Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - An African Observatory Hunts Killer Asteroids

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

One of the Planetary Society’s 2018 Shoemaker Near-Earth Object grants has gone to astronomers searching the sky from a mountaintop in the North African nation of Morocco.  Observer Michel Ory tells us about their work.  Tim Spahr ran the Minor Planet Center for many years.  He has moved from that worldwide coordinator for asteroid and comet discoveries to NEO Sciences LLC, and served once again as chair of the Shoemaker NEO judging committee.  Wait till you hear what poor Yuri Gagarin had for lunch as he orbited Earth.  That’s just one thing you’ll learn from this week’s What’s Up segment.  Hear complete interviews and learn more at:   http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0718-2018-spahr-ory-shoemaker-neo.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Searching for killer asteroids from an African observatory, 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 Planetary Society Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant has, for the first time, gone to astronomers working from an observatory on the continent of Africa. We'll talk to one of its very successful amateur astronomers, Michel Ory, in a few minutes. And later we'll learn about the first fairly disgusting meal ever enjoyed, if that's the word, in space.

That and much more when we talk with Bruce Betts. First, though, a return visit by one of the little-known heroes of our search for near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Tim Spahr ran the Minor Planet Center for many years. Now, he is CEO of NEO Sciences, but still made time to chair the committee that judged this year's applicants for Shoemaker-Neo grants. Among Tim's own discoveries are many Neos, but also a moon of Saturn and a moon circling Jupiter. Tim, welcome back to Planetary Radio, and thank you once again for leading this work that has led to the award of a whole new crop of Shoemaker-Neo grants. You're very welcome. First of all, it's great to be back here.

Obviously, I love to chat about near-Earth asteroids and the people doing that research. And in particular, I just really love the work that I'm doing for the Planetary Society. Let's talk a little bit about those grant awardees this year. We've had many of these groups. What do you think of the current one? I mean, we'll be talking to one of your awardees, Michel Ori, in just a few minutes.

I love this group of people and I love the diversity. It's a huge geographic diversity. So we've got people in Serbia, we have our usual groups in the United States, people in Australia, and people that are doing some work in Morocco. That's who you spoke to recently. It's just a really nice distribution of things. And I think it also shows the international component to this whole effort. We are also very proud to now have awardees who are based in Africa, on the continent of Africa for the first time. Why is it so important that this is an international effort or should be? Probably the most important part of it from a discovery standpoint

is having telescopes distributed around the Earth in longitude. And what this does is if someone finds something that you need follow-up on immediately, there are other facilities stationed around the world that can immediately point their telescopes there and observe it. And this will become more important as we find more objects that are going to impact the Earth. Now, as somebody who's done a lot of observing and a lot of made a lot of discoveries yourself, how important is it for these almost as a rule underfunded so-called amateur astronomers to be able to do something with the money that they get from the society.

I mean, to buy a new mount, to buy a new camera. I mean, the camera is pretty critical, isn't it? Yes, the camera is essential to this. And the cameras are improving at an unbelievable rate. You know, I'm a bird photographer. And 10 years ago, I couldn't take any good pictures at all. And now you just hand someone a camera and the cameras are just incredible. And that's the same revolution that's going on for CCD cameras and even new detectors that they're putting in cameras for

telescopes. It's really incredible. Are you talking about detectors that are now going beyond CCD technology? Yeah, there are detectors called CMOS detectors, but also we have infrared detectors, which we'll probably talk about later for space-based systems. And this is just a huge leap forward in the ability to do this research. Yeah, I definitely want to come back to that. And it's interesting. I mean, this progress with the cameras, you know, I've been hearing about this since well before we started this show over 15 years ago. They're still improving, you're saying, at a very fast rate. Yes, and some of what's happening is they're able to build larger chips that have the quality that the smaller chips had in the past, but they're also able to improve the quality of the larger chips at the same rate. It's astounding what happens is that suddenly you have this CCD chip that is big enough to cover most of the focal area of an optical system now

that is flat all the way across with the same transmission all the way across. It's just astounding. And how important in this kind of situation is it not just to have a really big chip, but a chip with a really high density of pixels, a very high pixel count. Critically important for both the discovery work and follow-up work, but also in the work where you're trying to measure the light curve variation of an asteroid. And so you want to have as many pixels as you can across that because you get effective counts of the photons that are coming in there. One of the things that's really important is they've built chips that actually collect the light more efficiently, and they can collect more of it per exposure.

So this just adds to the precision with which the measurements can be made. Another factor which I've known about but was reinforced when I actually looked up the little camera that Michel Horry is going to be able to purchase or has purchased with his grant, is that it has such good cooling. And I know that's a really important factor, but why is that? Well, if you have detectors that are operating at room temperature, there's inherent noise in that system. Really, it comes down to what's called a dark current. But that's sort of what's going on at the, you know, if you never open the shutter,

it's sort of what the noise is in the detector every few seconds. And if you cool that down, the dark current will actually go down. And so operating at these low temperatures, and by low temperatures, we're talking about minus 40 to minus 70 C. It's darn cold. Very cold. Yeah. Let's move on to talking about the structures that are in place

globally to support the work of both professional and amateur astronomers who are doing this work. And of course, I bring that up because you, for so many years, ran the Minor Planet Center, which seems to be not just a clearinghouse, but I begin to get the impression as I talk to these astronomers, it's almost a center of community. Anyone in the world that does measurements of asteroids, be them positional measurements for asteroids and comets, so we determine the orbits. Or now, there is even a light curve database that's associated with the Minor Planet Center and the International Asteroid Warning Network there. So there's just so much work being done, and all of it goes through there. I'm really glad that you mentioned that group, the International Asteroid Warning Network, IAWN, which I first heard about you a year ago when we talked for Asteroid Day in 2017. And you told me that it's commonly called IWAN. First of all, what is IWAN up to? And is that indicative of progress that's being made, not just to discover and characterize these objects, but to begin to deal with or to prepare to deal with the one that may be headed our way? in it now. For a little background, the United Nations General Assembly approved of the

organization of the I-1 in 2013. It had been on the table for about a decade. Membership is open to people around the world that are doing current work in discovery or follow-up. There's also components for communication, et cetera. One of the things I didn't talk about with our friends in Morocco, it's critically important to get other observatories around the world doing the work because then it spreads the word, sort of like the gospel of asteroids is being distributed around the world. And then people can go look and say, oh, the United Nations is actually interested in this problem. They've organized a little bit around it. And I think it just, it really does make a community out of the NEO people. And that necessarily means we will all be better at communicating in the process. Does this mean that you are satisfied with

the progress that we're making as we attempt to identify and track all of these objects, or at least as close as we can come to all of them that do pose a threat? Well, that for me, I'll answer that carefully. And I would quote my mom who said, you're doing great and you can always do better, Tim. As a scientist in this field, the group of people we have now are performing exceptionally well. If I went around to them and said, what would you do if you had more money? They would say, we would do more work. In a very diplomatic fashion, we are doing great. And increased funding allows more surveys to be done.

We completed the survey for the one kilometer and larger NEOs several years ago. On the heels of that, we're suggested now to find all the 100 meter objects. And with current technology, that will take an awfully long time. So we got a lot of work left to do. Regarding this progress, we just had Lindley Johnson, the planetary defense officer for NASA, back on the show. That was how we celebrated Asteroid Week on Planetary Radio, along with Kelly Fast, also in the planetary defense Office at NASA. And we talked a lot about this report that has just been issued that was developed very collaboratively by a pretty amazing array, a spectrum of agencies across the federal government here in the United States.

Are you familiar with the report? Yes. How do you feel about that? Is it another indication to go to good progress or did it say enough? Again, I have to be quite careful answering this because you have the giddy scientist who just wants everyone to throw more money at us so we can do more. And so, yeah, the existing assets are doing a wonderful job and to have a little more focus on this problem in terms of what is needed going forward, I think is always good.

How far are we, do you think, from, let's say tomorrow, someone announces a good-sized object, something that could take out a city, let's say, that there's a decent chance it's going to meet up with our planet in, oh, let's say 10 years. Does that sound like a challenge, a threat that we are prepared to deal with? Yes. So something like that, that is 10 years out, I think we would have a reasonable chance at deflection. The reason I say reasonable is that it can be difficult to launch missions quickly. The more lead time you have, the easier it is literally from a physics standpoint to deflect something because most of the asteroids have orbits of a few years. And so if you think of nudging it one time when it's very far out, maybe five orbits

from impacting the Earth, it's not very hard to nudge it to have it miss the Earth in five revolutions. It's like compound interest. Absolutely. That is a great analogy. I'm going to steal that from you now because that's perfect. Please do. Before I let you go, what can you tell us again about this, where you went from the Minor Planet Center, starting up this group, Neo Sciences Limited Partnership, that you are the CEO for. You told us last year that it's basically a consultancy and you work for NASA and some private clients. But what kind of work do you actually do? First of all, it's great to be your own employer. And I would encourage people if it works for them to try that. And the most important thing is that if I don't like what my boss tells me to do, it's my fault at that point. So yeah, I'm doing a lot of similar

work that I did at the Minor Planet Center outside of the observation processing. I do a lot of really technical writing. I do work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I actually did some advocacy. I've got all sorts of things I can dabble in. It definitely keeps things interesting because I have two or three different projects going at once. Do this project, shift to this one later in the day, come back to the other one. And I really love it. Does it feel good to have made this transition? I mean, maybe you miss making the discoveries yourself, but now you are playing a big part in making a lot of people around the world aware of this challenge.

Yes. I actually feel very good about that. I had worked at the Minor Planet Center for 15 years, and I'm probably more useful as a worldwide ambassador now than I was in that position. That's just my idea on it. Maybe that's not necessarily true, but that's the way I feel. And I think that helping push this field forward is very important. It's actually, I believe in the mission of protecting the Earth from asteroids, period. And so I'm doing whatever I can to push that mission forward. I got just one more thing for you, period. And so I'm doing whatever I can to push that mission forward. I got just one more thing for you, Tim. It's an invitation to convey a message to any of

this most recent group of Shoemaker-Neo grant awardees that might hear this program. Well, I would say keep doing what you're doing because you're making us and the world proud. Well said. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for all you're doing and for your great work for several years now working with us on the Shoemaker Neo program. And good luck getting the good word out as well. Thanks so much. It's an honor to be here. Take care. That's Tim Spahr. We've talked with him several times before. He spent many years as the director of the Minor Planet Center, the sort of center for near-Earth object research that is underway around the world. Now the CEO of Neosciences LLP,

one of the best-known people in the near-Earth object community, something I think that we can all be very grateful for. He also has served once again as the chair of the Shoemaker Neo Grant Review Committee for the Planetary Society. Those grants have been awarded, and that work is underway with those devices and other improvements made to observatories around the world. And we'll be talking to one of those recipients, Michelle Ori, in just a moment. This is Planetary Radio.

There were seven winning proposals in this year's round of Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grants awarded by the Planetary Society. Some went to veterans who have received support in previous years. Others went to impressive first-time applicants with observatories from California to Serbia. We talked with Australian awardee Julian Owey last March. Now we turn to the work underway at an observatory high atop a mountain in the northern African nation of Morocco. One of the leaders of that project, which also includes astronomers based in Morocco and France, is Switzerland's Michel Ori. Michel very kindly joined me online a few days ago,

kind and somewhat courageous, considering that English is not his second, but his third language. Michel Aurilly, welcome to Planetary Radio. I should say bienvenue and congratulations on the award of a Shoemaker-Neo grant. Where are you today? Are you at home in Switzerland or elsewhere? Yes, I am in Switzerland, in Jura, in Switzerland, North Switzerland. How often do you go to Morocco, to this mountaintop where you have established this very successful observatory? Usually I go two times a year in Morocco. My partner Claudine Riner, I go most often because she is the technician and I am more the communications. So we are going over

there in Morocco, 2,000 kilometer away from here, maybe five times a year. Thank goodness today astronomers, amateur and otherwise, are able to do such wonderful work without actually having to be with the telescope. You are able to do this work for the most part remotely from Switzerland. Yes, we have a low-cost airplane that goes from Basel here in north of Switzerland to Marrakech. And Claudine and I live near this airport, near this low-cost airplane that goes in two hours in Marrakech. That's the good thing. And the program is of course important with our Moroccan team because they speak the second language and the language they speak in university University is French, and we all speak French for this project, the MOSS project.

And the seat of Oukamden, it's well-studied with the University Kadiyad of Marrakesh. We have a good scene over there. They have spotted the scene more than 10 years over the Camden Mountains. It is a beautiful complex of telescopes, observatories, that this National Center of Scientific Research has created there in Morocco. How was it that you and Claudine were able to partner with them to establish your telescope, which operates under this organization, which the two of you created, called MOSS, M-O-S-S. Only you will be able to pronounce this correctly as we speak, but it's the Moroccan Boukhamadan Sky Survey.

And I'm sure I did not pronounce that correctly. Yes, it's quite okay. Morocco Boukhamiden Sky Survey. The beginning of the project is my first wife came from Morocco and I was there

each summer and I have made in 2007 a trip tour of Moroccan astronomy and I met 10 years ago Professor Zouer Ben Kaldoun in University Kadiyayad and he told me that he wants to make an observatory, a professional observatory in New Camden, in a summit where they have made some experience with the sun on the atmosphere. In Switzerland, I tracked the asteroid from 2000 and we all say that we need to have a telescope in a region that has the most clear night.

Here we have maybe 80 clear nights a year. And in Morocco, in the Okaindan summit, we have four times that. We have four times that. I proposed to Claudine in 2011 to pick up a telescope that was in Sousse, France, and to install that in the Camden Summit and to make this project the most project, Morocco-Camden Sky Survey. Professor Ben Kaldoun is very interested about this project, Morocco Camden Sky Survey. Professor Ben Kaldoun is very interesting about this project. Since this project is established, we have in the beginning two domes in the summit, and now we have six domes in the summit.

Very impressive. in the summit. Very impressive. And I will refer anyone listening to an excellent blog post at planetary.org by my colleague Jason Davis on July 3rd of this year. It is an excellent, it provides much more information than we will be able to get to, including some images of the observatory, a beautiful video actually, must have been taken by a drone. And there is the good photos, side by side, of you and Professor Benk Haldun, the director of the observatory, as you mentioned. In the beginning of the project, we have said that

we have, for Claudine and I five nights of observing for the asterisks and the Moroccans have the two other nights to observe what they want. But in the following of the project we see that we are very powerful, Claudine and I, with the detection of asteroids. And Ben Caldoun said that our scope is definitely used for checking and searching comets and asteroids. So Claudine sees the sky from here with remote mode four days a a week, and I have three days a week. So it sounds like it has been a good partnership, working with Professor Ben-Kaldoun and the other scientists who are based in Morocco. When we installed the dome in Camden, the dome comes from United America. When we

installed the dome, the Moorcon installed a dome too next to ours. They have also a scope and they make observations of special stars.

They do in the same time with two scope in the same amount. They make photometry of stars, special star and photometry and spectroscopy. That's their specialty. So they make long-term observation of stars and we make our project of small bodies of solar systems. Usually we make observation together for special subjects. For example, when the asteroid and dormant comet Phaeton go close to the Earth, we do together observation with spectral and photometry with two scopes, their scope and our scope. So this is quite a partnership. I read in Jason's article that you have spent more than a thousand nights using the telescopes looking for these near-Earth objects and other asteroids and comets, four or five hours each night. So many so-called amateur astronomers show such dedication, and you are obviously one

of these because then you go and you teach high school there in Switzerland. The article of Jason is not quite exact. Oh, please set us straight. Okay. Here in Switzerland, we have created an observatory with some of my colleagues here in Switzerland, in the northern part of Switzerland. And in this observatory, we have installed a 60-centimeter scope. It's quite a big scope for amateur astronomers.

And with that scope, I have searched the asteroids more than 600 nights in 10 years. One day each six days. That's what we can do here in North Switzerland. Since 2011, we have observed more than 1,200 nights. That's very impressive. Especially knowing, since my wife is also a teacher, what it takes to also be able to spend your day with young people. Let me ask you about the

Shoemaker Neo grant that you received and how it was used. I read that you used it to purchase a much better camera. Yes, the old camera is a big one. And the new one is a big one too, but with a more large and a more sensitive detector. The main thing is we have field of view upgrade with 15%. The download frame, the full frame download is more quickly. This new camera is cooling better and have low noise in the reading. And we'll put up a link to the actual description of this camera.

I think it's quite fascinating, even though I am not nearly the astronomer that you folks are. Obviously, this is going to help you with your work, but you've had pretty good success already. How many comets and asteroids, near-Earth objects, has MOSS discovered? The MOSS has discovered five comets and six nearest objects, near asteroids. We say usually that it's more difficult to check a comet than to pick up a nearest object, an asteroid. But we have discovered with most projects quite the same number of comets as of near-Earth objects. The reason is that the time of our images is quite long. It's the necessity to reach the magnitude that is necessary for such discovery. We make a long exposure time, make long exposure time,

quite long exposure time, not 10 seconds or 20 seconds like the big survey. We make more than one minute, usually two minutes, and we detect more easily quite low objects, but not very fast objects.

And the nearest object is quite the most rapid object in the sky. So we detect not the quickly object, but the objects that are quite low, but more rapid than main belt objects, of course. Do you concentrate on discovering objects that have not been seen before? Or do you also do some of the follow-up work, tracking asteroids and comets that have been discovered by others? Okaimdon is not in Arizona or Kansas.

Okaimdon is not in Arizona or Kansas. Oukamdon is in Africa. Near the summit, we don't have any city. The data rate from Oukamdon to here is very, very low. So we must observe with scripts. scripts, it's not possible to upload images of Okaimdon here in my computer, to assemble the images and to detect a very faint nearest object to be followed up like all the emitters make in all the words. Because if you will track and stack the asterisk, you must have a quick liaison, not a very low rate data. I see.

Well, certainly this record of discovery of objects that no one has ever seen before is plenty of justification for the work that you're doing. I wonder, are your students aware of your successes as a discoverer of objects in the solar system? Are they excited to hear about your work? Here in my small region, I was well known. My person is linked to the astronomy

because I have discovered here in my region a comet, the 305 P. Comet or Mr. Asteroid or Mr. Astronomy here in my region. Okay. That's wonderful. I teach physics in high school. And when I discovered Comet in 2008, During one week, I speak about comets with all my classes. Often, my students tell me, can you please speak us about your discovery, your comets, your asteroids? And I speak, of course, with great satisfaction about these discoveries because I have named 100 minor planets and for me it's important to make education about that because great extinctions have been made with great impact with asteroids. In this environment, I think it's less person that speak about this problem here in Switzerland.

Well, then I have another reason to thank you for this work because in addition to making these discoveries, you are sharing them. That is something that at the Planetary Society we feel very strongly about. As our boss said, we like to share the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. It sounds like you are certainly doing that. Maybe next year, the university will make a high-speed Internet data system, maybe. Excellent.

And if we have this high-trade data system, we can make other things than just searching all night, each night after each night, detecting some small object, near-Earth object. I hope to make that until the big the big survey, the very big survey will be established. So after that I think it's not more possible to discover the LSST and some other big project will end the amateur era of discovery of asteroids. But I think we have more one, two or three years to pick up some objects.

Well, we will wish you the greatest of continued success. And it is good to know that that new camera that you got with your Shoemaker-Neo grant will be assisting you and your partner, Claudine Rene, in this work. Please tell her as well that we are very grateful and you both have our congratulations and best wishes. Thank you very much. Congratulations and best wishes. Thank you very much. And I hope that this prize and the reconnaissance with the American community of asteroids will permit to the Morocco team in Marrakech to upgrade and to be well known more away than just in Morocco. Professor Ben Khaldun and his team make great efforts, but they have less money and it's important that

the project and what they do over there in the Okaimdon summit is well known and to progress and to have a well established reconnaissance and I, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He is being a chief scientist this week because he is up at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. What's going on up there? Hi, we're having a mission readiness review for LightSail 2. Going through the details and make sure we understand the spacecraft and the flight rules, etc. With our launch currently scheduled for no earlier than October 30th of this year. That's today And then tomorrow we'll have an operational readiness test and or, or, or. And in that case, we will use the so-called bench sat, the simulated spacecraft to go through key

operational points. Basically, it's a practice. It's a run through for when we're in flight. I was wondering if bench sat would be involved. And that's where you treat the BenchSat, so-called, as the real bird, right? They do telemetry from it and so on? Yeah, exactly. So it's got a flight computer. It's got the same software on board. It's got either the actual hardware or simulations of it. And so it's the practice test article. Best of luck with that. And now people know why you sound like you're in a hotel room in central California, because you are. Could you tell that sound? Obviously. How's the night sky up there? It's usually cloudy. Actually, it was clear and beautiful last night. I saw in the early evening in the west, I saw Venus hanging out in this case near the moon.

But the moon will do its pesky moving away thing. But super bright Venus in the early evening, low in the west. And then you can go across the sky to Jupiter looking really, really bright. And then Saturn and then Mars rising after sunset, but it's still in the early evening, and Mars is, of course, approaching its opposition, opposite side of the Earth from the Sun on July 27th. Closest approach on July 31st. In a few days, I'll have a blog all about watching Mars, as well as on July 27th, same day as Mars opposition, there's a total lunar eclipse, which is visible from throughout most of Europe, Africa, Western and Central Asia,

the Indian Ocean, and Western Australia. And so if you are in one of those places on the 27th, you can actually see reddish Mars very close to reddish eclipsed moon. And then also we've got the moon hanging out near as it moves across sky. It hangs out near Jupiter on the 20th, Saturn on the 24th. And then as I mentioned, Mars on the 27th. If you don't see the total eclipse, you'll still see a full moon near Mars. Yeah, I know. It's still a very busy sky. Let me take you back, unprofessional that I am, because I should have asked you to tell people how they can learn more about light sail, about all that's going on. Sail.planetary.org. Go check out our website and learn about it. Jason Davis, who's covering it

on a regular basis for us, will have a blog about today's meetings in the next few days. Forrest will have a blog about today's meetings in the next few days. Okay, on to this week in space history. It was 49 years ago that humans first walked on the moon. Dun-dun-dun. One year to go to the 50th anniversary. In 1976, Viking 1 landed on Mars. We move on to random space facts. That was eclectic.

Apollo 11 was the second all-veteran multi-person crew on an American mission, the first being that of Apollo 10. So all of Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 astronauts were veterans of spaceflight. Guys who knew what they were doing. Apparently. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. Speaking of guys in space, what did Yuri Gagarin eat in space? How'd we do, Matt? Ick.

Bleh. We did terribly or his food was terrible? I just feel sorry for the guy after all that he had to go through. But he did get to be the first human in space. So I guess the worst things could have happened. I'm going to go straight to the person chosen by random.org as our winner this week. Some people guessed that he wasn't long up there long enough to eat. But actually, what I read is that the Russians, the Soviets at the time, wanted him to eat just so that they could see if he would choke to death because no one knew if you could eat in space other than, you know, the dog biscuits they had

given to Laika and so on. So here he is. It's George Stephan, one of our listeners in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He said on the 12th of April in 1962, Yuri Gagarin had a fabulous meal of beef and liver completed with a nice chocolate sauce, all served out of tubes. Yummy. Tasty and so good for you. And I take it that's a tasty and correct answer. It's a tasty and correct answer.

Wow. George, congratulations. You are our winner this week, which means we will be finding out what size planetary radio T-shirt you'd like. And you're also going to get one of those 200-point itelescope.net astronomy accounts from the World Wide Network called iTelescope, a nonprofit network that you can use to do great astronomy anywhere. I'm going to start out. We usually save them for last, but here is what Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate, sent.

It wasn't quite the haute cuisine Parisians find divine and nothing like a creme brulee or ruby rosé wine. Instead, Yuri Gagarin, when the time arrived to eat, was snacking on the pudding and some tubes of pureed meat. That's what I had for breakfast this morning. Oh, lucky you. Free breakfast at that hotel, huh? It is.

You just grab the tubes and head to your room. Throw in a little dried space ice cream and you got it made. I'm still trying to get the bacon out of the tube. We got more. It gets even better. Brian Mangold, Maricopa, Arizona. The food was terrible. The service stank. The location had no atmosphere, but the view made up for it all. I know, I know. Pretty good. Dominic Turley, in the same vein, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is where he wrote to us from. He said, honestly,

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is where he wrote to us from. He said, honestly, I'd rather burn up on reentry than eat that. No. Jeff Sosby. I love this one. He's in Sacramento, thus setting the standard for in-flight meals for decades to come. And finally, a random space fact from Clem Unker. Whilst Uri can claim to have had the first bite in space, his successor on Vostok 2, German Titov, had the honors of being the first to be space sick and lose his lunch in space. Quite an honor. Yes, I'm pretty sure I've discussed that in random space fact land before or in trivia. I think it was a trivia question. Who was the first person to hurl in space? Oh, I think you're right. I do think that came up. Anyway, that came to us from Clem in Mornington, Australia, where we have many listeners who are anxiously awaiting your question that is part of the new contest.

All right. After Apollo 11, what was the next U.S. mission to fly an all-veteran crew? In other words, an entire crew who had all flown in space before. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 25th. That would be July 25 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time. And win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Also, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Thank you. As I said, I hope it goes great up there and looking forward to the launch. Thank you. Me too. And I also wanted on a different

topic to, one, thank Tim Spahr and all of our review panel from Shoemaker-Neo Grants. Tim's a great guy who helps us get it done. Also, remind people there's a cool Kickstarter going on right now with Planetary Defense products, Kick Asteroid, with a great poster from Thomas Romer of Chop Shop. And so you can go to Kickstarter, search for Asteroid if you're interested in checking it out. Excellent. And there's some fun video stuff there as well with our boss, Bill Nye. Thank you for that. I'll talk to you next week. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky,

and think about what you would shove into a tube to eat in space. Thank you, and good night. I think I'll reserve my tubes in space for toothpaste. That's Bruce Betts. He's the chief scientist for the Planetary Society who joins us every week here for What's Up. Actually, the chocolate sauce doesn't sound so bad. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its watchful

members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.