Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - An Enormous New Eye on the Universe

Episode Date: December 1, 2008

Astronomer Richard Ellis looks forward to the Thirty Meter Telescope.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A gigantic new eye on the universe, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. And happy birthday to us! We're celebrating the sixth anniversary of this little show about the biggest possible subject. Thanks for joining us on our weekly ride across the cosmos. And how appropriate, we'll talk with astronomer Richard Ellis about plans for the 30-meter telescope, an instrument that will let us explore farther than ever before. Emily Lakdaw that will let us explore farther than ever before.

Emily Lakdawalla will help us party by resolving a long-disputed question about the Voyager 1 mission, and Bruce Batts will join me to announce the winners of our 6th anniversary slogan contest as he points out the most interesting points of light in our night sky. Space shuttle Endeavour rattled windows in Southern California Sunday afternoon as it returned to Earth. The weather in Florida made a sunny landing on the other side of the United States seem prudent. For other space news and big news at that, we turn to Bill Nye. I'll be right back with Richard Ellis. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of Planetary Society. And this week on Mars, we may have made the biggest discovery of our lifetimes. I know we haven't talked about it

too much around the world, but we have discovered glaciers, enormous ice rinks of ice on Mars. And the reason we didn't see them before is they're under sand or gravel or rocky debris, and you don't see them in photographs. But with an Italian-built radar on board the U.S.-built Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we found ice, enormous amounts of it, at 29 degrees south latitude on Mars. That's almost in the tropics of Mars, where, by the way, it's well below freezing all the time. But my friends, if we find water that's not especially salty, even though it's frozen, we might find evidence of something that once lived there.

These would be microbes, Mars crobes, perhaps. Or maybe even wilder, there are things still alive there. So our next robotic mission, perhaps, should maybe even wilder, there are things still alive there. So our next robotic mission perhaps should go to this place. We'd have to build a Martian backhoe or something to dig down deep enough. I mean, this place is big and flat. Maybe we'll be able to land there without too much trouble. There may be as much water under this debris in the Hellas Basin on Mars as there is in the Great Lakes. Here on Earth is Lake Bacall over in Siberia.

There may be that much water. Who knows what we will discover with a mission there. This is a very exciting week. Happy December, my fellow planetary explorers. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Explorers, I'm Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Richard Ellis came to Caltech from his native England largely because he wanted to help build a telescope. He's been here almost 10 years now, and that instrument is still about 10 years away. But it's worth waiting for.

What do you call a telescope with a 30-meter-wide compound mirror? How about the 30-meter telescope, or TMT? I sat down with the professor of astronomy under the dome for the Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain. Ellis once served as the director of Caltech Optical Observatories, including the 200-inch monster that once ruled the skies. What a great setting to talk to you about what is likely to take over the mantle of the largest telescope in the world, if all goes well. Yeah, this is an amazing setting. Here we are both sitting under the mighty 200-inch telescope, legacy of George Ellery Hale, and here we are also talking about the next step, the 30-meter telescope. And if Hale were here, I think he'd just be so excited to hear about the progress we're making with that telescope. Do you draw a

direct line from this instrument to what you're hoping to build? Not quite. There are some differences. Some of the challenges are identical. Raising large amounts of money, convincing sceptics, getting people excited, dealing with the setbacks, Hale struggled for so long with the mirror. Those things are the same, and it's what drives science to make these big projects happen. But some things are different. We don't make mirrors in the same way as we made them in the 1930s. And we have techniques now called adaptive optics, which allow us to get very sharp images of the sky. Astronomy is an amazing subject.

It's constantly changing. So, you know, things have developed an enormous amount since Hale's time. For example, this mirror, this massive mirror, which was the crowning achievement that made this instrument possible. Your mirrors in the TMT, much like those at existing facilities like for the Keck telescope, they're quite different. Yes, that's the first breakthrough. The first breakthrough since Hale's time is we realized as we went to larger and larger mirrors, they were getting harder and harder to make. Hale imagined actually a 300-inch telescope, but he drew back and said, you know,

it's just going to be too difficult to make a 300-inch in the 1930s. Let's stick with the 200-inch telescope. As you know from looking at the documentary of Hale's life, it was a challenge. It took a huge amount of effort to make that mirror. We can't make much bigger mirrors than an 8-metre mirror in diameter, 25 feet or so, because we wouldn't be able to support its weight, we wouldn't be able to transport it,

and we wouldn't be able to correct it as it moves around the sky following a star or a galaxy. So the first breakthrough was making what we call a segmented primary, a large mirror made out of many small mirrors, each individually cast and polished, and then articulated very carefully so that it maintains the shape of a single surface. This was the breakthrough with the Keck telescope. 36 segments, all very carefully assembled and put together. That was a challenge, but now we've realized that we can make segmented mirror

telescopes. That is the route forward to bigger mirrors. The 30-meter telescope, that's 30 meters in diameter. Imagine 100 feet, right? If it's in a baseball yard, that mirror comprises 492 segments, each 1.4 meters across, each carefully made, each polished. The time it will take us to make that telescope is governed by a conveyor belt of making these mirrors. How fast can we make these 492 segments? So it's a very big change from Hale's day, but exciting nonetheless.

1,200 inches. Incredible. Six times the diameter of this mirror. Can you say how much more in terms of light-gathering power? The light-gathering power goes as the square of the mirror, so it's 36 times more powerful than the 200-inch telescope just in collecting area. But really that belies the main advance, which is that the image quality, because of adaptive optics, will be very much better. So it's the combination of both the bigger mirror diameter and the increased acuity of vision, the resolution,

that is the biggest breakthrough. 13 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. So that's a huge step forward, quite apart from the big light-gathering power. So it's the combination of the two. Bigger mirrors, segmented primaries, and adaptive optics. And we have talked about adaptive optics before on this show, but could you give us the quick 90-second overview of what we're talking about?

I'd be happy to. Adaptive optics is probably the biggest revolution in astronomy right now. What we're doing is getting the visual images of the same resolution as Hubble with ground-based telescopes. That's a huge advance because, of course, it costs a lot of money to send a telescope into space. How does it work? The atmosphere is a little bit like a pond, and a light ray is coming through the pond, and the pond is moving.

So the light rays are constantly being deflected as they travel through down the Earth's atmosphere. If we could follow a light ray that was traveling alongside the light from a distant galaxy so that we could monitor its behavior, then we could correct for the blurring in the Earth's atmosphere. So what we do is we take a reference signal from a bright star, and if there's not one there, well, we'll create one. We'll shine a laser in the sky to create a spot of light that makes an artificial star. The light ray comes through the Earth's atmosphere. It hits a mirror that analyzes the deformation of the light ray that's coming through the Earth's atmosphere and makes a very fast real-time correction that allows us to

correct not only the light coming from the reference star, but also the light from a distant astronomical object. The result, a very sharp image, just as if the telescope was in space. So it's a tremendous technique. And over the last five years, we've seen breakthrough after breakthrough so that many telescopes, including the 200-inch here, 200-inch telescope here, has this capability now. We'll hear more from astronomer Richard Ellis about the 30-meter telescope in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who

aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. With luck and adequate funding, we're about ten years from the largest telescope in history taking us to the edge of the universe. Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis is on both the Board of Directors and the Science Committee for the TMT, or 30-meter telescope. I spoke with him under the Hale telescope dome as we waited for the premiere of a PBS documentary about that pioneering instrument that was once the biggest on our planet.

What is the TMT going to show us that we cannot see now? The main gains are in imaging objects that are very close to bright objects, for example, planets close to bright objects, for example planets close to bright stars. That's a very challenging observation. We now know, largely through the work done at the Keck Observatory, that planets outside the solar system are very common. There are 300 of them unknown. The question is, can we find and image objects that are similar to Earth-like planets? Can we detect Earth-like planets in abundance? Or are we only, at the moment, we're only finding massive planets,

Jupiter-sized objects that are close to stars like the sun. So that's a huge area to explore. And, of course, the public is extraordinarily interested in whether an object like the Earth is a common planet in the Milky Way galaxy. Secondly, we can look at distant galaxies and study their internal properties. Are they rotating? How do galaxies assemble their spiral structure like the Milky Way? What are the mechanisms by which galaxies get their grand designs that we see these beautiful forms that we see today. Of course, a telescope is a time machine.

We can look back in time to very early examples, but they're very faint and fuzzy and small. So we need a large telescope to get the signal, and we need the resolution of adaptive optics to study their internal properties. And then perhaps I would say the most challenging and exciting area of all, and that's to look to the very earliest stages of the universe, when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, say 3% of its present age. What were the very first objects to shine in the universe?

What kind of objects were they? When did the universe switch on star formation for the very first time? That's an exciting discovery space that really is waiting to be explored with the 30-meter telescope. The engineering and other challenges that you face in pulling this together, I'm going to guess, are somewhat comparable to this magnificent instrument behind us here. How is that going? Are you still looking for a site where this amazing dome is going to be built. And again, I would suggest that people visit the website

to see this gigantic eye that you guys envision building on a mountaintop. Yes, of course there are challenges. So let me explain how astronomers go ahead and design and build a telescope. Of course, the first thing we have to do is to do a design study. And a design study means you have to hire engineers. That means you've got to raise money. So the first thing you have to do, even before you begin constructing, is you have to raise money just to do the design study.

So the first thing we did was what we called a concept study. A concept study is where astronomers, who are not very skilled at engineering, let's be honest, sit down and get enthused about the science that could be done with a 30-meter telescope. And I came to Caltech in the year 2000 largely to get involved in this concept study. It took two years. We raised $2 million to do this concept study. And then we wrote a book, which we called The Green Book, the California Extremely Large Telescope Green Book, the California Extremely Large

Telescope, Green Book, the Celt Green Book. And then, of course, we then said, okay, let's get serious. Let's hire some engineers and now do a proper design study. How much do you think we had to raise for the proper design study? The answer was $80 million. So we had to suddenly raise $80 million. And we had to enlarge the partnership beyond the University of California and Caltech to include Canada. And so we have raised that $80 million. In fact, we've nearly spent it all. And we have been completing the design study that has led to a design study for the telescope, a site testing campaign, a science case that's published, and a construction proposal. And so we're very close to the end of that design study,

and we are now raising money for construction. We have narrowed the site decision to two sites, one in the northern hemisphere, in Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, close to where the Keck telescopes are, and the other in the Atacama Desert in Hawaii, close to where the Keck telescopes are, and the other in the Atacama Desert in Chile, in northern Chile, a site called Chero Amazonas, which is near Antofagasta. Both of these extremely famous, preeminent sites already for some of the largest instruments in the world. Absolutely. These are the best two sites in the world in their respective hemispheres.

best two sites in the world in their respective hemispheres. We have enlarged the partnership again. We have managed to persuade Japan to join the project. And we obviously are now at the point where we're raising money. Now, you have to raise money for both construction and operations. Both are challenges. Private funding, of course, famous with the Rockefeller Foundation for the 200-inch behind us here, has been a stalwart in large telescopes history and astronomy for over 100 years. And we were delighted to get a $300 million leadership gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, augmented by Caltech and the University of California. So we're now counting on Canada and Japan to come forward with their capital contributions, and then we're looking to the federal government for some of the operating funds for the telescope. So we're not there yet, but we're very close, I think, having got this agreement with Canada and Japan

and, of course, having this wonderful gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Best case, when do you hope to see First Light? So if the money rolls in at the rate that we need it, we imagine First Light in 2018. We would imagine making our site decision next June 2009 and moving forward to construction in 2011. So seven years to build. Of course, these projects have a history of running over. If you look at the 200-inch, that was interrupted by the war. Let's hope we don't have anything as dreadful as that again. But we're all optimistic. But we all know this is a long haul. I crossed the Atlantic to get in touch with this project. I moved in 1999. Here we are now in 2008.

I think we've made great progress, but we're still 10 years away at least. You obviously have not lost any of your enthusiasm for this project. You're on the Science Advisory Committee. You just told me you're also on, is it the Executive Board? Board of Directors, yeah. Do you hope someday to be doing science with the TMT? I definitely do. You know, I have my pet project already lined up. But, of course, you've got to realize that science changes. And so what is a good project today may not be a good project in 10 years' time.

In fact, it's interesting to go back and look at the case for the Keck telescope and ask, did we do the science that was in that book when we planned the Keck telescope in the 1980s? What did we actually do with the Keck telescope in the 1990s and now? And the answer is amazing, Matt. We did so much more. We actually did a lot more than we said we would do.

Astronomers were very conservative about what they would expect to do with a large telescope. So in practice, telescopes do far more than you imagine they ever will. May you have exactly the same experience, and as soon as possible, with the 30-meter telescope. Richard, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you very much. Richard Ellis is, as you heard, on the Science Advisory Committee and the Executive Committee planning the 30-meter telescope, the TMT. Take a look at the website. We'll have a link to that site from ours at planetary.org slash radio.

He's on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, better known to most of us as Caltech. And we'll be back with another graduate of that esteemed institution. Bruce Betts will join us for this week's edition of What's Up right after we visit with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Is it true that Voyager 1 could have gone to Pluto

if it skipped the close flyby of Titan? Yes, it's true that an option to go to Pluto was on the table for Voyager 1. Remember, it was Voyager 2 that performed the grand tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1. Remember, it was Voyager 2 that performed the grand tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 did Jupiter and Saturn, but it couldn't continue the tour because, in order to get a close flyby of Saturn's giant moon Titan, Voyager 1 had to be sent on a course that flung it up and out of the ecliptic plane in which the planets orbit.

So the close encounter at Titan was achieved at a great cost in terms of the possible future science at either Pluto or Uranus and Neptune. Was it worth it? If you look at the Voyager photographs, it seems like they made the wrong choice. Voyager's cameras couldn't see into the infrared the way that Cassini's can, so all Voyager ever saw at Titan was the fuzzy orange smog that fills its upper atmosphere. In bland picture after picture, there was no view of the surface at all. But there was much more to the Titan flyby than pictures. As Voyager 1 flew behind Titan, it broadcast a radio signal through that pesky atmosphere to Earth. Radio scientists tease apart

the fluctuations in the strength of the signal to find out the density and temperature of the atmosphere, and finally got a direct measurement of Titan's diameter, proving that it wasn't actually the biggest moon in the solar system. And as it soared above the plane of the rings, Voyager 1 repeated the trick, probing their structure with radio, mapping the rings in a hundred times greater detail than could be done with camera images. The Cassini-Huygens mission would not have been well designed to study Titan and Saturn without these incredibly important experiments.

And there was no guarantee that Voyager 1 would have survived the long trip to Pluto, or been able to see anything in the low light at that distance from the Sun. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, the big one, the anniversary contest resolved. We are here with the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts,

and we're going to hear about the night sky very quickly because we want to tell you about the winners of our Anniversary Slogan Contest. Welcome back. Thank you very much. We've got Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky over in the west, two brightest star-like objects. If you happen to pick up this show right as it comes out on Monday the 1st, you can even check them out next to the moon in the evening sky. But if not, the moon will still be up there just a little farther away. Venus and Jupiter are very close together.

They'll start getting farther and farther apart as we go through December. Jupiter will get lower. Venus higher. Venus is the brighter of the two. Our other planet in the sky, we've got Saturn rising around middle of the night in the east and then up high before dawn. Quick mention of the Geminids meteor shower coming up, peaking on December 13th. However, that'll be right around a full moon, so it's going to cut you back. But other than that, they're a great meteor shower.

Let us go on to Random Space Reward! Ooh, an appropriately celebratory Random Space Fact. Happy anniversary. So, quick Random Space Fact. Saturn's moon, Mimas, looks a lot like the Death Star. Yeah. But the weird thing is that Mimas was photographed two years after Star Wars came out. Yeah.

was photographed two years after Star Wars came out. Yeah, but there is one really serious loony who will go unnamed who says it really is the Death Star, and George Lucas is plugged into all that, but we don't have time to go into it anyway. That's a whole different show. All right, on to our trivia contest. We'll start with what was the first asteroid that a spacecraft flew by and imaged,

and how did we do, Matt? Most people got it right, and it was only very slightly tricky. We did get the answer near, near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission. That really wasn't it. That was 1997. As most of you pointed out, Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, paused briefly to take a look at 951 Gaspera on October 29th, 1991. Our winner, Taras Henantyshin in New York, New York. And it's much easier to say New York, New York than to say your name, Taras,

but we're still going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and I think he is the last person to win also a one-year membership in the Planetary Society. Congratulations and a nice attempt at the name there. Yeah. Let's go on and give you our next trivia contest question before we get back to the anniversary contest. Who was the first civilian person in space? And by that I mean someone non-military. They can be part of a space agency, but non-military at the time they flew in space. And by that, I mean someone non-military. They can be part of a space agency,

but non-military at the time they flew in space. Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter and compete for a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Got till December 8th, 2 p.m. on Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific on Monday, December 8th, to get us your answer. Okay, let's get into this

because this is going to take a little bit of time. Go, go, go. We asked you a very long time ago to give us what you would suggest as a new slogan for this radio show. And we said it could be funny. We said it could be serious. We said we might or might not ever use these. You responded brilliantly, not just with quality, but quantity. And that's why it took us an extra week to get through these.

It has been a real struggle. I mean, we really have. It really has. But we think we've got it. And our congratulations to all of you, our gratitude also to all of you who entered. We're going to start going through these, beginning with some honorable mentions. Do you want to start that? Sure. From Torsten Zimmer, we had several with some honorable mentions. Do you want to start that? Sure.

From Torsten Zimmer, we had several that made honorable mentions. Yeah, he did a good job. Planetary Radio, our stars are hot and bright. Yeah, we didn't tell you what the criteria would be, and if you kiss up, that's a good way to go, actually. So thank you, Torsten. Got another one from him. Finally available after 13.7 billion years of evolution, Planetary Radio.

I enjoyed that one. It made me laugh out loud. I like this one also from Torsten. Six years on the air, only one planet lost. Find out if yours is next on Planetary Radio. And then from, now did we have any family issues here from Kiko Kaplan? No, man, we had like three different Kaplans, but two who entered. Two from the same family.

Absolute coincidence. Don't know these people. Oh, you read this. You enjoyed this. Oh, here you go. Planetary Radio, the true hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Radio, the true hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. And also from Kiko Kaplan, Planetary Radio,

the universe is closer than you think. And finally, and this from Jim Atavian, heard throughout the known universe Ataviani. Ataviani? I can't read it from here. I'm sorry. We're both looking at Bruce's laptop. We're sharing it. Heard throughout the known universe. Just give it time. And those are our honorable mentions. Let's move on to the third place winner who will receive a copy of Space Station Sim, the great space station simulation game.

Build and operate your own space station. It's from Vision Video Games. You'll find it at spacestationsim.com. Lay it on us. The universe is talking. Are you listening? Planetary Radio. That from Dwayne Jones. Congratulations. Hey, Dwayne. Congrats. Here is our second place winner. We're going to also send David Weatherholt a copy of Space Station Sim, but we're going to throw in that great package of covers, postal covers, from our friend Florian Knoller. And you want to go to his website to learn more.

If you are interested, it's spaceflory.com, www.spaceflory.com. Five covers designed at JPL for various missions, and that envelope that was on the helicopter that recovered the Apollo astronauts on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. Here it is. Where in the universe would you like to go? And, Bruce, if you would, our grand prize winner, Space Station Sim and SkyScout, the Celestron SkyScout, your personal planetarium, courtesy of OPT. That's Oceanside Photo and Telescope, at optcorp.com.

Here is our big winner. Cool prizes, by the way. Thank you again to our prize sponsor. And now, drumroll. Bringing the cosmos down to Earth. Planetary Radio from Doug Pickle. Hey, Doug, congratulations. So there it is, folks.

Now, we want to say there are a few others of you who had really good stuff, and you may hear some of those. Those might surface, but we sure thank all of you who entered. Absolutely brilliant work, and we love you all. And I think we're done. Congratulations, by the way, on six years of Planetary Radio. And congratulations to you as well. Always a highlight of my week.

As for me. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think what type of radio show you'd put together if you could. And maybe you do. Thank you, and good night. Don't think about that, actually. Please don't. Just listen to this one.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Thank you, and good night. Don't think about that, actually. Please don't. Just listen to this one. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week for six years here on Planetary Radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.