Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Amazing Science at the 2012 DPS Meeting

Episode Date: October 22, 2012

The 44th Annual Meeting of the AAS Division of Planetary Sciences hosted hundreds of researchers and revealed volumes of scientific results. Join us at the conference.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The greatest planetary scientists gather in Reno, Nevada, 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. Great science and lots of it. That's what could be found at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, part of the American Astronomical Society. I was there with Emily Lakdawalla to talk with many of the attendees. Today, you'll get a taste of this great conference, beginning with a quick recap from Emily.

Emily, the only thing about TPS that I'm unhappy about is that I couldn't spend as much time there as you. You were there all week, weren't you? I was there the whole week, and I wish even I could have split myself into three people to cover the three concurrent sessions that were happening in the mornings. There were literally hundreds of these 10-minute presentations to say nothing of, I'm sure, a couple of hundred posters. Yeah, it's an awful lot of science, and, you know, meetings like this, a couple of hundred posters. Yeah, it's an awful lot of science. And, you know, meetings like this are a lot of scientists telling you about incremental progress on work that they've been doing for a really long time.

And so it's always really cool to see how things get a little bit more precise, a little bit more definite with time, sometimes, though, a little bit less definite. It's also nice to see what a part of the community you are. Really, a few people know about Planetary Radio, more than a few, but everybody knows you and your blog. Yeah, that they do. It's really quite gratifying, actually, the number of scientists who come up to me and say, I like to read your blog because I can keep up with the stuff only in my narrow part of the field. I use your blog to keep up with everything else in planetary science.

So there's no possible way for us to capture it all here in the minute or two that we have left. But was there a standout finding among these hundreds of examples of terrific science? Well, the thing that has me the most excited for the future is the gravity maps presented by the GRAIL mission of the moon. It's amazing how a highly detailed gravity map really lets you peer inside underneath the surface of a planet in ways that no other kind of data set can get you. There's all kinds of invisible features of the moon that Grail's map is going to be revealing as soon as they get it published, which is not very long from now, I hope. How about the other portions of this conference? I mean,

a lot of it is social. And for this one, a lot of it was, like it or not, political, and the threat to planetary science funding, which is going to come up in some of the material we'll be playing in the rest of the show. Well, it's always political, but I have to say that the feeling about the political aspects of this meeting was a little bit resigned and depressed, actually. The scientists, even if things improve from where they are now, it's still going to be tight. So we need every bit of advocacy that we can possibly perform in order to get a minimum amount of funding for these planetary scientists to continue their work. Well, depressed or not, beer seems to play a role in DPS. Well, it's certainly a great opportunity to be social and hang around in a bar or wherever else

with your friends. A lot of these people are people that you went to grad school with, and it's always nice to catch up. And there's an awful lot of science being discussed over those tasty drinks. Be sure to check out Emily's blog posts about DPS 2012 that took place all of last week. And there'll be much, much more material showing up. Some of it, some videos that I put together with Emily, including a little tour of the JPL booth at DPS. Emily, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and also our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Up next, Bill Nye. Bill, you are just about to leave for the nation's capital. I know there's a lot going on there. One event in particular? Well, it's a bunch of events for the solar system at 50. So this fall, this period of the year, is the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 2 spacecraft's flyby of the planet Venus. So the NASA History Office and National Geographic said, people got together and said, we've got to celebrate this. So I'll be at a couple events on Wednesday of this week. And it's really an extraordinary thing.

This was the spacecraft that left Earth's orbit, went interplanetary, and this is the spacecraft that made the discoveries about the high pressures on the surface of Venus, that Venus has retrograde motion, unlike the Earth, not east to west, west to east. The extraordinary high temperatures on the surface of Venus were all these fundamental ideas, which, by the way,

are part of the discovery of climate change here on Earth. All of these fundamental ideas go back to 1962. It's really a venerable thing. And the planetary side was involved with that. Bruce Murray, Lou Friedman, all these guys that were coming of age. Carl Sagan were involved in the discoveries made by Mariner 2. Mariner 1, by the way, had to be aborted. It had to be blown up.

It had some problem. Certainly got us off to a good start. 50 years of truly, truly amazing discoveries throughout the solar system. You know, Matt, there would be no division for planetary science without Mariner 2. Yeah. Well, Bill, have a wonderful time,

and we'll talk to you again when you return. Thank you. Let's change the worlds. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Let's talk about TPS by taking you there, some of the material that I collected on my visit last week. If you work in planetary science, you probably want to be at the annual meeting of the DPS, the Division for Planetary Sciences. I arrived on the evening of Monday, October 15,

and one of the first people I ran into was Professor Jim Bell of Arizona State University. Jim is author of Postcards from Mars, the first photographer on the red planet, and he's the president of the Planetary Society Board of Directors. What's the importance of gatherings like this? This is such an amazing thing. It's the collection of all of the world's experts, not just U.S., but all of the world's experts in planetary science, all in one place. It's an assembly of the latest, greatest results going on in solar system research from missions, from telescopic measurements, from laboratory studies, from computer simulations by gray beard old standards in the field to, you know, young new faculty members, to postdocs, graduate students, undergraduate students.

I mean, it's really just the premier collection of planetary scientists in the world. And oftentimes people will use this meeting as a showcase of some cool new discovery that hasn't been released yet. And so we'll see the first evidence for whatever, XYZ, right here at this meeting. Have you already seen anything that has you excited? You know, we saw some of the results from the Vesta mission, the Dawn mission to Vesta today, from the elemental chemistry instrument, the gamma-ray neutron spectrometer, that I hadn't seen before. I guess they're just being published in Science Magazine with evidence for hydrated minerals in the surface of Vesta,

which is very strange because it's a warm body. It shouldn't have those materials necessarily, but lo and behold, it does. So surprises are great, and so that's just one example of some of the discoveries that will be announced this week. Rosalie Lopez has joined us several times. She is a senior research scientist and the deputy manager of planetary science at JPL. She had her own research results to present at DPS, but she was also there to take on the job of DPS chair. I talked to her about doing this at the beginning of what may be hard times for American planetary science and scientists.

These are extremely challenging times, which I must say I did not know were going to be here when I accepted to run for this position. But, you know, I think that with the help of the committee, But, you know, I think that with the help of the committee, we can handle this. One of the things DPS finds itself doing now, there was a comment that, I mean, it has this group that deals with federal relations, which I guess used to just sort of provide information. But now it's a little more active than that. Yes, we had to become a lot more active in our information to Congress. So the DPS, the Federal Relations Subcommittee, organizes congressional visits, and we also work with other societies, such as the Planetary Society, in urging our members as individuals to write to Congress, to write to the president,

and to say what great things we're doing in planetary exploration and planetary science, and that we need the planetary science budget within NASA restored and not have this proposed 20% cut so that we can carry on doing great things. You know, one of the other very interesting things that was mentioned by at least a couple of people is that everybody loves planetary science. The public, Congress, both sides of the aisle. It's just a question of paying for it. Exactly.

But we are fortunate that we have a lot of support. We have bipartisan support that many other causes and organizations cannot claim that they have. You know, really when it comes down to it, people love planetary science, planetary exploration, even all over the world, not just in the U.S. You saw what happened with MSL landing, when Curiosity landed on Mars. So many people all over the U.S., all over the world stopped to watch it. There were press conferences each day of DPS. They featured reports on some of the most eye-opening results presented at the conference,

including news of even more moons in the Pluto-Sharon system. The New Horizons spacecraft, which will arrive at Pluto in less than 1,000 days, may have to take evasive action, according to principal investigator Alan Stern. But that's not all Alan was asked about. Have you chosen names to put forward yet for P4 and P5? If not yet, do you expect to have them named before the flyby? And he suggests perhaps running a contest to choose names, much as happened when Pluto itself was discovered in 1930. We have not chosen those names. I do expect that we'll submit names long before the flyby for both of those satellites. And his idea is interesting.

Entire sessions were devoted to the study of exoplanets, and much of the data came from the Kepler spacecraft. I caught the mission's principal investigator, William Barucki, right after one of these sessions. But this is really spectacular. To see all of this science coming out of your mission must make you feel pretty good. It makes me feel very, very proud that we're providing so much new data for so many people.

And so many young people are coming into the field to use that data and makes all sorts of discoveries. The community, the team, everyone seems to be just delighted with the amount and precision of the data. Speaking of young people, the last speaker in the session, I take it, was an undergraduate. Yes, we have undergraduates and we have people that are not in the science community looking through the data because it's available to the public and they can look and find other planets that we have missed. One of the most interesting things that I heard in one of the presentations

is that your spacecraft is delivering so much data, so many potential candidates, it may not even be possible for all these other ground-based folks to follow up on them. We certainly have a shortage of ground-based facilities, telescopes, and things like that. We have lots of people. We have an enormous number of candidates, getting close to 3,000 candidates that need to get followed up and confirmed as actually planets. Or maybe they're not planets. Maybe 10% might be false positives where they're a small star crossing a big star. And so we need people to look through telescopes and check to see if it's a false positive or not. Something else I'd love for you to comment on is just the diversity of

systems that Kepler is uncovering that a lot of people talked about following up on today. One of the biggest surprises is the different kinds of planets we're finding. We have planets that have no analog at all in our own solar system. Planets that are probably water

planets, whether it's solid water, ice planets. We have planets that are less dense than that even of Saturn, which is less dense than that of water. So enormous planets that are very, very light gases basically floating together. So an enormous range of different kinds of planets. Planets that are denser than iron, for example. I also am thinking of a presentation I heard about a five-planet system, and every one of those is within a tenth of an AU,

a tenth of the distance from Earth to our sun of its own star. Again, another big surprise are these groups of planets, very, very close together, very close to their star, much closer than any planet we have by a factor of 10 or better. We don't know how they come about. How can they get that close and stay so close to their star? How come they're not falling into their star? William Barucki of the Kepler Exoplanet Discovery Mission.

I'll have more for you from DPS after a short break. And we've got much, much more at Planetary.org. This is Planetary Radio. 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. This week we're all about DPS. That's the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, which held its annual meeting in Reno, Nevada, last week.

Look for more of our coverage at planetary.org. A major event at every DPS conference is known as NASA Night, though this time that title had to be broadened to Agency Night to include the National Science Foundation and the European Space Agency. But it was NASA, represented by its planetary science chief Jim Green, that got most of the attention, including some very tough questions about the proposed 20 percent cut in funding for planetary science.

I'll air a great conversation I had with Dr. Green about this and other topics in an upcoming episode. His agency night remarks didn't avoid this subject, but there were bright spots, including next year's launches of LADEE, a lunar mission, and the MAVEN mission to Mars. NASA also selected OSIRIS-REx as our next New Frontiers mission. Its launch is in September 2016 and it's a sample return mission. And it goes to asteroid 1999 RQ-36, which Planetary Society has an open call for naming. And we're very excited about this particular mission.

And it is an important sample return mission for us. NASA's Jim Green also read a letter that had been sent to President Obama. It was written by a 20-year-old college student the morning after Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, landed on Mars. What truly inspires me about this mission is not the flawless success the NASA scientists and engineers achieved or the staggering technological advances that have been fueled by similar exploration. that have been fueled by similar exploration. Rather, it is the unbridled joy and the unity I have seen on the faces of the crying, hugging members of Mission Control and in countless Internet celebratory posts and in excited conversations with people this morning.

with people this morning. I am 20 years old and the only times I can remember feeling as close to my fellow Americans as I do now has been during national tragedies. The unifying effects of scientific expeditions like Curiosity and the Apollo landings is incredibly powerful, all the more so because it is born out of triumphant national success rather than sorrow. Please continue to fund NASA and its expeditions. In so many ways, we lift ourselves up when we shoot for the stars. Sincerely, Isaac Larkin. DPS leaders encouraged attendees to make themselves heard by joining the Planetary Society's Save Our Science letter-writing campaign, among other ways.

The Society's Emily Lakdawalla made an additional suggestion. As many letters as you guys can write, there are many, many more letters that can be written by members of the public. It's incumbent upon you to advertise the power of planetary exploration to inspire and excite the public about space exploration and to get them to write these letters. There's a sort of activation energy to their interest. You have to go out there, advocate not just for your own interest, but for the rest of the planetary community, why all of planetary exploration is important to the American public. So please write to the president, but also do what you can to excite the rest of the community

about space exploration so that we can have future missions. Heidi Hamel is Executive Vice President of Aura, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. She's also Vice President of the Planetary Society's Board of Directors. Heidi stopped to talk with me when agency night at DPS finally ended. Heidi, the very last slide in this town hall event with the agencies, primarily NASA, good spirited discussion, but you had the last word, and it was about that slide that said questions.

Beautiful slide. It was a gorgeous slide. I loved it. It had gorgeous images of Jupiter and Saturn, a whole bunch of terrestrial planets, and a human figure with a shining eye. And when I just looked at it, I realized that there was something missing. The two big, beautiful, ice giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, were not on the slide. So I asked the question, will they ever be on that slide? Will we ever have a chance to launch a mission to an ice giant? It's really important now because what we're learning with

our studies of planets around other stars is that most of them, a thousand of them that we've discovered so far, are giant worlds like Neptune and Uranus, not super giant worlds like Jupiter and Saturn. So Uranus and Neptune represent bodies that are ubiquitous out there. And we have two of them right here in our solar system. I'd love to see us launch a mission to them someday so we can study those systems in depth and really figure out what's going on with the giant atmospheres, their fabulous moon systems, their incredible ring systems, their really quirky tilted

rotated magnetic fields. There's just so much science waiting to be done there. Astronomer Heidi Hamel. We'll close our DPS coverage with an old friend. Bill Hartman of the Planetary Science Institute led the effort in the 1970s that reshaped our understanding of how the moon formed. He came to DPS to present Mars research that has even more profound ramifications for our own planet. Bill, there is a heck of a lot of great science going on at this year's DPS. But for anybody who thinks that studying another planet might have something useful to say about this planet, your talk, I think, really stands out. Thank you. Yeah, I think

that's the idea here because we're looking at global climate models, which are, you know, numerical computer models developed for planet Earth. These are the things that people use to predict where hurricanes are going to go and what's going to happen if you have more CO2 in the atmosphere. Suddenly, people got the idea of, let's take that and apply it to Mars. And you just plug in the Mars gravity and the Mars atmosphere and the Mars topography and run the model, and it tells you what to expect for winds and even precipitation of snow and ice on Mars. There will be more from planetary scientist Bill Hartman and the application of Earth climate models to Mars at planetary.org,

along with much more coverage of the 44th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, including more of Agency Night and a presentation at the Women in Astronomy luncheon, along with videos featuring Emily Lakdawalla. Stay with us. What's Up with Bruce Betts is up next. In the night sky, you can still catch Mars, reddish and low towards the horizon in the west.

After sunset, still hanging out with the reddish similarly bright star and terries jupiter rising in the 9 p.m time time frame in the east looking super bright for those of you who who celebrate our odd halloween holiday if it's after nine or so or you'll look over to the east and you can see Jupiter hanging out with the moon. And Aldebaran. Creepy. Venus still super bright in the east in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history.

It was 1968, the last flight of the X-15. Here's a bonus random space fact. It had 199 flights. Is that right? They couldn't do one more just to make it an even 200? Man, you really require a lot of people. You did say 68 was the last flight?

That just seems crazy because I thought that they kept retrofitting it and upgrading it. People can mock me if I'm wrong. All right. Well, let us know. And I'll mock my sources. If you know that Bruce is off base on this, let us know, and we'll tell you his source.

2004, and this one I know, Cassini, which has celebrated the 15th anniversary of launch, eight years ago did its first flyby of the Large Moon Titan, which has had all sorts of awesome flybys since then, shedding light, so to speak, on the clouded world. I saw Linda Spilker at DPS, congratulated her, 15 years in space, not her, her spacecraft, and said, we've got to get her back. Thanks for clarifying.

It's time for another one of her regular Cassini updates on this radio show slash podcast. Do you have something special? Yes, yes, indeed I do. regular Cassini updates on this radio show slash podcast. Do you have something special? Yes. Yes, indeed, I do. Have you been foraging around? Well, the pity is that I didn't ask more people to do this at DPS, but I did catch one very significant person. Excellent.

Here he is. Hey there. I'm Jim Bell. I'm the president of the Planetary Society, and I'm a professor at Arizona State University. And here today is your random space fact. El Presidente. That was very nice. That was El Presidente. Jim Bell.

He's a good guy. You know something else? He's a good guy. He's very tall. Yes, he is. You know, I've known him since grad school. No, I didn't know he was tall and that's not the random space back grad schools by the way uh that was good enough i no no the the random space fact the average magnetic field on the sun you pick a random spot on the sun while you're vaporizing measure the magnetic field on the surface.

It's on average about one gauss, which is just a fun unit, by the way. Gauss. That's about twice the average magnetic field strength on the surface of the Earth. About half a gauss. But sunspots, in a sunspot region, they can have magnetic fields of like 3,000 gauss. Like 6,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. So they must collect a lot of paperclips. They do. Why do you think they're dark?

So there were two issues, apparently, with the trivia contest. Let me tell you it as I said it, which was what is the first name of the principal investigators for each of the next two Mars landers? No, what I should have asked is what is the name that each of the next two principal investigators for NASA missions that they go by, that they are called? So anyway, we'll take a whole range of answers here. I not surprisingly, self-absorbingly, was looking for Bruce, which is what the PIs of Bruce Joukowsky of the MAVEN mission and Bruce Bannert of Insight go by. But it turns out Bruce Bannert, as people quickly pointed out to me, is actually, he goes by his middle name. His first name is actually William.

So we would have given it to one of the people who caught you in this. But it happens that our winner this week is Tyler Underwood, who simply said Bruce. Oh, then can we just delete all that? Yeah. Now it was much too entertaining. So, Tyler. Oh, yeah. And also, you know, there are also other international missions.

I really meant to say NASA missions. And go ahead, Matt. I'm sorry I interrupted the fabulous prize. Tyler, we're going to send to you in Marion, Illinois, a fabulous prize. The Deep Space or the Space Probe T-shirt in beautiful dramatic black that shows a whole bunch of spacecraft. It's like space. Only smaller. It's from Chop Shop Store.

And anybody can get one of these. It's a bunch of stuff that the Planetary Society cooperates with Chop Shop Store on. But Tyler's going to get one for free. And I did have to mention Ed Lupin down in San Diego, who just said the next two Mars missions, Maven and Insider, being led by Bruce's Almighty. Oh, there you go. All right, we move on to another trivia contest. About how much brighter is the sun compared to the full moon as seen from Earth? How much brighter? It's blah, blah, blah times brighter.

The sun compared to the full moon. Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. You have until the 29th, October 29th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about tall people. Thank you. Good night. I really look up to them. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

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 a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.