straight hours. So that gives you a good idea. And that was nonstop. Now this is just gathering light. What else is involved in this work that you do? Is there a lot of poring over images is involved in this work that you do? Is there a lot of poring over images, looking for little dots that have moved? Absolutely. I'm very fortunate to have some excellent people that are associated with universities. I've also got some high school students that help measure these objects.

So once I've collected all these images, the data's coming in all night long, because I'm uploading it to the internet. And so all this data's coming in all night long, and we're sending data to the Minor Planet Center. It's really a cooperative help with a good number of people. Remind me of the instruments that you've got out there, these two telescopes. We're currently operating a 32-inch and 24-inch telescope, and both are prime focus. And so these are pretty good-sized instruments. Right. In the past 30 days, we've made six observations that were fainter than 23rd magnitude. For the non-astronomically-minded out there, that's a very dim object.

I mean, is there a way of sort of putting that in terms that non-astronomers understand? That would be close to 7 million times fainter than your eye can see. That's pretty faint, and really an accomplishment for any observatory. How important are the cameras on these telescopes? Oh, essential. The STL cameras that we acquired from the Planetary Society have worked flawlessly. We've never had any downtime on those cameras. And that's the key to making a lot of observations.

If you've got a lot of downtime, you're not making the observations. And these cameras are bulletproof. We've done extremely well with them. You probably didn't really get into this until after the days of film, or am I wrong about that? Could you have done the kind of work you're doing in the old pre-digital CCD camera days? Very laborious if you were doing it with film. Doing plates were really, really difficult. So, possible? Yes. Doing the numbers? No. Difficult and expensive, right? Absolutely, yes.

I noticed that in the grants that you've gotten from the Planetary Society, these Shoemaker-Neo grants, they've helped you get these two cameras, two different grants, but there's also mention of filters. What's the importance of those? We're using those filters to do photometric observations of near-Earth objects, which means we're doing the light curves so we can calculate what the rotation rates of some of these near-Earth objects are. And these are all published in the Minor Planet Bulletin. I was on the website looking at all of the other organizations that have supported your work out there. It looked like everything from people who maybe must have donated some concrete or something on up through organizations like ours,

the Planetary Society, but also NASA. You do seem to get a lot of recognition for this. Who are some of the other prominent groups supporting your work? Isaac is a really important group who helps us in our education and public outreach program. They are also essential in helping us get good students that can help us make these measurements that save us a lot of time after we get up from working all night. I was going to ask you about the education program and how that's going. We talked about it at some length a couple of years ago when you were last on the show. That is still a big part of ARI's work? And it's still growing. We're in 40 countries around the world. Something in the ballpark now of over 500 schools have participated.

Wow. How would a school get involved? Essentially, they would get in contact with Patrick Miller, who's the head of ISAC, and he coordinates our images to get them to the proper schools and into the hands of the students so they can do this work directly in the classroom. If you follow ISAC, which is I-A-S-C, If you follow Isaac, which is I-A-S-C, you can basically Google that, and we'll come up with his particular program that uses our images in education public outreach. Do you offhand remember what I-A-S-C stands for? It's the International Asteroid Search Campaign.

And so any school can get a hold of them, and they might end up helping ARI or other talented amateurs do their work. Absolutely, and possibly make an asteroid discovery in the process. What do you think drives you? What keeps you at it night after night? Well, this is a passion to begin with, and if you just don't have this burning desire to be a part of a program such as NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program, you're not going to be as successful. You have to almost be able to want to do this without even being paid for it. And then if you are being compensated for your time on the project, then so much the better. It's really quite a brotherhood, and I should say brother and sisterhood, I guess, among you very serious so-called amateur astronomers

who, I don't know how many times we've had what other people might call professional astronomers talk about the extremely important role that folks like you play. Does it feel like there is a lot of camaraderie with the other folks, maybe camaraderie and also a bit of competition? It's both, sure. Bob, I really just want to congratulate you on this wonderful work and hope that you keep it up because who knows, as we said to Gary Hug, one of you guys is probably going to be the one who finds that rock

that is coming our way and we need to do something about. So please keep looking up at the skies. Thank you very much. Bob Holmes is president of the Astronomical Research Institute, ARI, in Ashmore, Illinois, actually near Ashmore, Illinois, way, way out there, where the only kind of service he's got is a cell phone, and that's what we've been talking to him via on this edition of Planetary Radio. And I wouldn't be surprised if we don't check in again someday.

We will definitely check in with Bruce Betts. He's coming up in just a moment with this week's edition of What's Up. Could it be he's back? Indeed it is. It's Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, here for this week's edition of What's Up? Welcome. Back and better than ever. So other than near-Earth objects, what's up in the sky? Nice segue. Well, we've got low in the west shortly after sunset. Check out reddish Mars hanging out near the reddish star and terry's and terry's is to the left and then it's going to get further below mars as we progress in the next couple weeks and it's just kind of cool because they're one's planet one's a star but they're

similar color and similar brightness right at the moment the trick is they are low down in the west you got to catch them catch them early and catch them low. Pre-dawn, still bright Venus dominating the pre-dawn east and Jupiter appearing high overhead. Jupiter rising in the east in the late evening these days. We also have the Orionids meteor shower, which I mentioned for the hardcore meteor shower watchers. Of course, I guess if they're hardcore, they know it's coming. Peaks on the October 21st. Kind of a mediocre shower. Average shower produces

about 20 meteors per hour at its peak if you're in a dark area. And has decent meteor output for about a week surrounding the 21st. Alright, we move on to this week in space history. It has been 15 years since Cassini-Huygens launched this week. Amazing. Still cranking out the science and doing great stuff at Saturn. And we just may talk about it again a little later in the show.

Ah, and we will hopefully again soon. We'll have to get one of our roughly every four months reports from Linda Spilker, the project scientist for that amazing mission. 15 years in space and still going strong. It is, it is. And it's like the size of a

school bus, at least a small one. It's huge with everything hanging off it. They actually did take the kitchen sink and they found amazing things with it. And then they take the kitchen sink and they found amazing things with it. And then they threw the kitchen sink down into Titan, I think. Yes, that's why there's liquid on Titan. No, no, this is going awry. Random space fact.

That was a wonderful impression of the Huygens probe descending through the Titan atmosphere. No, you've heard my impression. Here, I have to do my impression. Here's my impression. This is what the sounds Huygens sounded like when you compress two and a half hours into ten seconds. I don't think I have heard this. Go ahead. I'll do it.

Okay, I'll do it in less than 10, because you'll get the idea. So this is actually what we got when taking the acoustic sensor data, and Planetary Society worked with the scientists on this to convert it into, as much as you could, into sounds. And as it parachuted through the atmosphere, it sounded like this.

You catch that transition? Yes, I did. That was the landing oh yes and i've heard the real thing too that was amazingly realistic thanks it's a it's a gift speaking of titan titan is larger by volume than the smallest planet mercury depending on how you define planet, whatever. It's larger by volume than Mercury, although it is only half as massive. Okay. All right. With spacecraft impressions and all, we need to hurry on into the contest. It's worth it, though, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. Four out of five spacecraft surveys, no, four out of five spacecraft with escape trajectories

spacecraft surveys. Now, four out of five spacecraft with escape trajectories going out of the solar system are on the same, let's call it, side of the solar system. Which one is on the other side? Which one's the lone wolf headed in the opposite direction? How do we do, Matt? Oh, well, Ben Norris, Benjamin Norris of Salt Lake City, Utah, said it's Pioneer 10. It is indeed. Pioneer 10. We've got Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and New Horizons all headed into kind of the other part of the universe. Pioneer 10, the Rebel, headed the other way. And so, Benjamin, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Pioneer 10, first out of the solar system. There's some excitement. Sorry, there's the lone wolf. Pioneer 10, first out of the solar system. Haven't heard from it since 2003. But as Daryl Gardner said, on a two million year voyage to Aldebaran, Godspeed, Pioneer 10.

There were a number of people who made this mistake. Because we put on the website, and you did say on the other side of the solar system, as seen from above the solar system, we got a number of people who said Voyager 2, because it's out of the ecliptic. And then there was David Kaplan who mentioned Voyager 6, which is on an unknown trajectory on its way to becoming part of V'ger. Didn't it come back? It's all very confusing.

Don't give away the ending. What do you got for next time? For next time, in honor of Cassini's 15th anniversary of launch, what planets did Cassini fly by on its way to Saturn? Tell me the planets Cassini flew by on its way to Saturn. Planets. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

You've got until Monday, October 22nd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this latest answer and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about book jackets. What would you put on yours? Thank you and good night. I would certainly put a hearty endorsement of the book, of my new book, by Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who 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 a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.