Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Amazing Technology at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Planetary Radio host Mat Kaplan interviewed NIAC Fellows about their revolutionary projects as part of the 2021 virtual symposium. You’ll hear highlights including how we might grow structures on the Moon and Mars from fungi, and solar sails that will pass excruciatingly close to the Sun before they zoom out of our solar system. We’ll also check in with Society chief scientist Bruce Betts for another What’s Up.  Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2021-2021-niac-symposiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is it a glimpse of our future in space? The 2021 NIAC Symposium, 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. A special episode this week, in spite of the fact that I'm on vacation. Though we had hoped to gather in person over three days in September, the annual symposium of NIAC fellows forged ahead in the virtual world. It was my honor to once again host several of the fellows and other

participants during nine breaks in the action. You'll hear highlights of those conversations today. NIAC is the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, and I think you'll agree that it lives up to its name. We'll follow this dive into the leading or bleeding edge of space tech with yet another What's Up update from Bruce Betts. I can't share headlines from the down lake with you because I produced this episode days ago, but that doesn't prevent you from visiting planetary.org slash down lake to see the latest edition of the Planetary Society's newsletter. There's a new one every Friday. You can also have it conveniently delivered to your inbox, as I do, and it's always free.

We'll start our NIAC visit with an overview from the person who leads the program. Jason Derleth is the NIAC program executive at NASA headquarters. He was the opening speaker at this year's symposium. I began by reminding Jason of how he said new NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy had described NIAC. She called NIAC the seed corn for NASA, which I thought was a very apt metaphor. Yeah, that's kind of how I think of NIAC. I think of us as the venture capitalists of NASA. We get a little bit of money and we try and invest it in what the future could be. And hopefully some of these things will come through and really strike it rich but obviously we're not earning money as venture capitalists what we're doing is we're investing

in humanity's future for space and so striking it rich might mean enabling somebody to go out and mine asteroids and sell the water so somebody else might actually be making lots of money but what it will do is enable the human race to go deeper and farther into space and to help us explore, which is what it's all about. And you just mentioned several of the things, projects, the fellows have proposed that we'll be hearing about over the next few days. You also mentioned that most of the projects that are funded through the NIAC program may never turn into anything practical or real, but that even some of those have rippling effects. And I don't know if you can see it in your picture, but here on my space tie, there's Ingenuity, which is still now and then flying above the surface of Mars. And didn't you say that Ingenuity was sort of inspired by an IAP project?

Yes, the PI of Ingenuity actually mentioned it in an article and we contacted him and he confirmed, yes, that he got from watching a presentation kind of like what we're doing today going out to the world live without really knowing what people are going to be saying these this is a conference and only the sort of structure what it really is is it's a a working meeting where the various projects are reporting their progress out to the program office. And we are evaluating their project reports, essentially. But like I said, we bring everybody together so that it becomes this fellowship of ingenuity, of a fellowship of creativity and advanced concepts thinkers that are helping each other. Instead of just pursuing their own careers, they're helping everybody else pursue careers as well, fellowship of creativity and advanced concepts thinkers that are helping each other instead of just pursuing their own careers. They're helping everybody else pursue careers as well, but helping

to explore. You made another great point as you were talking about exactly this in your opening presentation, and that was the interdisciplinary nature that is so key to NIAC and another reason why it's so important to bring everybody together. I only wish we were all in one big room in Tucson, which of course was the plan before the pandemic got in the way, the Delta variant. I have seen the synergy taking place after presentations where, you know, one fellow will walk up to another and say, hey, we need to talk. You must see that a lot. My favorite story is when I was sitting at breakfast one morning in the hotel restaurant, and I had a very disheveled fellow come up to me and say, thank you for having this meeting.

I was up until three o'clock last night talking with another fellow, and we're going to put in a proposal to the next solicitation together as a team and that does happen probably once every couple of years we get proposals from teams that met each other during the symposium and partnered which is just fantastic that really is could you take us through sort of an elevator speech version of how NIAC does its work, how proposals are made, how they're evaluated, and how they get funded. Yes, absolutely. We are open to anyone who is legally able to work in the United States to propose to. And so we get generally about 300 proposals every year. The program office goes through those 300 proposals for phase one studies, which I already mentioned. It's a nine-month study for $125,000 last year. Now we're up to $175,000

this year in the open solicitation now. And we look through those 300 and we eliminate anyone who's out of scope for the program, which is a large percentage of them. For prospective proposers, I can just say, read the solicitation. Maybe even every day when you're writing your proposal. If you're out of scope for the program, we can't select you, no matter how good your idea is. And so we select about 110 of them to go forward to full panel reviews. I should have said that those first proposals are only three-page white papers that describe

the idea and how it will be used in the future if it is a successful technology development. The full eight-page proposal comes to a panel review where we hire experts in the fields, the various fields, and that means that we have to have multiple fields sitting at the table almost every time for each review. But we make sure that we have at least one or two experts in the actual field of each proposal that's being reviewed. And then we have a technical panel review where these experts talk about each of the proposals and rank them and provide us with a ranked list. We take that list, the best ones out of that list, and we check to make sure that no

other place in NASA is funding similar work. And we check with our own mission directorate, the higher up technology development folks and the other technology folks within the other mission directorates at NASA, like the science mission directorate. We check with the technologists there to see if there is any special interest or special disinterest from those groups. And then we take the entire set of information that we've gleaned in a small package to the source selection official who then chooses the about 16 winners each year and like i said anyone who is eligible to work legally in the united states is eligible to propose to nyack and so we have had graduate students propose and win we've had an undergraduate

student propose and win a nyack award we've had garage inventors. Quite literally one of our fellows had an optics bench in his garage that he was working from. We've had physical therapists proposing how to do artificial gravity in a new way that's never been thought of before. Normally you rotate a spacecraft and the astronauts stick to the inside. He came up with an interesting way of doing it linearly with a sled. So we've had these really creative folks from medium-sized businesses, small businesses, and even NASA propose new ideas. And while it might sound a little bit like Insider Pool there, when NASA can propose to a NASA program, there are a lot of folks who have really challenging ideas that the status quo can't always accept. A great example of that might be

the Apollo program had the Earth orbit rendezvous and the lunar orbit rendezvous, where the rocket launched, and then they turned the capsule around and pulled out the limb, and then they took that whole set to the moon, and they separated. The limb went to the surface around and pulled out the limb. And then they took that whole set to the moon and they separated. The limb went to the surface. And then the astronauts came back up and docked again with the command module and then came home. That was not the preferred solution. And there was one engineer at Langley Research Center who said, that's the right way to do it. And I can prove it mathematically.

And he had to keep arguing and keep arguing and keep arguing. And eventually people said, that might be the only way we can do it. Let's do that. And we get folks like that, that have said, hey, you know, there might be a better way, folks. And we are one of the few places that they can go and get a little bit of money to do a real study to show that their idea might be the best way to do it, or maybe even the only way. So how then do phase one fellows make it up to phase two and then to that ultimate level of phase three? Phase three, I like to say, doesn't exist. As a proposer to the program, I think it's the best strategy to always be done, to be ready to seize an opportunity that shows up, even if you've just finished

a phase one proposal, maybe you can find funding from an implementation organization right then. And that's the best way to go. NIAC has only a very small number of dollars and only a very small number of studies. So what we do is we have the phase ones that have completed their studies but not won a phase two yet and yes that means that people who have won studies in the past but haven't won a phase two can re-propose. They make a longer proposal 20 or 25 pages depending on the

year for a $500,000 study that lasts two years. And we look at the proposals and have a technical panel with experts in the fields, give us a rating and a ranking, and then we take it to the source selection official after checking to make sure there's still no duplication of funding anywhere else, very similar to the phase ones. And for the phase threes, we do a very similar process, but without a technical panel, because the NIAC program office has been shepherding these folks for four years. We feel that we are the experts as far as those are concerned. And then we get input from the mission directorates, especially because phase three is the one that we get each year. We only get one.

And that's why I say, especially for phase twos, don't count on the phase three is the one that we get each year. We only get one. And that's why I say, especially for phase twos, don't count on the phase three being your service to funding. Try and find an implementer that wants your technology instead. But for those that just have too much risk to move forward with an implementer, a phase three might be a way of doing it if they can win the one for the year. The NIAC program office down selects and then

runs each one by implementers in the agency. So the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Director, the Science Mission Director. We haven't had one yet for aeronautics, but we would go to aeronautics mission directorate if we had an aero proposal for phase three. And then we bring that to the source selection official and the source selection official chooses, finally makes the final decision. Say something about the NIAC external council, because it is such a collection of all-stars. So the original NIAC program had an external council to help guide it towards the edge of what's possible. And we implemented that when we started the new program up again in 2010, 2011. And what the external counsel is meant to do is to keep us from having that sort of slow creep towards the mirror, if you will, a mirror additional government program.

Government programs tend to shy away from risk over time. They choose things that are certain instead of things that are uncertain because that's how you have successes, and successes are everything for individual careers. The NIAC program doesn't want that to happen, and so we have a whole bunch of, well, a whole bunch is nine, eight, eight experts from the field, the different fields, to help us understand how well we did. They are not involved in the selection process at all,

but they do give us feedback each year on what we selected and tell us, hey, this one was a little bit over the line towards science fiction, and these other ones seem too implementable, too easy for the NIAC program. So you need to think about that. We really appreciate their time and their input to the program. They're absolutely vital to keep this program on the cutting edge. And I really thank each and every one of them for coming each year and attending these meetings and asking questions because they help make the fellows and the studies better with those questions. NIAC program executive Jason Derleth. By the way, I want to thank all the great people at NIAC for their support. They pulled off a miracle when it became clear that the Delta variant would make an in-person symposium unwise.

All of the presentations are available on demand at the NIAC Symposium website. We'll have that link on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio. I also want to thank the University of Arizona. The school was looking forward to taking us on tours of its Miro Lab and other facilities. They still contributed an impressive panel discussion that made me even keener to visit Tucson someday soon. Let's hear from the first of nine NIAC fellows I spoke with across the symposium. Lynn Rothschild of NASA's Ames Research Center has joined us before. Lynn is a 2021 Phase II NIAC fellow. She reported on her amazing work with fungi that may one day literally give

people living on the moon a home. Here's how the break began. It has been absolutely delightful hearing these presentations so far. The typical diversity, variety of amazing solutions, many of which may not see the light of day. Speaking of not seeing the light of day, that seems well-suited for mushrooms and fungi, I would say. Lynn Rothschild is here with us. Lynn, great to see you again. I was also wonderful to see again that mycelial network stool with someone sitting on it. Yeah, it was just great. I had a group of what are called iGEM students in International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, and they were working on this project,

and without me knowing it, actually, they turned around and in two weeks made this absolutely fantastic little stool. As I always say, it's human-rated because they all sat on it, and it's currently in my office. So I know that I can sit on it too. So it's even adult old lady rated.

And I think that that is a fabulous demonstration of the power of being able to build things with fungal microtexture. And build them more rapidly than I might've expected. It seems to be a good omen for what we heard about in this latest presentation from you, Microtexture Off-Planet. You are, of course, now a 2021 Phase 2 fellow, so you've made it to that advanced level.

There was something on one of your first slides. You had a list of some of the benefits of using fungi to help construct the structures that we will need as humanity expands, at least as far as the moon and maybe beyond. It mentioned the psychological properties or advantages of making stuff out of fungi. What did you have in mind? Well, what's interesting is when you're building with fungi, you can use that as a material in itself. And in fact, there are a few people like Phil Ross who have used fungi, the mycelium in particular, and then squished them down and made imitation leather for high-end handbags. So you could just use the mycelium by themselves.

But you can also use it as a binding agent. People have, including my wonderful colleague Chris Maurer, who's an architect at Red House Studios, who's been working on this very, very serious way. You can use this to agglutinate something like wood chips or lawn clippings. Obviously, we're not going to have either of those on Mars. But when you do wood chips, you end up with something that you would swear is particle board. And in fact, telling a story out of school, I brought an example of it to NASA headquarters and said, what do you think of this? And they smelled it and said, it's particle board, but it kind of smells like a mushroom.

I said, well, yes, because it is. And so you have the potential to build things that are warm and cozy and more familiar to us. You could paint, you could make them different colors. And it seems to me that there would be huge psychological benefits to using that kind of approach, something that we're much more comfortable with on planet Earth than just simply staring at steel walls, living in a large tin can. When I read the description of your project on the NIAC website, I saw this reference to sort of building in bacteria, cyanobacteria, into these structures. Then there was also a very intriguing mention of building in bacteria that release oxygen.

Is that also something that might be practical? Yes, I hope it's practical. I think it's a great idea. So for a long time now, I've been pushing the idea that on planet Earth, we use, well, we use, Earth has evolved organisms that take advantage of the raw materials on the planet. Water, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, minerals and so on, and convert those into sugars and proteins and nucleic acids and so on. Things that other organisms like us can eat. And this is actually how the world has run

for literally billions of years. So to me, we should be taking advantage of exactly the same approach off planet, particularly if you're dealing with someplace like Mars that has the CO2 in the water. Why not use a photosynthetic organism such as cyanobacterium that can take the water, split it open, spit out the oxygen as its waste product, but something obviously that is extremely important for us, and again, provide that interface between the raw materials on the planet and the things that other organisms such as ourselves would need to eat. Rather than bringing up a machine that does it for you, why not take advantage of these exquisitely evolved machines called life?

And so I believe that that's going to be the key interface, and that's why we actually recently completed a satellite mission testing some of these concepts, totally outside the NIAC program, but we've also incorporated that into this particular project with the fungal microtexture. I was also intrigued by the mention, both on the NIAC website and in your presentation, of terrestrial applications of this technology, which would be a lovely sort of spinoff to see. And even the interest from a master chef. Can you expand on that a little bit? I mean, would this be something that you could see as helping to create structures, particularly

in a disadvantaged area as third world nations? Absolutely. And again, my wonderful colleague, Chris Maurer, already has a project going in Namibia on this. And we certainly imagine being able to make quick structures that you could use as sort of a garage or as a shelter for refugees. But beyond thinking about microtexture for full habitats, you could also use it to replace a lot of things. I'm looking at you right now, You could also use it to replace a lot of things. I'm looking at you right now sitting in your room,

and it looks like you have a wooden or wooden imitation desk, and behind you may be a dresser and bookshelves and so on, filing cabinet. There is no reason every one of these things couldn't be made with fungal microtexture. And to go out a little bit on a limb, I bet you we could make your hat and shirt and tie out of it if we're not finding anything, if we're just using that so that you would have sort of an imitation leather, you know, microtech. I'm not sure if we could do your glasses or your computer quite yet, but we could build you a very nice computer case. I look forward to shopping at your new online site, the Micromarket. Please forgive this dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie. Maybe I should say

dyed-in-the-fungi Trekkie. Have you ever seen Star Trek Discovery? One of those new series that you have to get streaming? There's a mycelial network that stretches across the universe in Star Trek Discovery.

Pure science fiction, of course, till we discover it, which apparently outdoes warp drive. So perhaps you are going to help us travel between the stars. The work that you're doing today might someday turn into that, at least in the Star Trek universe, Lynn. That's my next NIAC. Lynn Rothschild of NASA Ames. Next up is a conversation with two NIAC fellows.

Chris Morrison is with a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, or USNC. His 2021 Phase I NIAC study is called Extrasolar Object Interceptor and Sample Return Enabled by Compact Ultra Power, dense radioisotope batteries. Phew. Joe Nemanek is with the Aerospace Corporation. He had presented about his 2021 Phase 1 study titled Atomic Planar Power for Lightweight Exploration, or APPLE. Gentlemen, it seems that both of you are trying to address a refrain that I hear from mission scientists and engineers all the time, which can be summarized as, give us more power.

And you both have ways of doing that. Chris, yours is maybe a bit more revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Could you, for those who may have missed it, give us, I've been asking people for their 60-second elevator speech about what you hope to do, and in particular, the CAB, this chargeable atomic battery. Yeah, thanks for the introduction. So this is a technology that uses alternative radioisotopes to plutonium-238, which has been the stalwart of the NASA program. And if you look back in the 60s, NASA actually looked at a lot of different radio isotopes, but they chose that one because it is the best. With the exception of, in some cases, you don't need an 87-year half-life. You know, if you're going to Pluto, save the plutonium for Pluto. But for this sample return mission that I want to do, it's about a

15-year mission. So picking an isotope with a shorter half-life and a high power density is something that is kind of enabled for this mission. The technology that I'm working on works not only for this particular isotope, but the idea is that someone can come to me and say, I have this mission, it's this long and this power, what technology options do you have for me? And I can find the right one for them. Generally, plutonium is extremely good, but there are niche areas where alternative radioisotopes can be quite good. And you're talking about use of cobalt-60, which I think you said has something like 30 times the energy that we could get out of a plutonium-powered system, an RTG?

Yeah, it's 30 times the power. So in terms of the energy stored inside, it's about the same. But the difference is, one is emitting that energy over a period of about 100 years, and the other one's emitting that energy over a period of about five years. So the power density, because of the short half-life, is incredibly high. Joe, as I said, your project may be a little bit more evolutionary since you're still talking about using plutonium, but still fascinating work. And you're shooting for, I think you said, roughly double the, I guess, watts per gram that we get from the RTGs that have powered so many NASA missions up until now. Tell us a little bit about Apple.

so many NASA missions up until now. Tell us a little bit about Apple. Yeah, so the concept behind Apple is to take the monolithic and large MMRTG design, which you would have to build your entire spacecraft around due to how big it is and how much energy it puts out, and making a smaller compact, in this case, a flat design. It allows you to then do your mission design by saying, here's how much power we need, and I can say, okay, you need X number of tiles, you need 16 tiles or 12 tiles to meet your mission power needs.

We chose plutonium primarily because less of the half-life that we really thought we needed an alpha emitter. We originally were doing studies on ones like strontium-90 and americium, but we found the penetration depth of things like beta and gamma rays were so large that we were having difficulty merging a flat tile. We don't have a lot of space for radiation protection and shielding in this. So instead we want something as an alpha emitter. So at that point, the plutonium itself actually does most of the

shielding from the alpha particles. The alpha particles are caught and transformed in a thermal energy within the actual isotope itself for the most part. Joe, when I looked at your diagrams of these relatively tiny devices, I kept thinking of integrated circuits. I mean, it looked like this was something that would come out of a fab, but I know that's a little bit off, but is it in any way a decent comparison? It's actually a fairly good comparison because what we found was the mass of the plutonium, the mass of the battery, the mass of the radiator, none of those are really significant contributors to the overall mass of the tile. What's really driving it is the mass of the thermoelectrics.

These are semiconductor materials that are going to be made in a similar way to the fab. this new flat design, we're going to be taking a lot of lessons from the semiconductor manufacturing area to get this planar design of the thermoelectrics and then surround them with our different types of insulation to really get that heat flow going only from hot shoe to cold shoe to our radiator. Chris, I'm going to come back to you because I'm so intrigued by the fact that you have extrasolar object right there in the name of this project. Was it inspired by our recent encounters with Oumuamua and the Borisov comet? Or was it just accelerated by the thought that this might be a way to reach the next one of these visitors from interstellar space? So I've been proposing NIACs for quite a few years throughout grad school and

even the last few years. And my go-to mission has traditionally been the solar gravitational lens. That kind of seemed to be the long duration, long distance type of goal. But when I saw Muamua, I thought, hey, this is really cool because it's not a problem of distance. It's a problem of velocity. And that changes the equation. If it's a problem of distance. It's a problem of velocity. And that changes the equation. If it's a problem of distance, you have to wait a certain amount of time to arrive at your destination. And it can take quite a long time. So if you have an isotope that's decaying, it's short-lived, it won't work for that mission. You want to use longer-lived radioisotopes. But for these particular missions where these objects are coming into the inner solar system, it's all about getting that speed up quickly. And that is where I think this innovation

came in. It was like a light switch that popped onto my head because I've been evaluating radio isotopes and fission systems. I'd love to learn more about fusion systems too. I think those are really cool, but my background is more on radioisotope and fission. And I just saw this and, you know, kind of a light bulb turned on. I have a feeling it's going to be more of a common theme in a lot of the future NIACs of catching up with Oumuamua or going out to some of these extrasolar objects because it just presents such a really interesting science opportunity, something that's never been done before. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you don't turn out to be right about that. Joe, what's next for Apple for your little tiles?

So for Apple, what's next is looking for manufacturing and testing of the thermoelectric design. We believe that we can nail down the thermal isolation concepts in the phase one, but no one's really done in-plane thermoelectric heat to electricity conversion. And so that's a big thing we're going to need to demonstrate in the next step to show that we can, you know, sort of build these thermoelectrics in a different way and still get the efficiencies that we're calculating. Excellent. Thank you, gentlemen. I wonder, in one sentence, can you tell us, each of you, how important getting this support from NIAC has been to your work? Chris? It's increased the visibility and interest, and I think it's already influenced people,

at least in the United States, to look at a lot of these cool concepts. So, the visibility is extremely important. Joe, you had a few extra seconds to think about this. Thanks to Chris. What would you add? We found that the community of fellows that NIAC supplies has really given us a lot of great connections to people who can answer the tough questions.

Each of us on this team were experts in our field, but there are so many fields that need to be brought together in a collaborative fashion to make a technology like this work. And NIAC has been instrumental in affecting that. Joe Mnemonic of the Aerospace Corporation and Chris Morrison of the UltraSafe Nuclear Corporation. Sigrid Close is also a 2021 Phase I NIAC fellow. While she was able to record her presentation for day one of the symposium, she wasn't available to talk with me live during a break. Her colleague, Nicholas Lee, stepped in to discuss a study called SCATR, that's Sustained

Chipsat-Cubesat Activity Through Transmitted Electromagnetic Radiation. Their dream is to chipsat cubesat activity through transmitted electromagnetic radiation their dream is to send a powerful mothership to a destination like Uranus you also have on board this mothership I think you said 20 to a hundred of these tiny spacecraft which would be set out to to further. Do I have that right? Yeah, that's correct. The idea is to allow distributed measurements without flying a full-fledged second mothership that has its own nuclear power and everything that comes with it,

all of the cost that goes into the large-scale spacecraft designs. I'm from the Planetary Society, so you know that I'm going to point out it was exciting to see that you are relying on essentially light sail technologies, that these tiny craft are not just powered by a laser on the mothership, but they actually get propulsion and attitude control and communication via that laser. The concept has evolved over time. This is, I think, the third time we actually proposed a form of this project to NOAC. Initially, we had a graduate student, Sean Young, who just graduated and is now at Johns Hopkins APL.

He was looking at harvesting energy from the space environment itself. So that would be things like spacecraft charging or looking at impacts of meteoroids or ring particles on a spacecraft harvesting either the acoustic energy or the RF energy that comes off of that, or trying to develop sort of a tether system that can pull energy out of the plasma or out of the magnetospheres. A lot of those numbers are pretty low unless you really stretch the spacecraft design. So what if we brought our power with us? So we have these deployable probes and they're going to be powered through some harvesting system. But what if that system harvested power that we have

control over? So that's where we brought either laser or RF energy beamed from a mothership. As we worked through those numbers, the RF didn't really seem feasible at all. So we focused primarily on the laser. Once we have the laser there, with all of this work that, as some people are saying in chat, many other people have studied with breakthrough star shot, with light sails. My PhD initially started looking at solar sails for CubeSats. And all of this technology can sort of be wrapped into, the smaller the spacecraft, the more agile it gets within this laser. And what we didn't really have an understanding of

at the start of this whole project was, how small could we make the spacecraft? How small could we make the laser and still fly within it? That's where we're trying to converge those numbers now. I'm going to guess that a lot of lay people out there, and I count myself one of them, might look at your plan that calls for a 25-watt laser, and they think of a 25-watt light bulb. Actually, a 25-watt laser, especially with the kind of collimated beam that you're proposing, can deliver quite a

bit of energy, can't it? Yeah. So one of the nice things about lasers is that they're generally monochromatic. And so they operate on a single wavelength. So when we look at building solar cells, photovoltaics that deal with lasers, we're focused on a single wavelength of light that we're shining. And that means we can do a lot more with much simpler cells, like a single junction cell should be able to convert a much larger fraction of the energy. And recent publications from other research groups have shown up to 58% efficiency. I liked your description of these small sats, chip sats, cube sats, your description of these small sats, chip sats, cube sats, beginning at least at a very,

very small size, as being disposable or expendable. And you compared this to when Captain Picard on the Enterprise sent out a probe. He didn't really expect to get it back. What is the explanation? Why can't a large flagship style spacecraft do the work on its own, what's the real advantage in having other instruments on these tiny craft that are sent out from the mothership? So one of the things we're really focused on is the concept of distributed measurements. And that's been something that's been deployed around Earth, the Themis mission, the Artemis mission. A number of spacecraft have been flown around the Earth system. Swarm is another one, where by flying multiple sensors, making the same measurement over some distance, what you're getting is a decoupling of how the measurements are changing

with time versus how they're changing with space. Very interesting. We just had on Planetary Radio the PI for a newly approved mission to Mars, which has two CubeSats working with the magnetosphere of Mars, measuring it for the same reason, to give them both temporal and spatial data, which it sounds like what you're after as well. One of the members of the audience wants to talk with you about self-centering light sales. It struck me that this is exactly the kind of synergy that really warms the hearts of everybody at NIAC. Sounds like something that I bet you'll want to follow up on. There's definitely interesting conversations that we have with different NIAC projects and how they synergize with each other. Nicholas Lee speaking on behalf of NIAC fellow Sigrid Close from Stanford University. Several more NIAC fellows want to tell us about their fascinating concepts,

and there's my conversation with a special keynote speaker at the 2021 NIAC Symposium. All that and Bruce Betts are moments away. There's so much going on in the world of space science and exploration, and we're here to share it with you. Hi, I'm Sarah, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society. Are you looking for a place to get more space? Catch the latest space exploration news, pretty planetary pictures, and Planetary Society publications on our social media channels. You can find the Planetary Society on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Make sure you like and subscribe so you never miss the next exciting update from the world of planetary science. We're back with more highlights from the 2021 NASA Innovative Advanced Concept Symposium.

Ron Pollidon is a Texas-based 2021 NIAC Phase I Fellow. And Ron is from Lunar Resources Incorporated, but long history before that as an astrophysicist. He was Chief Technologist at the fabled Goddard Space Flight Center for many years and Chief Architect for Civil Systems at Northrop Grumman. And now does a lot of different stuff, but one of those is about lunar resources, this relatively small company. Ron, welcome. Oh, thank you, Matt. I'm happy to be here. Glad you invited me. Oh, absolutely. We're very glad to have you on board. And congratulations, of course, on becoming an IAC fellow and being able to pursue

this project, which you call Farview, an in-situ manufactured lunar far-side radio observatory. You know, it's not the only presentation we're hearing at the NIAC symposium about building a big telescope on the far side of the moon. I remember one in the last couple of days that had a an image from I think it was from the 1970s of a very very speculative antenna there on far side So this is something people have been thinking about for a long time you addressed it in your presentation But remind us why will it be so useful to have this kind of facility out there on? What is not the dark side of the moon? But the far side. One of the aspects of science in general is that we always, as we learn, we open new windows.

We realize that there's something we can't see or do from the Earth, and so we look for ways to do that. In the 60s, that started with ultraviolet telescopes and x-ray telescopes. And as we've learned more and more, we have realized that, you know, the Earth is indeed constraining in many ways. And for cosmology in particular, there is an era of the formation of the universe, the first phases when the universe went from neutral hydrogen everywhere to a little bit of helium to stars and galaxies. We would love to study that. The problem is that information is redshifted into low frequency radio. And so this 21 centimeter line of hydrogen now appears in the tens of megahertz areas, depending on where you're at. phenomena and generate a lot of noise. So while you, in principle, can observe at least down to the ionospheric limit, you really don't get a good picture. And so where could you go to do this? If you're in space, you still see the Earth, so it's still going to be noisy. The sun is noisy. But if you go to the lunar far side, the moon is a really nice blocking filter. And so it blocks out all the

noise from the Earth. And as long as the sun's on the other side, you have as pristine of data as you could possibly get. And so that's the reason everybody is looking to put things on the far side. I'm reminded of that silence that I think all of the Apollo command module pilots enjoyed when, for a brief time, they became the furthest humans from Earth that still have have ever been part of our species. There are proposals for single giant antennas dishes generally for Farside. Yours is something different it reminds me of something like ALMA down in the Atacama in Chile or the Allen array that the SETI Institute operates. Are those fair comparisons? Yes. The one big difference between us and the Lunar Crater Radial Telescope is that we're an interferometer.

And so that interferometer gives us much more leverage. It does a variety of things. We can actually map out the distributions and get the power spectrum far better than we can with a single dish. We also are able to to image the entire sky every few minutes and so we can gather ancillary data uh things on transient sources such as as uh you know magnetic fields on uh the planets of the solar system uh we probably can see magnetic fields around uh stars and and hopefully some exoplanets out a short distance. And so this is the big advantage of an interferometer. And so this was the focus of this effort is how could we

build a large interferometer on the lunar far side? The problem is it has to be large. It can't be, you know, 10 dipoles. It has to be a lot of dipoles because the signals faint the key thing with us is that we're building this in situ and there is no pre-designed uh constraints so literally if we get up there and let's say we do a prototype mission and we build uh 10 dipoles and we discover that well we really need to make them 20 longer we just make them 20 longer it's a very different way of perceiving how you would build something. And that's the big power of this. And so it's really the extraction of materials and the ability to manufacture directly without any pre-plan that gives this thing so much leverage. Have you read Andy Weir's book Artemis? Yes. In that book, they build things out of aluminum with this smelter on the moon using in situ resources.

I mean, that must have struck a note with you. Oh, yes. No, the funny thing is I read that before I joined Little Resources. So it was like, I know about this. And so, yeah, and so it's been an interesting learning experience for me. I came from a different era, learning about In-Situ and how to work this. You've got to think of different ways to do things. The one big leverage that Farview has is we're not modifying a previous build. We are actually coming at this completely orthogonally.

We're carrying as little stuff with us as we can and seeing what we can manufacture. And whenever we encounter something where we need to bring this from Earth, we spin off, all right, how do we not bring this from Earth? The whole goal is to land only the tools we need to build and then use the moon for all of our resources. And that's going to make this much cheaper.

The one other advantage is if things break, we just fix them. So there's not a problem of, well, what do you do if the thermal cycling breaks an antenna? Well, we go patch it together again. It means that we can invest in this and have a 50-year observatory if we want. Current designs is probably something like a metric ton to land, but it can generate tens of metric tons per year of resources. For something large, for a habitat or anything else, we can generate more than enough material in a year to really keep everybody happy. Sounds like after all these years,

you're still having a pretty good time. Yes. Oh, I'm having more fun these last few years than I have in a long time. NIAC fellow Ron Poladin of Lunar Resources. We're about to hear from 2020 Phase 2 fellow Masahiro Ono of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. The title of Hiro's study speaks for itself, Enceladus Vent Explorer. Welcome, Hero. We have a couple of minutes here to talk.

Thank you. Thanks, Matt, for having me. Of course. You're a 2020 NIAC Phase II recipient. And the project, of course, is the Enceladus Vent Explorer. Because you and others on your team, and I will mention Morgan Cable, your colleague at JPL, who delivered the presentation yesterday with you and was our guest on Planetary Radio making the case for Enceladus. You don't just want to fly through those plumes that rise up out of the tiger stripes at the south pole of Enceladus.

You want to visit them. You want to drop spacecraft or little rovers down inside them. Is that a fair description of what you hope to do? Yeah, you want to see, right? You know, when I was younger, I used to travel around the world. We have some fundamental desire to see, right, the places. And we now know that the fantastic place is there with that man-powered life. Encountering with extraterrestrial life, that's going to answer one of our fundamental questions of mankind.

It's there. The door is open. Why not? Absolutely. Yeah, that question being, are we alone? And maybe the other question that our boss, Bill Nye, likes to ask, where do we come from? Because this might help to answer that as well. It's certainly possible. I was so pleased to see the progress that is being made, including that simulator, that cryojet facility that you've put together. I think it was at JPL where you are. Am I right?

Actually beginning to simulate these geysers? Yes. Yes. Of course, you cannot simulate to simulate these geysers? Yes, yes. Of course, you cannot simulate the full-scale geyser in the lab. What we are making is a miniaturized version of it. But still, you know, you can learn a lot. You can test the hardware to retire the major risks. Doing it in a vacuum and at those incredibly frigid temperatures, right? That's right.

Morgan, she talked about the questions that remain to be answered if we do a full exploration of these plumes at Enceladus. And that they cross over many, many disciplines. Is this represented in the people who are looking into this at JPL and elsewhere from different disciplines? I mean, biological, geological, and so on. Oh, yeah, of course. We have a very diverse team. Myself, actually, my background is how to automate spacecraft. I'm a software guy. But of course, we have to work with hardware people, system engineers, and scientists in many domains. Actually, we had a workshop to create an SDM with 20 or 30 scientists. So that's one aspect of NIAC, right? What NIAC really

is. I really enjoy the interaction with people. That's another reason it's a shame we're not all together in Tucson right now. How important has the support of NIAC been to the progress of this work? Oh, it's instrumental because without it,

we only had this, you know, cartoon and ideas in my head but with NIAC's support first, you know, we did the first iteration. Also, most importantly, because of that we could convince JPL to, you know, invest its own funding for prototyping the robot. So, you know, it's not just a dollar value that you provided, It's a ripple effect. So NIAC was able to provide some leverage it sounds like with management. Absolutely, yeah. That's great. What comes next? I mean, obviously we're talking about if there is an Enceladus lander some days, it's quite a ways off.

I know that Morgan Cable is looking forward anxiously to the release of the next Planetary Science Decadal and astrobiology, I should say, decadal survey, which may come in spring of next year. Of course, you know, what comes out from decadal is out of our control. But nonetheless, our plan is to complete the system trade study in this NIAC and make a prototype robot and bring it to Athabasca Glacier probably in Canada to test it and of course our dream is to bring it to Enceladus right. Personally the reason that I came to this the world of space exploration is because of Voyager 2 that went to Neptune when I was six years old and you know I've been following that dream since then. And I want to be a part of those, you know, big discoveries, you know, in the future. So I really, really hope, you know, this is going to happen.

Maybe not in my lifetime, perhaps my daughter's lifetime. You are putting us on the path, Hiro. Thank you so much to you and others like you. And thanks for joining us during this break today as well. Thank you so much, Matt. Hiro Ono of JPL. this break today as well. Thank you so much, Matt. Hero Ono of JPL.

Arthur Devoyen of UCLA is yet another Phase II fellow. With a title like Extreme Solar Sailing for Breakthrough Space Exploration, you can probably guess why I wanted to talk with him. I started that session with a look back at other presentations symposium attendees

had just watched. Absolutely amazing presentations. We heard about sample return rockets from Titan that create their own propellants in situ, giant space structures that unfold from itty-bitty payloads at the top of a Falcon 9, swarms of one kilogram Venus gliders largely built with off-the-shelf components. You know, to me, this is what NIAC is all about. There was a fourth of those presentations in this last session, but we've saved that one to talk to the PI, the fellow who is in charge of the project.

He's here with us now. Welcome, Arthur Devoyen. Fascinating presentation that you titled Extreme Solar Sailing for Breakthrough Space Exploration. Welcome again. Thank you, Matt. Nice seeing you. Pleasure being here. Great to see you as well.

I'm with the Planetary Society. We know that solar sails are hot, but I'm not sure that all of us really had in mind the kind of heat that you're talking about putting your sails through. Did I get it correctly that you're talking about going within, what, four or five radii of the sun? As close as we can get. So our hope is to get about maybe two to three solar radii from the surface of the sun. If we can push it further, that would be even nicer. Perhaps we can land there. I don't know.

Okay, I've been dropping Star Trek references in here and there during some of the other breaks. So, you know, Star Trek people know that if you're under warp and you go too close to the sun, that sends you into the past. It sounds like what you want to do in the real world is accelerate us into the future, reaching unheard of distances using the slingshot effect around the sun, right? Using the sun as a launching pad. Is that fair? That's absolutely right. So the way the vision that we have is that it has been 60 years of fantastic space exploration. We saw missions going to all the planets and so on. But if you look closely, then you'll see that outer planets beyond Saturn have been visited only once and only two probes have left the solar system. going to all the planets and so on. But if you look closely, then you'll see that outer planets beyond Saturn have been visited only once, and only two probes have left the solar system so far.

I mean, the heliopause itself, it's not even solar system, kind of reached interstellar boundary, the interstellar space. So it's not really scalable the way things are done today. We want to change it. And we think that we can turn the sun into a launch pad and then mass produce this low-cost system, send them to the sun, toward the sun, very close, and then shoot and slingshot into different directions. That's our kind of hope and vision. You're a Phase II NIAC fellow, so you had a Phase I grant as well to get some work done. Are you now confident that the materials exist that could

actually perform this kind of mission, which, you know, my goodness, will have extremes that it has to survive, unlike probably anything we've sent into space before? Yes, we're getting confident. So in phase two, we're going to try to demonstrate them, really measure and prove that this is the case. In phase one, we did the comprehensive study. Actually, we fabricated some samples that are very promising samples. We didn't get a chance to measure them in detail, but we did some preliminary measurements of them. So we see that we have materials. Now the question is, how close can we get to the sun? We definitely can get as close as, say, five to seven solar radiowave from the surface of the sun so

we're already closer than the solar parker probe can get us there what we want to try to do in the phase two we want to prove that we can get to the ultimate limit which is two to three solar radiowave from the surface of the sun the materials are there but now we are trying to push the limit i didn't mention actually during my presentation so one one of the samples, we sent it on the MISI mission, which is Materials Exploration Mission, on the ISS board, so to be tested out there. And this is a special thanks to NASA Marshall folks that have helped us. So that's the synergy of collaboration that we see through the NIAID. My colleague at the Planetary Society, our chief scientist, also LightSail program manager, Bruce Betts,

apparently the two of you met at a solar-sailing metamaterials workshop a couple of years back, and he sends his regards, by the way. Is this what we're talking about? What are metamaterials? They send my regards to Bruce, too. I was first meeting him. Metamaterials, actually, the conventional materials, they have certain properties that we all know. Like, for example, glass is just glass. It's transparent. And we use it all the time. Metamaterials, they try to change the properties of conventional materials by creating some structure. So if I take regular glass and start structuring at very, very small dimensions, nanometer dimensions,

then I can make my glass to be, for example, not transparent, but reflective, and turn it into a sail material. That's one optical property change. I can also control its temperature or heat distribution, and I also can control the mechanical properties of it. And our hope is to create a metamaterial that is made of some traditional materials, structured at these very small dimensions, so that they can perform the functions that we really want. Like, you know, strong, they were comments on that, lightweight, surviving high temperatures, and making the propulsion work so the radiation pressure can really propel our sails.

You have not one, but two missions in mind. You talked a bit about these in your presentation. You talked a bit about these in your presentation. One that would go out really far across our solar system, but another which I think you're calling CoronaNet, which maybe would help us to understand our sun better. Our goal and vision is to send them very fastysics study, reaching the interstellar space, understanding the interstellar space and so on. But obviously the first mission that is going to be out there, which is pretty much going to be to reach the sun and see whether the materials and spacecraft can survive and can get to two or three solar radii away from the sun.

Now that's going to be a technology demonstration mission, and we have a certain timeline that we think we can do it. But once we are there, that close to the Sun, then basically we also ask ourselves, what can we do? What is useful that we can do? And it turns out that the physics of the Sun is not really well understood. As a mission, technology demonstration mission and science mission that can be done on the way of, before launching into interstellar space we can launch several of these spacecraft into orbits that are not possible with conventional

spacecraft like for example polar orbits or some of these halo orbits we can launch the configuration of the spacecraft and then try to map magnetic field map the corona and physics of the sun is really one of the least understood and known. It's one of the major unsolved problems. We don't know what creates the magnetic field, why it switches every 11 years, and why the corona heats up to a million degrees. And these are the questions that we can answer and we want to answer. We only have about a minute left. I note also when you put up your slide with your team and collaborators, Slava Turashev, who is at JPL, a NIAC Phase 3 fellow, and my old boss, Lou Friedman, were there. So I bet that they and maybe others are talking too about using this kind

of sail to achieve their dream of a solar gravitational lensing telescope. Correct. So they're also based on solar sails. Their solar sails are a little bit different and we're working with them so they're a little heavier because they need to carry a telescope. Ours is just a smaller and gets much closer to the Sun. So these are the concept of propulsion is the same but the technology and the mission concept is very different behind this. We're not going to have time for me to ask you if you're also talking to those breakthrough Starshot folks who want to laser propel tiny, tiny sails to Proxima Centauri, if not beyond.

But I bet they will be interested in talking to you about those metamaterials as well. Archer, thank you so much for joining us during this break. The last of my NIAC symposium breaks allowed me to visit with two Phase 3 fellows. I began the break with an offbeat acknowledgement of two other fellows among the many who presented at the virtual symposium. I have some awards to give out. Best name for a new class of spacecraft goes to Joshua, Josh Vanderhoek, for his data mules on the Solar System Pony Express. But the best line of the day award, judged by me alone, goes to Charles Taylor for his war more Edisonian than Tesla, which seems like a very Nyack sort of thing to say. like a very Nyack sort of thing to say. Professor Nick Salome. He is a high-energy particle physicist professor who has worked at CERN and Fermilab and is talking to us from Wichita State University.

Nick has literally written the book on neutrinos. It's called The Elusive Neutrino, and he's going to talk to us about his project, CubeSat Spaceflight Test of a Neutrino Detector. Also on the screen is Red Whittaker, William Red Whittaker, who is Founder's University Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He's with the Robotics Institute, where he has been for over 40 years. So welcome to both of you guys. But Nick, you're the new guy with a 2021 phase three project from NIAC. You have a spacecraft which is going to, you hope, will someday, right, fly very close to the sun and very far away from the sun. Right. We had this idea that we could dramatically increase the intensity of neutrinos by going very close to the sun.

You could get up to a factor of a thousand times higher intensity than you have here on Earth by going to where ProPlus is currently going. And if you go to three solar radii where some people think we could go to, then we could get up to 10,000 times larger. That'll allow us to do some science in heliophysics that can't be done anywhere else. wants to do some science in heliophysics that can't be done anywhere else. And then once you've gone to where the environment is just thick with neutrinos, you go out to where there are a lot fewer of them, at least a lot fewer coming from the sun, right?

Right. So the advantage of neutrinos is that they can penetrate anything. So we can get them directly out of the core of the sun very quickly. things so we could get them directly out of the core of the sun very quickly but by going away from the sun uh neutrinos here on earth are a large background for dark matter searches so by going away from the sun we could dramatically reduce the background in searching for dark matter and that was the original phase one concept that we could do both of these things at this uh with this type of new technology but we have to find a way in which we can actually detect neutrinos in space by taking with us only the shielding and veto rays that we can bring with us. And so we have to devise a whole new technique of how to detect neutrinos in space that is very different than the way in which you detect neutrinos here on the surface

or on the Earth or very deep underground. different than the way in which you detect neutrinos here on the surface of the Earth or very deep underground. Red, how is that cute little rover of yours coming along? Are we going to see it approaching those pits on the moon anytime soon? We certainly can. One distinction of this initiative relative to so many is that in the course of the NIAC support, it's gone from idea to implementation and unique readiness for near-term economic small mission deployment. It's come that far. And yes, we will see it in terrestrial analog in today's presentation.

You probably should give us the little, I've been calling it the elevator speech description once again. You know, you have one minute in the elevator with the NASA administrator to talk about what this little rover, the Pit Rover, which is now part of, I guess you're calling the project Skylight now, of what it will be able to do for us at these intriguing holes in the moon. People have dreamed of exploring living under the moon for a century. The big challenge is that there's never been a way to access that immense underworld. So much has gone into how to explore caves. world. So much has gone into how to explore caves, how do you actually explore an access that would be the means to a cave? This solves that problem. It does so by negotiating the rim,

and then with vision that's light-corrected to look at the correct angles and into the dark, because the caverns will be dark. It is like the first human coming upon the Grand Canyon. I'm going to ask you something I haven't asked any of my other guests across this symposium, and that is, as you listen to each other, I mean, here you are coming at fascinating challenges that don't have a whole lot of overlap. I'm just wondering what you think as you listen to your colleague, your fellow fellow, as I've been saying, Red, as you listen to Nick, is this as fascinating for you as it is for me?

It is. My sense is that anyone who is out to transform belief has to first be a believer and to deliver in the inspiring way we just heard. Additionally, it matters so much to be believed in. That is what NIAC brings to the game. Those ingredients are the winning formula. Well put. Nick, you get the last word. How does it feel to be among all these big thinkers and dreamers whose projects may just result in amazing advances? Well, it's an honor to be chosen,

and it's an exciting symposium because there was a lot of exciting things from how to explore Venus and how to tunnel into ocean crusts of other moons around Jupiter or Saturn. So there's a lot of excitement there that I just found thrilling and exciting. Nick Solomay of Wichita State University and William Red Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon, two of the four Phase III fellows who closed out the 2021 NIAC Symposium.

A bonus conversation now with someone who is not a NIAC fellow. Dane Elliott Lewis's keynote address opened the final day of the symposium. Dane is an engineer, entrepreneur, and manager who has worked at GE Aviation for more than 20 years. Along the way, he has authored several science fiction stories. He also devotes a lot of time to the National Society of Black Engineers, where he is on the board of the NSBE's Aerospace Special Interest Group. Dane's message of inspiration and vision included his admiration for Mae Jemison.

He had heard the first black female astronaut speak at Morehouse College while he was an undergraduate there. I told you before we started that I had a surprise for you. You mentioned that Mae Jemison visited Morehouse when you were an undergrad there. Do you know that she's participating in NIAC right now? I did not know that. Not only that, but she is a member of the NIAC External Council. And so I asked May, who's been on our show, Planetary Radio, if she had a message she wanted me to pass along. And she did. She passed along both a message and a question

with her greetings. She says, my visits to Morehouse were always very important to me, as was my work at Spelman College. She says, I was a member at the start of NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers, as an engineering undergrad at Stanford. There's your surprise. Wow, that is a cool surprise. So here's the question she had for you, or has for you. She says to ask Dane about the best ways to engage students at historically black colleges and universities to enter science and engineering. What can NIAC do to get more faculty at HBCU and other minority-serving institutions to submit applications?

I'm sure she means to submit applications for NIAC projects, which can be done by anyone, can be submitted by anyone. Well, wow. I am blown away by this. I think communicating that these opportunities exist first and foremost is, I think, the most important thing. At Morehouse College, my connection to NASA was purely because of the nature of my scholarship program. Everything else in NASA was a black box to me. And so if there are perhaps opportunities for professors to be brought to NASA headquarters to get an in-depth understanding through a symposium like this or just a briefing on what are the opportunities of this program because I think that would unlock all types of creativity and

interest in an opportunity for entrepreneurship or an opportunity to pursue aerospace in particular. Morehouse doesn't have an engineering department. What happens is you go there for three years and then you go off to an engineering school. I went to Georgia Tech. So I graduated from both universities with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Bachelor of General Science from Morehouse. So I think it is having a presence locally, if it's through the physics professor at Morehouse or a department head who's focused on engineering, but to introduce the concept of these proposals and these competitions are out there and you have nothing to lose by giving it a shot. Don't wait until

you're an engineer and you feel like you've got years of experience behind you, start thinking about this now. You plant the seed in the students today. Professors can weave this into some of their design projects and say, okay, my senior design project was designing an anti-sub-warfare aircraft, but there are other people who, okay, if you have a space-related design project, see if you're not also going to be fulfilling the requirements of the NIAC proposals. I was touched by your story about how you went to space camp twice and never wanted to tell your friends about it because you were afraid exactly what did happen after your second visit would happen, that you would basically be belittled, that you'd be made fun of. Have you thought about how do we change things in this country from a kid like you having to hide that to a kid like you coming back a hero because he or she has been to space camp? Yeah, I think

STEM careers are starting, they probably have a greater, there's probably a greater respect for them today than when I was a child. I know my children are in elementary school now and there are STEM courses. That's the first step. You need to have some sort of education that isn't just simply math or science, but to say, look, these are careers. There's a whole field of opportunity out here. These are careers. There's a whole field of opportunity out here. So you plant the seed in their schools. I like to tell my kids is that's an entirely open space, like white space opportunity. And if you think about the people who explored parts of the earth and went into places and said, OK, well, I can create something here, whether that's a home or that's a business opportunity. I think space is literally unexplored in that sense, where there are going to be businesses created there. There's going to be careers made. There's going to be new ways of doing hotels and everything that people have here. We're going to go up there and do the same thing, and we're going to do things that you can't even think of.

In terms of creativity, what is better in terms of leveraging your creative spirit than thinking about how I can apply that off world? And so I've been not having that discussion with my kids, but talking about entrepreneurship. And I think entrepreneurship, the opportunity to literally control your feet, to leave a legacy that you can actually give to your children. I think that fits perfect in opening up space. Maybe that's a little bit of a capitalistic bent, but I would use that to also encourage kids to say, yeah, this stuff down here is fun, too. it's really unlimited if you start looking up and you think about how I can take this education or take this experience and this creative mind and create something that no one's ever thought about. Again, going back to Mae Jemison, I needed to write it out. I needed to not just think in my head, I'm going to do these things. I needed to put a plan together. I needed to define something.

That is vision. Vision is I'm going to put some details behind just this inner, completely unrelated thoughts and say, this is what the future should look like or this is the future that I want to create. And once you've laid it out, whether it's on paper or whether it's photographs or however that works for you, a timetable, you can start filling in the gaps as you work through it. start filling in the gaps as you work through it. But there needs to be something that you're working towards. There needs to be some concept of what that tomorrow or what that project or what that effort is going to realize. For me, I think that's in itself a motivating factor is what is this future that I'm building towards. But also, I think it helps organize, helps you plan, it helps you define what are the steps that I need to achieve that. How do I become like Mae Jemison? What are the things that I need to do? I need to first visualize myself in the space lab, space head module, like the image of her.

If I can see myself in that place, then I can start thinking about what does it take for me to get there? So I think vision is, you really don't get anywhere without some sort of vision driving you or helping to focus your energy. Engineer and entrepreneur Dane Elliott Lewis. The 2021 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium offered so much more that we don't have time to even sample. Again, you can hear and see all of the presentations on the Center's website. We've got the link at planetary.org slash radio. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, a vacation period of What's Up on this regular segment in our show, my vacation. I don't know about you. I'm still joined, though, by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

I'm still joined, though, by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. Here is Dr. Bruce Betts. Welcome to my vacation. Thanks again for taking me on your vacation, Matt. I appreciate it. Yeah, you fit so well in that trunk. Yeah, that part wasn't so relaxing. We'll let you out at some point here when the view is right.

Thank you. We are on vacation, which means that there will not be either a contest or an answer for the contest this week. But I have it from a reliable source that we still have some really great stuff for you. Bruce says, I will be pleased. So go for it. Please me. What's up? All right. Well, let's start with the night sky, which is always pleasing and really pleasing right now with the evening sky with super bright Venus over in the east.

No, just testing you. Super bright Venus over in the west shortly after sunset and bright Jupiter in the east or south or north, as we discussed here in the southern hemisphere and Saturn hanging out near it looking yellowish. They'll discussed here in the southern hemisphere. And Saturn hanging out near it, looking yellowish. They'll get closer over the coming weeks, that whole gang. In the pre-dawn sky, we've got Mercury on the 25th at greatest western elongation, meaning it reaches the highest point during its pre-dawn party for three or four weeks. But the point is, you still have to look really low to the

eastern horizon in the pre-dawn. Mercury's there, and it's kind of neat if you can watch it over a few days because we're seeing phases with Mercury like we see with the moon, and it actually brightens like a lot over these coming week or so. And so it actually, if you look carefully, should be noticeable. More coming up with Mercury, but we'll hold that off for next week because it's going to be tough. It's low down, but worth it. It's a fun friend, but I digress. Let us go to this week in space history.

This is so cool, Matt. 2001, which last I checked is 20 years ago. Mars Odyssey arrived at Mars. The last I checked, it's still working. Happy 20th anniversary, Mars Odyssey and the awesome team that's been creating it and running it. Congratulations to all of you. You know, we talk to some of those people every now and then on this show, and what a performance it has put on and continues to put on. Yeah, I mean, that's how it got the name, right?

It was in honor of Arthur C. Clarke's book and Stanley Kubrick's movie. Indeed. We're even well past now the sequel, the first sequel to 2001, which was 2010, which was the return to that strange object out there. I can't remember if it was Jupiter or Saturn. Of course, in the movie, it was Jupiter. But in the original book, it was Saturn. But Kubrick decided it was just too difficult to make Saturn look realistic. There's a random movie space fact for you. Wow. Nice. Well played, sir. But I'm going to go on to

a random space fact. That was good. I like that jingle. Maybe we'll use that one again. If only I could remember it. Okay, I think you'll like this. In the time it takes me to read this sentence, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has gotten approximately 200 kilometers farther away from us on Earth. Boom. Did you actually time the sentence and figure that out? I mean, you would have figured this out, I imagine. I did, but I wouldn't swear I delivered it exactly properly. So, you know,

approximately. I was assuming a 12-second sentence you can go back and check. Anyway. No, I'm happy. I don't want to know. I just want to believe that wonderful written space fact. That was exactly how long it took it to get 200 kilometers

farther away. And I believe, since we've been talking, it got another 500 kilometers away. Yeah. And if we don't shut up, it's going to be 1,000 kilometers away. That was wonderful. It's so far away. Hey, there's no contest to go to. What will I do with myself? Just one week off, because next week I promise a new contest and then winners, two new winners the following week.

It's going to be a wonderful return. I don't know what else to say. It seems so strange not to have a contest except to say we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about questions and answers. Thank you, and good night. The really big ones, the ones that haunt all of us, probably 2,000 kilometers by now.

He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week, even when I'm not really there, for What's Up. Or is it 2001 kilometers? Ooh. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its innovative and very advanced members. Learn how easy it is to become one of us at planetary.org slash join.

Mark Hilverda and Jason Davis are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astro.