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

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

Seven astronomers have been selected to receive Shoemaker NEO (Near Earth Object) grants from the Planetary Society.  They and their observatories span the planet.  We’ll meet an American and an Australian.  Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts provides an overview of the grant program and later returns for this week’s edition of What’s Up. The Planetary Society’s Kate Howells reports on the outlook for space funding in Canada’s newly-released federal budget.  She and Society CEO Bill Nye also met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  Learn more about this week’s topics and see images here: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0314-shoemaker-newo-2018-winners.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, everyone. So far, so good. Our move to Panoply seems to have been seamless for nearly all of you. We're grateful and relieved. I can't wait to reveal our new sponsor next week. It has to do with someone who has been our guest on Planetary Radio, though his reputation is, shall we say, cosmos-spanning? I will say no more. Here's the show. Amateur astronomers protecting Mother Earth, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We'll meet two of the seven dedicated amateur astronomers who have been awarded Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grants in the latest round of competition. They'll tell us why they spend night after night searching the sky for asteroids that cross the path of our planet and how they do their work. Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts runs the Shoemaker NEO program. He'll give us a quick overview and then

return for this week's What's Up, Potpourri? Canada is a space leader, but many Canadians believe it should be doing even more on the final frontier. My colleague Kate Howell serves as the Society's Global Community Outreach Manager, but she's also on the Canadian Space Society's Board of Directors and serves as a member of the Government of Canada's Space Advisory Board. Kate, good to get you on Planetary Radio to talk about what's going on up in Canada with space plans there. Shall we begin with this just announced federal budget? Yes. So this has been a very highly anticipated budget for the Canadian space community, because as I've talked to you about on this show previously, we've been busy working on

advising the government on a new space strategy. However, the budget came out at the end of February and there was no mention of a new space strategy. So a lot of anticipation led to quite a lot of disappointment in the space community. That's a shame. How is the community reacting? I mean, is there a feeling that more needs to be done? Absolutely. There's been a lot of initial dismay and disappointment, but then that was quickly tempered by optimism. So people kind of looking to the budget that does have an emphasis on new investments in science and on adjusting some of the sort of regulatory frameworks on the federal level that could help the space industry. So people have been finding

the silver linings here. But really now there's a rallying to move forward and do what we need to do as a community to get space in the next federal budget next year. Looking for it to be much more directly addressed, huh? Yeah, what we're really looking for is a new initiative, a new strategic vision for space. There hasn't been a space strategy in many, many years. So we're looking for not only new funding, but really a new vision and strategic direction. Well, you've got much more about this in a March 5 blog post at planetary.org, of course. What does the 2018 Canadian federal budget mean for space? And you told me before we started recording, there's going to be, if it's not available at planetary.org yet,

there will very soon be a sort of companion post about a trip you and our boss made to Ottawa. Yes, that's right. Bill was invited to Ottawa early last week to have a conversation with our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. And because I work on the Planetary Society's activities in Canada, I went along with Bill to sort of guide the conversation a little bit. Trudeau wanted to bring Bill to a public event at the University of Ottawa to celebrate the new investments that Canada is making in science. And we really did everything we could to guide that conversation towards space. So we really advocated for the importance of a vision, the value that particularly you can get from planetary science, get a lot of bang for your buck because Canada is a country with a relatively small budget for space compared to, for example,

the United States. So we really were taking this opportunity not only to meet and rub shoulders with some of Canada's leaders, but really to push space as a priority. All right, Kate, we'll watch for that separate blog post that details that visit as well. And I got to ask, because you do have that very nice photo, photo op with Bill and the prime minister. Did you receive any evidence during your visit that he is not the coolest head of state on this planet? You know, he's the only one I've met, but he does seem quite cool. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Kate Howells is the Global Community Outreach Manager for the Planetary Society,

and she is based in Montreal, and so is well-positioned to report to us and care a lot about what's happening with the Canadian space program. We're going to meet a couple of people who were awarded Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grants in the last few weeks, right after we visit with Bruce Betts for a description of that program. Bruce joins us from San Luis Obispo, the home of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. You might guess that this has something to do with light sale, but we'll explain further when we get to the What's Up segment toward the end of this week's program. For now, though, because we're going to be talking to a couple of the winners of this last round of Shoemaker-Neo grants, tell us what's behind all this. The Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grants

are grants that the Flandre Society has been giving out for more than 20 years to really advanced amateur astronomers to help upgrade their telescope setups to take them to the next level of observing. And it's been a very effective program, getting amateurs to the points where they can really make significant contributions to protecting our planet from asteroid impact, particularly through study of the positions of the asteroids so that you can track the orbits, predict the orbits, and figure out if it's going to hit Earth, which is kind of the important part, and also characterizing asteroids, checking out their physical properties, their spin rate, whether

one asteroid is actually a binary pair, things like that. What, if anything, sets this latest round of awardees or sets the program apart this year? Well, we've got seven awards, and it's the largest group and the largest funding that we've ever done in an award round. They're on four different continents where the observatories are. We've picked up our first observatory in Africa, which is in Morocco. And so we've actually funded observatories on all continents except Antarctica. We're still waiting, Antarctica. That's pretty cool. All right, I guess that'll do for now. But don't go too far, Bruce,

because we want to talk to you once again over this bad connection when we get to What's Up. Sounds good. As you heard from Bruce, seven outstanding international astronomers received grants in the latest round of Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Awards. This isn't the first award many of them have earned. With six grants, Robert Holmes of the Astronomical Research Institute in Illinois

is the current champ. Following on his heels is our first guest. Don Prey was just awarded $11,000 for his Sugarloaf Observatory in Massachusetts. Don Prey, welcome to Planetary Radio and congratulations on being one of the recipients in this latest round of Shoemaker-Neo grants. Yes, it's an honor to get the support from the Planetary Society. I'd like to thank the society and certainly all the members who contribute to this program. I'm sure it's done a lot of good for many observers. This is actually my fourth time I've gotten this. It's very inspiring that the Planetary Society has got the confidence in me to be a valuable contributor to this program. We have quite a few multiple grant awardees. You're a four-time success here. I would guess that that's a nice recognition of the excellent work that you do, as well as the proposal that you wrote. I saw that you're going to use the money this time to get a new mount for one of your telescopes? Yes. I've got two 20-inch reflectors.

They're fairly heavy optical tube assemblies, so the mounts have to be fairly heavy-duty. Both telescopes are run by computers, so they have to be fairly sophisticated, and unfortunately that makes them very expensive. Yeah. I drag around an 8-inch telescope now and then, and I know what a 20-inch looks like. Yeah. I drag around an eight inch telescope now and then, and I know what a 20 inch looks like. So yeah, I could see where you'd want to have a, where a really good mount might set you back a little. Right. Yeah. I've got both of them in small observatories that I've built out in a field behind my house. And that really makes things a lot easier. There's no transporting of equipment. Everything is out there and ready to go when the sky is clear.

But you still operate them remotely so that when it gets cold, as it does where you are at this time of year, you're able to control things from inside the house? Yes, definitely. I've got a wireless connection from the house to the computers out there. If I had to sit out there with them, I'd freeze to death. Plus, they're running all night long, too. I also saw that you're going to be taking the old mount that is replaced with this telescope and using that to do what? To buy a new camera. The camera that's currently there is maybe 8 or 10 years old.

currently there is maybe eight or ten years old. This technology keeps moving along so that it doesn't take a whole lot of time for the older technology to start to become somewhat obsolete. What this new camera will be able to do is keep the chip very cool at warm summer temperatures. The old camera can't do that, so I'd have to run it at a very high temperature, which is not good. Yeah, not good for the images or even for the optics, right? I mean, you want nice cold air. Right. Well, the chip needs to be cold in order to reduce electronic noise. And so the lower you can get that noise, the more signal you'll get, and so the more accurate data. Are you one of those who has been at this long enough that you have, it sounds like you have seen these just short of miraculous improvements as we have seen CCD cameras become more and more sophisticated, more and more powerful? Yeah, I actually made my first

CCD camera from a kit. Some people, if there are any observers out there, they might recognize a cookbook camera. That was a kit you could buy. I'm not sure when that was. It was probably in the late 90s. So I sorted that thing together, and it actually worked. It was amazing. So I did some early work with that. But since then, the market has really flowered with some really wonderful cameras.

It really is amazing to see what a so-called amateur like yourself can do now with a 20-inch telescope. Tell us about the work that you do, the role you play, and your interest in especially binary asteroids, which, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read recently that we've discovered that it could be the majority of asteroids are actually at least binaries. Yeah. Well, back in 2003, I started to get interested in asteroids in general and creating light curves, which is basically a graph showing the variation in brightness over time. From that, you can determine the rotation rate of the asteroid. It was then a couple of years later that I discovered that there was a

professional astronomer in the Czech Republic who was basically looking for people to help him in his program. This was Dr. Peter Pravik of Andreev Observatory. I became a member of that group, which is really quite international. That's really when I started to get into the search for binaries, because that's what his project is all about. I've been providing data for him since that time, and some significant papers have come out of that work. You know, it's been a real honor to be able to participate in what's cutting-edge astronomy.

Being an amateur and, you know, having my own equipment, it's really quite amazing. Bruce Betts tells me that you also are, by some measures, the most successful amateur astronomer in observing these binaries. Well, I wouldn't go that far. I'm persistent, let's put it that way. And I develop, you know, kind of protocols for doing things that turn out data that's useful. But I can think of several people who are far and away more advanced than I am. But it's really a great thing to do.

Well, persistence is a very fine quality in an astronomer, especially an observational astronomer like yourself. How often are the scopes running? How often are you using them to search the skies or to track objects that you've learned about? Well, of course, it's all dependent on the weather and the moon cycle. When the moon is bright, you can't observe because it just makes the sky too bright. I'd say seven to eight nights a month are acceptable to run the telescopes. Basically, almost all acceptable nights I'll be at it. Maybe that shows something about my social life. But anyway, I'm right on it with that. I feel as if I've wasted an opportunity. Does this mean, on a night when you're observing, does this mean that you are, even though you're operating remotely, that you're up most of the night or all night?

No, definitely not. I'll get things running as soon as it's dark. Sometimes the target won't rise over the horizon until, say, midnight or one in the morning, and I don't want to be hanging around. So I can set the system to begin observing at any time I want. It's definitely not hanging around watching it all the time. Well, thank heaven for automation, as well as better cameras and better mounts and better telescopes all the time. Where do you see this going? Is this something that you think you'll be keeping up for the foreseeable future?

Yeah, definitely. I enjoy the process of observing. You know, there was a real thrill seeing a light curve for the first time on an asteroid that nobody has ever seen before. You get that feeling of discovery. I think that's probably what drives all astronomers, whether they're professionals or amateurs. Definitely that. And, you know, as long as I can get out there and wrestle the roofs off the observatories, I'll be at this. Does it enter into your thinking that you are part of this grand worldwide effort to protect our planet? You are part of this worldwide team that is looking for the one that has our name on it. Oh, yeah, definitely. I see this detection of binaries as really quite critical, because if we ever were in a situation with an asteroid that looked like

it was going to impact Earth, it would be really nice to know if there was two rather than just one because that would really change the whole reflection strategy. Don, I want to thank you very much and congratulate you once again for receiving this Shoemaker-Neo Grant Award,

the fourth that you've received. And I just wish you the best of success as you continue your observations. And, of course, wish you clear skies. Well, thanks very much. And, again, thank you to the Planetary Society. Don Prey of Sugarloaf Observatory. Next, we'll talk with the Shoemaker-Neo Grant Awardee, Down Under. This is Planetary Radio.

Hi, I'm Bruce Betts of the Planetary Society, and I'm here at Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California with Justin. Hello. And Catherine. Hello. Who are engineers on the PlanetVac project. Grabbing dirt and rocks on another world is hard, but it enables profound discoveries about the solar system. What am I looking at? PlanetVac prototypes from quite some time ago all the way up to just a few days ago. PlanetVac, a new reliable low-cost technique for collecting planetary surface samples. Help us take this technology through the next level of testing on a Zodiac rocket, thus enabling PlanetVac's use on missions to Mars and other worlds.

Learn more by visiting us at planetary.org slash PlanetVac. That's Planetvac! Planetvac! Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're about to talk with another of the seven astronomers who have just been awarded Shoemaker-Neo or Near-Earth Object grants. We found Julian Uy at his home in Sydney, Australia. We found Julian Uy at his home in Sydney, Australia.

Julian, welcome to Planetary Radio and congratulations to you on being one of this year's Shoemaker-Neo grant awardees. Oh, thank you, Matt. I'm very excited to win this grant. And I would like to thank Planetary Society to allow me to venture a little bit more into my hobby, the photometry of asteroids. And we are very happy to be able to help you do that, do an even better job than you have been. I have read that the grant that you'll receive will allow you to purchase a 20-inch telescope, which is quite a large telescope for an amateur, isn't it? Yes, it is. It is very exciting to have a 20-inch telescope that I can use to see dimmer objects throughout the sky. Tell us about the observatory that will

host this telescope, the JBL Observatory, and just where is it in Australia? JBL Observatory is located west of Sydney. It's probably about three hours drive west of Sydney, beyond the Blue Mountains Great Dividing Range, near the town called Bathurst. The location is very dry. It's dark. It's very flat. There's no traffic. I have two friends there that is helping me setting up this place. They are very keen amateur astronomers as well, who build the place, automate the roof, and manage the mechanical aspects of the telescopes. And also the computer system that is required to run the place is also managed by them. Is that Brett Soames and Lars Henson?

Yes, that's right. Now I get the JBL with the J for Julian. That's right. It was Lars' idea. I thought, oh, that's pretty good. That's a good name for it. I'm sure somebody could come up with a wonderful abbreviation in addition to using your initials.

You've got, this sounds like a terrific place to be hunting down asteroids. Yeah, because Lars has been in this place for quite a long time. He has been doing a lot of imaging as well through his own telescopes. The three of us got together one day and then thought, oh, why don't we just set up something that is a little bit more permanent? Each one of us can utilize the equipment that we can place there. And it's very convenient for me because I'm located in Sydney and I can just do whatever I need to do with these telescopes, download the data and do the

data reduction that way. Whenever there's any problems with the equipment, there's always Lars or Brett that is handy, very handy. They just live nearby. They come in and they operate the equipment, whatever that needs to be repaired or sorted out, and they will just make it work. Sounds like a great team. I see you've got another facility, the Blue Mountain Observatory, which already benefited from a 2015 Shoemaker-Neo grant. The Blue Mountain Observatory is my baby, shall I say. I created that place from nothing, and now it becomes an observatory with many telescopes in there. And from there, I learned how to create a nice automated remote-controlled telescope.

We have a 24-inch scope there in Blue Mountain Observatory, where we also have the camera that I got from the 2015 Shoemaker-Neogrand. I have been using it with a lot of success. Well, tell us about some of the work that has been conducted at these two facilities that you operate down under. The Blue Mountain Observatory has been operating for close to five years now. And during that time, I collected a lot of data, a lot of images that helped me compile and reduce it down to the light curves that is needed to understand the physical properties of the minor planets I'm interested in. I've done work in the search for binary asteroids.

I have done a lot of work with near-Earth asteroids. I believe that there's not many facilities in the Southern Hemisphere that can do work with the near-Earth asteroids. So I thought this is a good thing to have and to be able to contribute to the light curves that is needed to find out more about the physical properties of these asteroids. Let me ask you on behalf of anybody in the audience who's not an amateur or a professional astronomer for that matter, what is it about the light curve that tells us more about asteroids? And you're talking about what the change in the brightness of an object over time, right? Yes, that's right. The way we do it is we take a long exposure images of the asteroid that we are interested in. And then we take multiple images

of such asteroid. And then we're using photometric software. We download the data and reference it to other local stars around the area. And then we get a data point that is plotted over time. And this data point form light curve. And the light curves is what we see as the rotation period of the asteroid. And I would assume that it also helps you to identify asteroids that aren't alone, that are binary, where there might be two objects? Yes, correct. In one night, we probably could get a segment of that light curve. And after it's been folded and combined together, we can see the full period of that light curve. And sometimes there is a little dip in the light curve that indicated there's a presence of a satellite of that asteroid that eclipsed over the primary asteroid. When we get a repetitive dipping, and then we can derive the period of that repetitive dipping, then we can confirm that that is the satellite

of the asteroid. If it hasn't been discovered, then we will claim that as a discovery. Yeah. You know what's just occurred to me, and I don't know why it hasn't before, is the similarity between looking at these light curves of asteroids and the work that is done by the transit method of finding exoplanets, worlds that are orbiting distant stars, where you look for these changes in the light curve, right? Where you see a little bit of a dip, and if that happens on a regular basis, well, you might have a world going around, just like you've seen this little satellite asteroid going around the primary. That's right. It is very similar in principle, because an exoplanet, you detect the deep as the transiting planet across the front surface of the star. But the difficulty with asteroid photometry is that we have to follow the asteroid as it moves against the background stars. And

that creates a problem because when we measure the brightness of the asteroid, we will have to reference it with the background stars. And every night, the background stars will change because of the movement. And we have to find a reference of that. So that's where it becomes critical issues. Another thing that I had not thought of makes this work even more challenging for you. This is challenging work. And I wonder what attracts you to it. I wonder why it is something that you have been doing now for years? Well, that's an interesting question because I've been thinking about that myself. And it started off from astronomy as a passion for me since I was young. But about five years or six years ago, the International Astronomical Union came to Australia. There were a whole lot of these professional astronomers available to us down under. So one of my colleagues, his name is Greg Crawford, he organized a workshop for

minor planets. So he invited prominent planetary scientists to go to this sub-conference. Everybody started talking about asteroids, photometry, astrometry, radio, echo, and the whole thing captivated, captured my imagination. And I thought, hey, what, you know, this is really interesting. There is this software, Canopus. I started to use that. I put together some of the data that I gathered, and I found a light curve. I thought, oh, this is like a little piece of jigsaw puzzle that I can collect every night and put it all together until a picture is

formed, a picture of the light curve that tells me that there is a rotation period of this particular object that is so faint, so far away, and I can actually detect it. I guess that is what I find interesting about asteroid photometry. Interesting and exciting. And it puts you in the grand tradition of astronomers for hundreds of years who have been sweeping the sky with their telescopes and discovering objects, and not just discovering them, but learning more about them, tracking them. And of course, in this case, all of us have reason to be grateful to you for being part of this search for and characterization of near-Earth asteroids

because, you know, who knows, someday you or someone like you might just help save the planet. That's the idea. Save the planet while having fun at the same time. Well, I'm glad it's fun as well. I just want to thank you again and congratulate you again on this work. I certainly hope that before long you'll have that new 20-inch telescope mounted

and sweeping the skies following these objects, and I wish you many, many nights of clear skies. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'd just like to thank Planetary Society again so that I can get this 20-inch telescope. I'm really grateful. Thank you very much. And I would bet that they would all say you are very welcome. Thank you, Julian. Thank you, Matt. All right, as promised, we are back with Bruce, who remains in San Luis Obispo, California. Now, maybe you can take a moment to tell us what you're doing up there. I came up here for the integration of light sail to the spacecraft into the P-Pod, the box that deploys it into space.

We did that today in the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo clean room and got the spacecraft all bundled up nice and snug in the P-Pod. Nice. Congratulations. So what's the next step? Next step is in a couple of days, it will be hand-carried and flown to Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I will be meeting up with it there and the Cal Poly people who are bringing it down there. And then it will be integrated into the PROX-1 Georgia Tech spacecraft and be put inside there.

So we had a spacecraft box put in a box that now will be put in another box. All right. We'll leave it at that for now for lack of time, but we all know that eventually this is going to be up there at the top of a Falcon Heavy, hopefully launching for orbit this summer. Let's get to what's up. All right. Try in the evening west, shortly after sunset, to see Venus and Mercury. Venus being the much brighter of the two. Mercury actually higher than Venus for several days and then dropping lower. Jupiter, super bright coming up in the middle of the night.

And then kind of fun if you're up in the pre-dawn or the middle of the night, you've got Mars and Saturn will be getting closer and closer to each other over the coming weeks until they end up pretty close together in early April. We move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 2011 that Messenger became the first and so far only Mercury orbiter. Wow, there's a mission we followed from before launch to the end of the mission here on Planetary Radio and at the Planetary Society, of course. Very successful. Revolutionized our understanding of Mercury, gave us, let us see what the other half of it looked like. All right, we move on to random space facts.

It loses a little bit over this poor connection, but it works. chooses a little bit over this poor connection, but it works. Of the 88 modern constellations, the largest, as measured by area on the sky, or more formally, solid angle subtended, is the constellation Hydra. It takes up 3.16% of the total sky. You know, I remember when I was a kid with a star chart, I couldn't find a lot of the constellations. And I later discovered it was because they were much bigger in the sky than I thought they were going to be.

Yeah, some of them cover like Hydra, really cuts along between several other constellations. Let's go on to the contest because we've got a lot to talk about. All right. I asked you, what is the second brightest star in the nighttime sky as seen from either hemisphere? How do we do, Matt? Now, first of all, let us establish that you were talking about apparent magnitude as seen from Earth, right? Which you implied because you said as seen from either hemisphere. That is correct. And once again, I should have been more specific and referred to apparent magnitude, but yes, as seen from either hemisphere of the Earth. This explains why David Fisher in Craigmore, Australia, may be frustrated because he did say Canopus, actually, it's just that he wasn't chosen by random.org. But he added,

But he added, RF-136A1 in the Large Magellanic Cloud is absolutely the winner at minus 12.5 magnitude, but it's too far away, apparently. Thanks for the attempt, David. Here's our winner, Megan Stanley, a first-time winner in Flagstaff, Arizona. She said it's Canopus, which is what pretty much everybody said, right? That is indeed correct. Here's what Megan added. The Voyager missions captured my interest when I was a young kid. These days, I work at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, where I just created a talk about unmanned space missions. The Planetary Society has been an incredible resource and guide for me. Thank you, Megan. That's very nice. Let's send her prizes. Let's send her a really great prize, which is why I'm sure we had a gigantic turnout, a lot of entries this week. We're going

to send Mega that Osma Records Voyager Golden Record box set that we learned about from our new friends who put out a message from Earth that we talked about a couple of weeks ago on this show. I have the set. It is absolutely gorgeous. It comes with an illustrated book. Megan, I'm sure you're going to love this since you are already in the business of sharing the passion, beauty, and joy of space. We're also going to send her a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. We got lots of other stuff from lots of other people, including from Norman Kassoon. Canopus is big. He says it would take about 65 of our suns to cross the width or the diameter of Canopus.

Big star, huh? My, what a large star. Robert Laporta in Avon, Connecticut, says in science fiction, Canopus is the parent star for Arrakis, the dusty desert planet in the Dune universe. From Jana Miller in Titusville, Florida, well, first of all, what's the brightest star in the sky, Bruce? Sirius.

Jana says, my dog is named Sirius, and he is a very bright dog. Sirius referred to as the dog star because it's in the consolation big dog, Canis Major. This from Mark Little in Northern Ireland. He's wondering, Bruce, if you could please ask this question again in 480,000 years, because at that time, Canopus will retake its place as the brightest star in the sky, just because I guess Sirius will be farther away. Hey, it's a date. I'll make a note.

Paul Bergel. I love this. He also ordered the box set, but he ordered it on September 5th of 1977. He says he must have selected the wrong shipping option because he just tracked it. And the shipping label, it says it's now 141 astronomical units away. He's going to notify the seller. Yeah, good luck with that return. Finally, this from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. Canopus, canopus, when viewed through a scope is, a southern star skillfully spun.

And here is a tactful, if random space factful, this star is just second to one. Telescopus. Through a scope is. And with that, we are ready for the new contest. All right, back to your friends, the constellations. Of the 88 modern constellations, which is the smallest in area,

in other words, solid angle subtended, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. How clever of you. And for all of you out there who are also clever, you have until Wednesday, the 21st of March at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And you may win yourself a Planetary Society t-shirt. Beautiful design. You can take a look at it at chopshopstore.com in the Planetary Society store and a 200-point itelescope.net account from those guys who run that non-profit network of telescopes around the world that you can use, have your own account, or donate the account if you win to an astronomy club, a school near you, or anybody else. 200 points worth a couple hundred bucks.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about jacks in the boxes, or jack in the boxes, or jacks in the box. Yeah, thank you, and good night. You mean things that spring out of boxes, like light sails from peapods. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. He's a clever boy. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. A reminder that I'll be back at Southern Illinois University on March 24th for the premiere of In the Shadow, the documentary shot at and around SIU during the great 2017 solar eclipse.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its globe-spanning members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies!