Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Amy Mainzer Is Hunting Asteroids With NEOWISE

Episode Date: December 30, 2013

Take a spacecraft that can no longer survey the realm of galaxies and repurpose it to discover thousands of much nearer asteroids and comets. Put it to sleep for 2.5 years, then wake it up and start discovering even more! JPL’s Amy Mainzer is Principal Investigator for NEOWISE, the mission using this amazing space telescope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amy Meinzer and her resurrected asteroid hunter, 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. NEOWISE is back and Amy Meinzer of the Jet Propulsion Lab couldn't be happier. We'll talk to her about this repurposed spacecraft that has returned from the near-dead. You can tell Europe from Europa, right? Don't be so sure your neighbor knows the difference. That's what Bill Nye will address while Bruce Betts waits in the green room

for his chance to tell us about the night sky and give away a year in space wall calendar. Emily Lakdawalla just hosted a reunion with several very special young people. Here she is to tell us about it, but you can also watch the Google Hangout at planetary.org. Emily, thanks to you, I got to see the somewhat more mature faces of some young people that I hadn't seen in a long time. Did you have a good time catching up with the student astronauts? Yeah, it was really wonderful to see these guys again. These kids, they're not kids anymore. They're all grown up now.

But they were the reason I was originally hired at the Planetary Society. to come and run this education and public outreach project called Red Rover Goes to Mars, or at least a part of it, where we ran contests to select really amazing high school students from all over the world and bring them inside Mars Exploration Rover mission operations when the two rovers landed. So we had 16 kids from five continents, and they came in in pairs in order to experience the actual operations, the science operations of these two rovers. And so to see them all again and to see what they've all grown into has been absolutely great. They've all wound up in science and technology, either careers now or they're still in graduate school, finishing up their schooling and getting ready to research in astrophysics and computer programming and all kinds of other stuff.

It was wonderful to catch up with them. I remember how much work this was at the time. So I'm glad that you're able to look back on this and catch up with these folks and feel so good about what it accomplished in their lives. But it had influence beyond these young people. It really did. And this hangout was a reminder of that. Being in the United States, which is so saturated with media, I didn't always have the impression working on this project that we were really getting very far beyond these 16 kids. So it was a wonderful reminder to talk, especially with the Indian and European students who were national celebrities. The two Indian students met their president after being selected for this program. The Hungarian and Polish students tell me that they still get recognized on buses by people who recognize them from 10 years ago. Wow. think a little bit again about what we could do to try to reach out, do more space outreach in these countries. Of course, in the 10 years since the program ran, many of these countries have gone on to do a lot more in space,

again, particularly India, which, after all, has a mission on its way to Mars right now. And the Indian student was very proud to talk about that. Well, I bet it's safe to say that that India program got just a bit more incentive by having a couple of young people involved here in the United States as student astronauts. Emily, thank you so much, and I look forward to talking with you at somewhat greater length next week with a preview of what's coming up in 2014. It's going to be a great year. That's Emily Laktawalla, the senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. She is also a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope

Magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, welcome back for the last time this year as we're speaking, though most of our listeners will probably hear it in 2014. 2014, Matt! It's going to be a good year. It really is. You were telling me, though, that you were having a conversation, correspondence, with our friend Emily, who we just heard, who was concerned because there are so many people out there who can't place where some of these big stories, maybe big stories for 2014, are taking place in our solar system. Places like Europa and Enceladus. But I don't know. Is this so surprising from a public, many of whom can't find Saudi Arabia on a map? Oh, now, now, Matt, let's not get into these kids today. The point is,

I believe that you think of Jupiter as an enormous planet. So you don't stop and think about its moons, four of which are a reasonable fraction of the size of the Earth. And one of them may have an ocean under it with who knows what's going on down there. And the thing is, we got to get everybody excited about this, because if we were able to make a discovery there, let's say of evidence of life, it would utterly change the world. And as I so often say, it's such a reasonable price. And this is part of what, I mean, not to turn this into a commercial, but this is part of what the Planetary Society and many other organizations are about, right? Not just making people aware, but making people excited.

Once you are aware, I claim you will get excited because of the two deep questions that trouble us all. Where did we come from and are we alone? And if we were to discover life on another world, Mars, on the slushy saltwater rivulets that may be running down these gullies that we observe from orbit, or under the saltwater ocean of Europa or Enceladus, it would utterly change this world. It would change the way everyone thinks about his or her place in space. You just think back. It wasn't that long ago that Pluto was discovered, let alone the other icy objects out there, the Plutoids. And it wasn't that long ago that people realized that Mars really was covered with water, not fictional canals.

It wasn't that long ago we did not have lasers. It wasn't that long ago that people discovered germs. I mean, who knows how the course of medical history would change if we found something alive or evidence of something alive out there. This is why these things are so important. So to Emily's point, she was talking, I think, especially about Europa, moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, moon of Saturn, because these extraordinary places are reasonable places to go looking for life. It would change the world in 2014, Matt. Let's do that, and let's change it in other ways.

I'm very glad, Bill, that I'll be working with you and talking with you throughout the coming year. Thank you, and Happy New Year. Happy New Year. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, the science guy who joins us each week on Planetary Radio. Coming up next, a conversation about finding near-Earth objects

with a terrific scientist who has a spacecraft that is doing just that. So many space rocks, so many threats to our world. Fortunately, the worldwide effort to discover them has just welcomed the return of a powerful space-based tool. Amy Meinzer is principaligator for NEOWISE, the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer. She has joined us before, including her appearance in the great panel discussion

at the Planetary Defense Conference last April. I recently welcomed Amy back for a Skype conversation. She was in her office at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. Amy, what a pleasure to be talking to you once again. I got a question for you right up front. Were you taught as a kid that you should never let a perfectly good spacecraft go to waste? Well, I would say that this is sort of the ultimate in recycling in some sense. We are certainly not going to let this good spacecraft go to waste. So far, so good. In fact, I decided it was time for us to talk again because of this press release that came out not too long ago on the 19th of December about some early success with this

revived spacecraft. Yeah, we are just so happy about this. I can't even begin to describe how relieved, happy, overjoyed. It's basically like Christmas and my birthday. How appropriate. Yeah. Really, really great gift for us this season. I mean, we're just so happy. Everything seems to be working okay so far, knock on wood. Got to keep some traditions alive. But yeah, it seems to be doing fine so far. All the spacecraft subsystems are in good health. So far, the images look just as good as they did before we shut it down and put it into hibernation mode. Which was quite a while ago.

How long ago was that? It was about 31 months ago, give or take, about two and a half years. So this spacecraft has been asleep and it hasn't really been contacted. We knew it wasn't tumbling because you can look at it with a pair of binoculars. But we did have one brief contact with it about a year ago to just verify that it was still alive and still there. And sure enough, it was. So WISE has been a very good little spacecraft while we've been away from it. And that's an important thing to note, that this is the NeoWISE mission that you are the PI for, but it's still the WISE

spacecraft. So this is a spacecraft that began its life as an astrophysics mission. Its primary scientific objectives were to survey the whole sky in four infrared wavelengths. These are, of course, wavelengths that are quite a bit longer than our human eyes can see, but we perceive infrared as heat. Now, once that mission was done, it turned out that this was also a very, very effective tool for finding and characterizing asteroids, because they're warm, they're sort of room temperature, the ones that are close to the Earth, and then somewhat cooler after that as you get further away. We actually continued the mission an extra four months once we ran out of our refrigerant just for the purpose of looking

for asteroids. And after that, the mission was over and the spacecraft was placed into hibernation. But what happened was eventually NASA, of course, has been looking for more ways to continue to characterize potentially hazardous objects. And, you know, this spacecraft is up there. So they asked us for a proposal basically to bring it back. I mean, it's certainly much easier and much less expensive to bring back an existing asset rather than build something new. This was something that NASA wanted to see if we could do. And so far, it seems to be going very well. We're very pleased. Tell us about some of these outstanding results that you had prior to hibernation. It's really pretty, some amazing

numbers here. Right. So the asteroids really do emit a lot of their energy at infrared wavelengths. They really do glow brightly in the wavelengths that this spacecraft is equipped to see. And because of that, we were able to observe quite a lot of them and discover a whole bunch. In total, we observed about 158,000 objects, and that's just what we've mined out of the data so far. We know that there's more in there, and we're working on ways to go in and extract more detections. And we included in that number about 34,000 new objects

that were previously unknown. Now, almost all of those asteroids and comets are in the main asteroid belt. These are mostly asteroids. They're mostly main belt objects between Mars and Jupiter. So they're pretty far away from the Earth. For the near-Earth object population, these are the ones that get particularly close to Earth. This is a tricky population to observe for lots of different reasons.

And we saw a lot fewer of those, but we still saw around 700 of them in total from all the phases of the mission. And the special thing about infrared is that it allows us to really get a good measurement of the size of the object and its reflectivity. And that gives us a clue as to what it's made out of. So if you just have a visible light observation, it can be very difficult to figure out if you're looking at something that's large, but really dark, like a piece of coal, or something that's much smaller but much more highly reflective, just brighter in color, like a fresh piece of sidewalk tile. Whereas if you're looking at its heat signature only, not the light that's bouncing off of it and reflecting back into your telescope, now you have a much better idea of the object's true size. And that's the real strength of the NEOWISE project,

is that we can characterize a lot of objects very rapidly. Say something else about why infrared is better at this kind of evaluation, this sizing up, than the wavelengths that our eyes work at. Right. Well, the basic problem is that when we see something, what we're really seeing is, you know, if you're outdoors, you're seeing sunlight bouncing off of an object's surface

and reflecting back at you. So how bright the object appears and its color depends very much on the properties of that surface and how reflective it is. If it's very, very low reflectivity, something that really absorbs a lot of light, like, say, black paint, then you're not going to get a lot of energy reflected back to you. So that does two things. Now, if you're an asteroid, if you're an observer looking for asteroids that are far away in space, if you can only see things that are bright, in other words, it's easier to see things that are bright. And things can be bright because they're nearby. They can be bright because they're large. Or they can be bright because they're shiny.

They're highly reflective. Light and color, you could think of it. So if you have an infrared telescope, it does convey certain advantages. Now, instead of seeing the sunlight bouncing off that surface, you're really seeing the heat the object's emitting. And that really doesn't depend on the reflectivity. It gives you a much more direct relationship to the size, and that's what you really want.

The other side effect of this is that if an object is on the smaller side but also very dark, these objects are more difficult for visible light telescopes to even discover in the first place. So what we've been able to do is get a more accurate representation of the ratio of dark to bright objects that are out there as a function of size. And that tells us more about the asteroid population as a whole, how many are really there.

Of course, what we'd eventually like to do is a much more comprehensive survey. The NEOWISE was never originally designed for this kind of work. It turns out that it's good at it. But what we would really like is a survey that was especially designed for hunting asteroids. There is obviously so much more out there to discover. And there does seem to be a great deal more interest in discovering these, particularly the ones that cross our path, the near-Earth objects. Maybe what happened over Chelyabinsk was a big incentive. Obviously, you feel that this interest, whether it's renewed or brand new, is very well placed. Well, this is something that I've been interested in for a while with my colleagues. And in fact, we knew that WISE would be a powerful tool for looking at the asteroids and the small bodies in our solar system, but it's limited. I mean, first of all, it had to be cryogenically cooled with solid hydrogen.

That's a pain because the solid hydrogen ran out. It didn't last forever. The other thing is the field of view. While this is the wide field infrared survey explorer, we could make it wider. And to do that, you need more pixels. You need more advanced cameras. What we've been able to do is come up with a design for an observatory that would address all of these issues. We call it the Near Earth Object Camera, or NEOCam. And the idea is basically to just put a somewhat taller sunshade on it, so it can look a little closer to the sun, in fact,

quite a lot closer to the sun. So it can survey more of the space around the Earth's orbit at any given point in time. And it would also have brand new detectors that are a variation on a kind that we already use. We actually proposed NEOCAM a couple of times to NASA starting in 2005. In this most recent round, we were actually given technology development funding to go off and make these detectors that we need. And the good news is the development has been extremely successful. We've actually made the detectors now. So these are basically camera chips, if you will, that operate at the long infrared wavelengths where the asteroids are really bright, but they don't need to be nearly as cold. That's important because if we can get away from having to be at the extremely low temperatures that WISE required, now if you just put your telescope just a little bit away from Earth, not super far because

you still want to be able to get the data back, but just a little bit away, just outside the orbit of the moon, then it turns out the telescope will naturally equilibrate to a temperature that allows us to continue using these detectors for years. So that's the idea. And then, of course, we have a lot more pixels now than we did even when we built WISE. So we basically just equipped the observatory with a next-generation digital camera that operates at the infrared wavelengths that we want and let it go, let it do its thing. That's Amy Meinzer, Principal Investigator for NeoWISE. She'll be back after the break. You're listening to Planetary Radio.

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That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more.

It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and I'm in the midst of a conversation with the leader of the NEOWISE mission. Principal Investigator Amy Meinzer has just told us how a spacecraft that formerly surveyed the most distant reaches of the universe is now working much closer to home, discovering tens of thousands of asteroids and comets, some of which are the near-Earth objects that could someday have a much too close encounter with our planet. So I'm very glad to hear that you've had these early development funds and that things are going well. But what's the outlook for actually seeing this new mission make it out there into space? As we all know and talk about at the Planetary Society,

it's a tough time for finding funding for new planetary science within the solar system missions. That's certainly true. One thing about this, though, is that NASA missions have been incredibly successful. I mean, if you look at the Discovery Line, for example, that has been an incredibly productive array of sort of small to medium-sized NASA missions, and they've done a lot of great science. This is where we would plan to repropose NEOCAM whenever the next Discovery Round comes up.

I'm looking forward to it. There have been some people, highly placed people at NASA headquarters, who see this new mission, NEOCAM, as being an important step toward some of the things the Obama administration has talked about, right? Well, that's one of the things we would like to be able to do is characterize some of the more accessible objects. And we've seen some of these with NEOWISE. One of the more fascinating kind of oddballs that we found with NEOWISE is something called an Earth Trojan. And it's an asteroid that's actually gravitationally kind of stuck to the Earth. And

it sort of shares the Earth's orbit. So wherever the Earth goes, it sort of pulls the asteroid along with it. So it's kind of trapped in this gravitational resonance. And I like to think of it as sort of a leaf being trapped in an eddy in a stream. It'll just sort of stick in there for a while and sort of whirl around. Now, eventually get carried away but for this particular object we think it's going to be stuck there for thousands of years these are so-called co-orbitals because they share the earth's orbit there may be more of these out there it's kind of an old old saying right if you see something it's it's probably common right there's probably more of it out there so we think that there's probably more of these types of objects these co-orbitals out there, and they might make attractive targets because they might require less energy

to get to than some of the other asteroids, which have much more highly inclined or kind of crazy orbits that take them far away from the Earth and the Earth's vicinity. And somewhere out there is an asteroid with our name on it that's not nearly as safe as this Trojan that Neowise has already discovered. Is it your hope that this new round is just the kind of thing that might help us find that rock? Well, that's the thing. I mean, observers all over the world, the big surveys and the amateur community, everybody's out there trying to do what they can to look and make sure that we don't miss anything. One thing I wanted to point out is that a lot of our NEOWISE follow-up is done by amateurs.

And in particular, I believe some of the follow-up has been done by people who have been Shoemaker Grant recipients. So we're very grateful for that. And we're hoping for three years of survey data. So that means three years of follow-up. And we really rely on all of our follow-up observers all over the place. So it is a huge deal. We really, really appreciate this.

Guys like Bob Holmes, I think, is one. Yes. In fact, he's in our little thank you video that I just edited we just posted a few days ago. These guys are just amazing. It really is. And that's the beauty of it, right, is that a lot of science, so much of astronomy really relies on these huge telescopes. But that's not the case for small bodies. You can actually do quite a lot with a pretty modest-sized telescope.

It's true that the discovery nowadays is pretty much dominated by the surveys. The amateurs are not going to be able to compete in large ways with the big surveys. However, where they really shine and where it's really important is follow-up and characterization and that is just so important because you know for us we lose the objects if we don't get ground-based follow-up generally speaking um that's how you secure the orbits yeah because this is not a dedicated neo telescope right so the cadence and the orbit don't allow us to make you know long-term arcs on these things in general. So we absolutely are dependent upon the ground-based follow-up to figure out where these things are going to go in the future.

Well, thank goodness. These guys seem to get a huge kick out of staying up all night and making this stuff happen because they do a great job. One of the things that's come out recently from some of our NEOWISE work is that for the very largest objects, the near-Earth objects that are more than a kilometer across, so big stuff, the good news there is 90% of those have been found. In fact, more than 90% at this point. So that's great. What we found with NEOWISE is that for objects down to about 100 meters across, those objects, that sort of football field size, those sorts of objects right now, only about 25% of those have been discovered to date. So that leaves a lot more out there.

And then, of course, when you get down to objects as small as the one that exploded over Russia, which is maybe 20 meters across, now you're talking about the size of a small building, those only maybe a percent or so have been found. So it's a much worse track record there. So there's clearly a lot more work to do. The good news is, you know, NASA's, the NASA-funded surveys have done a great job of what they've done so far. We just need to kind of take the next step, in my opinion. So obviously even a 100 or even a 20-meter asteroid on the right trajectory can ruin your town's whole day. What's ahead for NEOWISE? What's the mission profile as we look out across 2014?

Right. Well, we're doing well so far. Like I said, things seem to be pretty good. This has been a terrific little spacecraft. And right now what we're doing is we're actually waiting for the last degree of heat to radiate away into deep space. We're very, very close now. And what happens is that WISE was originally cooled with solid hydrogen, which is this very powerful refrigerant, but it only lasted about eight and a half months or so.

However, we're still able to keep pretty cold if we just don't look at the Earth, because the Earth is hot. So as long as we keep looking at deep space, we are able to radiate a lot of the heat away out of our telescope and that's important because these are infrared wavelengths we're looking for heat signatures from asteroids so it wouldn't work so well if our own telescope was hot you know that would be like trying to observe the stars during broad daylight it just doesn't work so what we're doing is we've basically been pointing the telescope at deep space, and that basically just causes the heat to radiate out of it.

It goes very fast at first, and then the last couple degrees take a very long time. So we're still waiting for the temperature to stabilize. It's still inching downward every day. But that's good. The colder it gets, the better the images will be. Amy, I wish you and your spacecraft a very cold new year. Thank you very much, Matt. You're now part of this exclusive club, these principal investigators. It's kind of like being a starship captain, which is a pretty exclusive club, except that yours is in the real world. You've got your own spacecraft. Now, I know you've got a whole team working on this and everybody else that's been involved with this mission, but that's got to be a pretty cool feeling.

Well, I think the most cool thing about it of all is, you just said it, the team. We have a great team of people here. It's a partnership between a lot of different groups, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. The former principal investigator, Ned Wright, from UCLA, is part of our group of course and you know JPL and our all of our partners SDL and Taladyne it's just fun because it's a great group of people and I love working with them it's fun going to the office every day and and just hang out with these folks and work with them because it's just really a blast for me that's one of the best things about this particular project this is. This is a lightning in the bottle situation. Great team, really wonderful

folks. You sent me this terrific image, and we'll try and get it up on the website. People will be able to reach it from planetary.org slash radio, where they can find this show. You somewhat fancifully told me that we're looking at, it must be Santa and his well-lit reindeer going across the sky, not that near, but apparently near a rather beautiful galaxy. That's right. Even asteroids need Christmas presents. Amy, it has been delightful, as it has been in the past. Thank you so much. And I hope we can check back with you after NEOWISE has had a little bit more time to do what it does so well. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it.

Amy Meinzer is the principal investigator for NEOWISE. That's the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer. The spacecraft that has already been repurposed at least once and brought back to life and is already

doing, looks like it's going to be doing a terrific job finding these asteroids, these rocks, and particularly these near-Earth objects that would be wise for our species to keep an eye on, ignoring all the other things that we can learn from them. She was the deputy project scientist for the WISE mission using this same spacecraft. deputy project scientist for the WISE mission using this same spacecraft. And in 2012, she received the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA. We'll move on now to another astronomer, one we talk to each week. That's Bruce Betts with this week's edition of What's Up.

For the very last time in 2013, though most of you were probably hearing this in 2014, here is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, with this week's edition of What's Up. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. Thank you for a great year of looking at what's up in the sky and all the other stuff that we get to talk about. I didn't know we were going to be gooey. Thank you, Matt, for all you do to space, to give us insights into the world of space and for being such a great guy.

Oh, thank you. I just talk to people. That's all I do. And it's fun. You do it so well. Talk to us before we continue the goo. I'm overflowing now. God, images I didn't want uh let's think about the night sky quickly so over low in the west shortly after sunset still

venus you got a few more days but basically venus is dropping rapidly because in the scheme of the solar system it will be passing in front of the sun relative to the Earth, called inferior conjunction, on January 11th. So it's getting closer and closer to the sun, and that's why it's dropping in the evening sky, and it'll pop up in the pre-dawn late in the month as it goes and pops out on the other side of the sun. But right now, check it out low in the west. And if you can look at it with a small telescope or even binoculars, it is quite the crescent phase right now. So you will see a crescent Venus. And on January 2nd, although again, you need a good view to low on the horizon in the west,

but January 2nd, you can actually see a crescent Venus below a crescent moon. Jupiter is lovely. And in fact, when you're looking at Venus over on the one horizon, spin your head around in a possessed kind of way, and look low on the other horizon over towards the east in the early evening, and you will see bright Jupiter. Not as bright as Venus, but still brighter than any star in the sky. It is at opposition, so it will be on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun on january 5th it's just all sorts of stuff we got saturn low in the pre-dawn east and mars coming up in the

middle of the night in the east peaking on january 2nd the hardest to pronounce meteor shower of the year the quantrantids lots of lots of night sky stuff don, Matt. I'll pick it up for the rest of it. This week in space history, 10 years ago, Spirit landed on Mars. And the same days, the same weekend, we had Stardust flying through the coma of Comet Wild 2, otherwise known as Wild. And lots of celebrations of this 10th anniversary of the Mars Exploration Rovers on Mars coming up. Stay tuned. Watchplanetary.org. We've got big stuff happening. Big, big, big stuff.

We move on to Random Space Fact. That's kind of a crooning approach. I like it. Venus. So in honor of Venus dipping from the evening sky, Venus has 92 times the surface pressure of Earth, is 95% the diameter of Earth, and has an atmosphere that is more than 96% carbon dioxide. And we don't want to be that way,

but that's a topic for a different kind of show. We move on to the trivia contest, and I asked you what is the only planet in the solar system, besides Earth, to have had a successful soft lander before it had a successful orbiter. How do we do, Matt? I'm going to jump right in with our winner, somebody who's won in the past, though it's been a while, Scott Borgsmiller of Ijamsville, Maryland. He said that since you limited it to planets, we're talking about Venus, the first successful soft lander, Venera 7?

Yes, indeed, in 1970. Yeah, farther back than I would have guessed. That's quite impressive. And the first orbiter was not for another five years with Venera 9. And both, of course, accomplishments by the Soviet Union. Now, you did specify planets wisely. And I did that for a reason. Because we did get some other nominations here.

I will mention Scott, first of all, is going to get that year in space wall calendar, the 2014 wall calendar, which is absolutely magnificent. Got some wonderful comments about it. Somebody had been looking at it on the website, a friend of mine, and said, boy, this looks great. It really is. It really is. It's really cool. It's beautiful and informative. And we're going to give away another one of those in a moment. But first,

Mark Smith, he was saying, well, since you specified planet, he said he would also go with Venus. But you could have said Titan, where Huygens was a lander, and nothing has orbited yet. And the Moon, Luna 9 before Luna 10. Interesting.

Depending on how you define things. But yeah, that's why I went planet. And going back even further, Randy Bottom, he said it was in 1965 that the Jupiter 2 soft-landed in the TV series Lost in Space, of course. Of course.

I don't think it was really that soft. I think they spent the rest of that season trying to get off of that planet. But be that as it may, we did have this observation also from Mark Wilson in California, that there were images, of course, taken of the Venusian surface, not the Martian surface, by Venera 9, and that at least these images indicated that women are not from Venus. Or that they don't like to be photographed. But anyway, if there are women there, they're hot. I see what you did there.

All right. While you're out there staring at the crescent Venus, tell us who recorded the first observations, who recorded the first observations that indicated that Venus had phases, like lunar phases, that Venus had phases? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest to get your entry in to win the fabulous Year in Space calendar, but you can always order your own at yearinspace.com. You have until Monday, January 6th, that's the first monday in 2014 at 2 p.m pacific time to get us this answer thank you very much happy new year happy new year to you and and everyone out there have a wonderful 2014 go out there look up the night sky and think about paint drying thank you and good night and what could be more exciting on this dawn of a new year? He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Society. Clear skies, and Happy New Year! Music