Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Approaching Pluto, and Learning About Uwingu From Alan Stern

Episode Date: November 26, 2012

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern returns with a Pluto mission update. He also introduces us to Uwingu.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Approaching Pluto and naming a planet after your dog, 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. Alan Stern is back. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Alan Stern is back. He'll tell us how he and his team will keep the New Horizons spacecraft from running into anything unexpected when it reaches Pluto. He'll also ask you if you Uingu.

It's his new company that raises money for space exploration as it lets you suggest names for new planets. Bruce Betts has a couple of invitations to share, and Bill Nye is wondering with the rest of us what Curiosity has found on Mars. First up is Emily Lakdawalla. Welcome back, Emily. We're talking today about some stuff that, as we speak, is not quite up yet on the blog at planetary.org, but will be probably by the time people hear this and well worth looking at. What is this image from Curiosity that you plan to post?

The Curiosity team, like the rest of us, didn't work much at the end of last week because it was a Thanksgiving holiday. But what they had done was they gave Curiosity a three-day plan of things to do while they were all eating turkey. And one of those things was this amazing mosaic that shows the new area that they have recently driven to. It's down into the area called Glenelg, which is where that light colored rock is that they're so interested in checking out. And this, it's just a geologist's paradise. There is nothing but bedrock as far as the eye can see. And what bedrock is, it's rock that's in the same place, the same position it was in when it first formed. So you have all the context you need to understand what the environment was like when it formed, what's happened to it since then. You know, as a geologist, I would hardly know where to begin to investigate this stuff. So I'm sure that they're going to have

a really fun time here. But the one kind of odd thing about it, though, looking at it from the perspective of an Earth geologist is that you want to look at all these little, you see some channels and other things that appear to line up, you want to say, oh, I think water may have flowed through here, and that looks like a dry pond. But you have to remind yourself that Mars is not like Earth. Mars hasn't had very much geologic activity for billions of years. And so what you're really seeing is kind of the desiccated corpse of an Earth landscape. It's all dry and air-blasted and sand-blasted. So it doesn't really look a whole lot like it did when this landscape

was forming. When Emily shares it, be sure to expand that to as much of your screen as possible, because it really makes it so dramatic. Thank you for sending me a little preview of that and giving me a little preview of some book reviews that you're going to be posting. Any highlights? Right. Well, I'm looking at two books by Michael Benson, who is a person after my own heart. He likes to dig into raw image archives and actually not just show pictures that were the ones that were press released from missions, but really dig into the archives and find things that nobody's seen before. And he's produced a couple of absolutely amazing looking books. One of them is called Planetfall. It's printed just like an art book.

The pictures are enormous on white background pages. It looks like any kind of art coffee table book. And it just shows amazing landscapes. All of the images were taken in the last 12 years. The other book is called Beyond. And he had already published a book called Beyond. But this one is a slightly different version with text that's aimed at children, or at least I would say junior high school age readers. It's an excellent overview of amazing pictures from across the solar system, many of which I had not seen before, and so I highly recommend them both. All right, Emily, just one more question. You're going to share your recipe for green bread? It involves lots and lots of spinach, and it is very tasty.

Thanks, Emily. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. And she'll visit with us again next week. Here is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back. It's big news, or is it? Yes, Matt, it's not clear. The people at the Curiosity rover mission started to say that they found something big, but then it's been walked back, if I understand that term. Yeah, our friend Guy Webster, who's a public information guy at JPL, he sort of tempered John Gratzinger's enthusiasm.

I'm hoping that they found something organic, evidence of something that would be associated with a living thing, a chemical. It doesn't mean it's alive. It's just a kind of chemical. Like in petroleum, natural gas, those have carbon in them. I'll go even further.

I mean, because, you know, you can find organics everywhere, in space. But really, you know, complex organics. Now, that would be cool. I guess the big point, the point I'd like to make, is that it shows you how interested everybody all over the world is in this mission. Everybody really has it in their heads that it's quite possible we'll find evidence of something that was once alive or, stranger still, something is alive on Mars. It would just be amazing. You know, once in a while people get excited about looking for methane, which would be swamp gas, which would come from bacteria. The amount of methane in the

Martian atmosphere is tiny. But if anything's alive, it would be underground someplace in some icy slush. Who knows? It's cool. Yeah. And it does say that scientists, they get very excited about their results, as they should. Well, Matt, if we found evidence of life on Mars, it would utterly change. What do you say? Earth shaking. It would change this world. Everybody would feel very differently about his and her place in space.

in space? And then what if those things on Mars that were or are strangely are still alive have DNA or molecules like ours, and that we are actually all descendant from a Martian microbe that fell here after an impact on Mars through a bunch of Mars rocks into space? It is just fantastic to think about. It's crazy. It's exciting. It is. It's exciting stuff. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you, Matt. It's great to talk with you again. It's just so exciting.

Everybody, pay attention to this mission. The holidays are coming up. It's a busy time. But stay tuned. These people are going to discover something in the next few weeks that's going to change things. It's very exciting. Did I mention planetary.org? I've got to fly.

Bill Nye, the planetary guy. He is that got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. He is that, and he is the CEO of the Planetary Society. He's going to join us on stage on December 15th, when we'll be talking to the two guys who run the Curiosity mission, including John Gratzinger, the project scientist. And you'll be able to tune in and

watch it on the live webcast or afterward or hear it here on Planetary Radio where we're going to be right back with Alan Stern. Alan Stern is the busiest man in space exploration. Alan Stern is the busiest man in space exploration. The Southwest Research Institute vice president has a piece of more space missions than we have time to mention. Recent discoveries about Pluto and its satellites will make his New Horizons mission to that world even more exciting and possibly more dangerous. He is preparing to do science on human suborbital missions as soon as they begin,

and he is a brand new company that, like the Planetary Society, has turned to the public for funding of space research. Uyengu hopes to do this by letting anyone with a dollar or two submit new planet names and vote for names contributed by others. The former NASA Associate Administrator joined me on the phone a few days ago. Alan, great to have you back on the radio show. How is New Horizons doing? Matt, it's great to be back, and New Horizons is just doing fantastically. Well in its way. I hear that you did a, what, a dress rehearsal recently of that closest approach day at the Pluto system?

Yeah, we did this summer. We did a rehearsal that closest approach day at the Pluto system? Yeah, we did this summer. We did a rehearsal of closest approach day on the spacecraft, walking through each and every scientific observation, all of the maneuvers, everything, and we passed with a really good clean bill of health, so we're very happy about that. That's good to hear. I see that there is a software upgrade coming up in January. Do you just keep refining things? Exactly.

Actually, the one that's in January is a bug fix, a bug that's been around since launch. Uh-oh. That we finally traced down causes the computer on the spacecraft to go blue screen every year or two. I wish my laptop would only go blue screen once every year or two. Really? I hope you're not running Windows. And it reboots and everything's fine, but it's kind of a nuisance. And this will eliminate that particular flavor of reboot. In addition, we do other kinds of upgrades with new capabilities.

We've still got some more capability, for example, in our spacecraft fault protection system that we'll be upgrading this coming summer. So I don't know if there have been any upgrades to the Voyager software, but I doubt it. So this may be the most distant software maintenance in the history of humankind. Well, always a new record for New Horizons. Thanks for pointing that out. Just one of many, of course. A couple of other developments recently. A couple of images, one from announced last July, one just last September.

One from announced last July, one just last September. This truly stunning achievement by the folks with the Gemini North telescope that shows Pluto and Charon as never before. And yet, there's still just a couple of large featureless dots, which New Horizons is going to do a little bit better, I think. Right. Well, they're very far away. And even with the Hubble, which is the best tool we've got, we can only put a few pixels, literally a handful, five pixels across Pluto. Of course, when we get there, we will put thousands of pixels across the diameter and millions of pixels on the planet and on the satellite, Sharon, and on the smaller satellites will do very well. It's really going to be quite an awakening for this kind of science.

I'm glad you mentioned the Hubble, because this other team led by Mark Showalter up at the SETI Institute, they have this image that shows this very busy little system, and to that point, undiscovered object, for the moment known as P5. And to that point, undiscovered object for the moment known as P5. It is becoming apparent that this is quite a crowded system that your spacecraft is heading into. What challenges does that present? You're right. It looks like the smash-up that created Pluto-Sharon put a lot of debris that coalesced into satellites in the system.

We're up to Satellite 5, and we're still looking in the data. I fully expect that we will find more, if not in the Hubble data, than on approach. Of course, that presents some challenges for us. The primary challenge is that we're worried about debris that those satellites can create when they're hit by things that make craters on them, because the ejecta from those craters, the boulders, the rocks, the pebbles, the things that get out of those craters on them, because the ejecta from those craters, the boulders, the rocks, the pebbles, the things that get out of those craters get into orbit around Pluto, and we don't want to hit any of that. So we're preparing alternate plans besides our main encounter plan so that we could fire our engine late on approach if we're worried about going into a debris zone and move over to one of a number of different safer trajectories that we're currently preparing.

How far ahead would you have to adjust this trajectory that New Horizons is on to be able to make sure the spacecraft is safe? Can you even answer that at this point? Sure, I can answer that, Matt. We'd like to do that early, of course, but earlier we're farther out and we can't see as well. We like to do it early for a lot of reasons, and one would be that it just saves fuel. It's less expensive to burn the engines early and make a small maneuver than to make a sharper turn much later. But we could fire the engines as late as

about 10 days before encounter, and that's a pretty good day for fireworks. It's July the 4th, 2015. And if we have to fire the engines that late, we will, because we want to make sure we have a safe encounter. I was reading your column that shows up on the New Horizons website. Simply Google New Horizons and maybe add APL in there, and we'll put a link up to it where this radio show can be heard at planetary.org slash radio as well. But you talk about some of the conclusions that we're beginning to reach about the Kuiper Belt,

and maybe this complex system around Pluto now backs this up as well. We're learning about our solar system. Does it say something to us about the rest of the universe? Well, it tells us a lot about our own solar system that we didn't know. One thing is that we used to think of where the giant planets are as the outer solar system. We now realize that's really the middle solar system, that it's the Kuiper Belt, which is littered with small planets. It's really the third zone, the outer part of our planetary system.

We also realized something else we didn't get at all, even as recently as the 80s and early 90s, when many of us learned about planetary science for the first time, and that is that the solar system was extremely good in the early days in making small planets. We used to think of the solar system as four terrestrial planets, four giant planets, and a small one on the outside called Pluto all by itself. But now we realize those four terrestrial planets and four giant planets

come with a cohort of many dozens, if not possibly hundreds, of dwarf planets, and that really is the dominant planetary type in our solar system. And these objects aren't so small. If you were to drive around Pluto's equator, it's as far as from Manhattan to Moscow. That's Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission. More in a minute here on Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory

rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too,

giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Alan Stern is going to tell us about something called Uingu in a moment. He has also returned to provide another update on the New Horizons mission I'm Matt Kaplan. Alan Stern is going to tell us about something called Uingu in a moment. He has also returned to provide another update on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

Alan is the New Horizons principal investigator. He was telling us before the break about the Kuiper Belt, the distant region of our solar system that contains countless small and not-so-small bodies. Do you think this tells us something about the solar systems we're going to find elsewhere in our galaxy? Oh, good question. Absolutely. We think that Kuiper belts are common in other solar systems. We see evidence of debris belts that are at similar distances around other stars in both protoplanetary systems under formation as well as more mature systems. So we think this is one of the standard architectures to have a Kuiper belt on the outside. And there are probably not only billions, but maybe tens of billions of Kuiper belts around the galaxy. All right, so we have all these little objects, planets being discovered, or at least candidate planets.

So you've come up with a way, maybe, to have some fun with this and come up with some new names. Well, we think we've got a fun way. It's called Uwingu, U-W-I-N-G-U, Uwingu, and it's the Swahili word for the sky. It's a company we've started, about a dozen of us, planetary scientists, astronomers, some software and business people, that's actually meant to connect people better to the sky, not those of us that love astronomy that spend our time doing it or reading about it, people like Planetary Society members so much as the general public, find ways that they can learn a little bit more.

And one way is that human beings just love to name things. You know, as soon as our kids are born or we get a pet, somebody buys a boat or has a ranch, they always name things. You know, as soon as our kids are born or we get a pet, somebody buys a boat or has a ranch, they always name it. Of course, all the explorers that came across North America and the other continents named all the mountains and rivers. They love naming their towns and so forth. So we're giving the public an opportunity to create a baby book of names, not to actually name the planets of the galaxy, but to suggest names to be used later to create that baby book of names at www.awingu.com. It's a dollar for a name nomination, actually 99 cents.

And we hope we get a big response because the money is going to fund space projects and researchers and educators. That's what our company does. It does seem like a very novel, innovative way to fund space science at a time when such funding is very much challenged. Right. You know, there's an old saying, if you only own one stock, you probably deserve what you get when it goes down. We're trying to broaden that portfolio,

and we've got great partners in this, like the SETI Institute, Astronomy Magazine, Combox Publishing. We're very happy about that, and that've got great partners in this, like the SETI Institute, Astronomy Magazine, Combox Publishing. We're very happy about that, and that list is expanding. We launched our beta test of this project on November the 6th, and we've had almost 2,000 name nominations or votes for names, because we're also conducting a popularity contest. But we're going to emerge from beta the first week of December. And I want to announce something right here, an opportunity for planetary radio listeners to take advantage of early. We're going to give you a sneak peek. We're going to let you in early on the fact that we're holding a contest to see how many name nominations the people of the Earth can make for planets around the galaxy.

The contest ends on Valentine's Day, the 14th of February, and we're not only looking to see if we can put millions or tens of millions of names into that list for astronomers to shop among, but also we're conducting a popularity contest. What names do people that are in the database, the people like the best? You can name them for historical figures, artists, your children, your grandchildren, for your favorite places, your favorite sports teams. We like to get contests going between, say, the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, or between New York City and San Francisco, or Madonna and Lady Gaga, what have you. It's a really interesting social experiment that's going to generate money for space research and space education.

So we're really happy with it. What would the people of the Earth like to name planets for across the galaxy? After all, there are more than 100 billion of them, and we astronomers couldn't possibly write down 100 billion names. At Awingu, we want to provide astronomers with some help. I'm just thinking of the planet Lombardi being out there someday. And full disclosure here, I'm rather surprised that my two nominations during the beta period have not done better. Now, Coyote I can kind of understand, because you have to be a little bit of a hardcore science fiction fan. But Pandora, come on, folks!

I love Pandora. What a great name. Absolutely. You know, Heinlein's currently at the top of the list, but science fiction isn't all that's there. We see people naming after places, after relatives and friends and loved ones, after somebody's probably named something after their boss already. All kinds of ideas that are already in the database. And once we launch in early December on the commercial product with this contest, we expect this to really proliferate, and we hope it goes viral.

Alan, we're out of time. We'll just say once again it's uingu.com, but people should be following New Horizons. There will be more to say about that mission. Best of luck with this software upgrade and a few other things that have to be done in January. And certainly we'll all be waiting for that great time in 2015, which will start well before closest approach, when New Horizons begins to reveal the Pluto system as never before. Thank you, Matt.

He's Alan Stern. He is an associate VP at the Southwest Research Institute, SWRI, and has so many other things going on. He is the principal investigator for New Horizons and has also been the PI for a slew of other instruments and spacecraft, many of which we simply didn't have time to talk about today, like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter where he's got an instrument. Now you've heard that he heads up this new effort called Uingu.

I'll be right back for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. Welcome. I think you have an announcement for us. I do. I do have an announcement, and it's one for the history books. No, wait, no. It's earth-shaking. It's earth-shaking. No, that's what the Mars announcement has been touted by John Grotzinger. We'll come back to that later. No one knows what it is, even Grotzinger, I don't think.

He was just messing with Joe Palka of NPR, I think. Totally. But our announcement, which I will not keep you waiting any longer, is we're announcing a new round, new request for proposals for the Planetary Society Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant Program. And if you're a hardcore astronomer, amateur or professional looking to upgrade your system, go check out the details. You can find them at planetary.org under Shoemaker Neo Grants. It's for the really serious asteroid hunter.

grants. It's for the really serious asteroid hunter. And this is our 15th year, 15th anniversary of Shoemaker-Neo grants, making a lot of difference in the world, particularly for tracking of asteroids to find out if they're on dangerous orbits and characterizing what they're made of or how they're put together more accurately. So we can figure out how to deflect them when a dangerous, nasty one named Kaplan comes flying at us in the future. And, of course, we talk to a lot of these winners, and you hear now and then on this program the wonderful work that they're able to do even better because of getting these grants. Okay, lots of asteroids that are hard to see, but also things that are easy to see. We've got Jupiter hanging out in the mid-evening over in the east, super bright star-like object. It is hanging out near the moon on November 28th, making for a

lovely sight. And in the pre-dawn, still super bright Venus dominating in the pre-dawn east. Saturn now getting very close to it, and in fact, we're right on top of their closest being about one degree apart on November 27th. They will then begin to separate more. And Mercury, you can check out if you catch it just right low in the pre-dawn East still for another week or two. Also, Geminid meteor shower coming up December 13th and 14th. We'll come back to that as we get closer. We move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1964 that Mariner 4 was launched, became the first successful spacecraft to Mars, flyby mission. In 1997, 15th anniversary of TRMM, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and Earth Observing Mission

to study, not surprisingly, rainfall. It's been going, constantly doing great stuff for 15 years. And now we move on to Random Space Facts. Hay fever getting in the way there. Oh, you have no idea. So I put this out to my Twitter audience at Random Space fact. Hay fever getting in the way there. Oh, you have no idea. So I put this out to my Twitter audience at random space fact, but I liked it so much I'm going to share it here. Usually I give different info the two places. If Mercury were the size of a cranberry, Jupiter would be about the size of a turkey with metallic hydrogen stuffing, of course.

And we hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Or a happy Thursday elsewhere in the world. Yeah. We move on to the trivia contest, and we ask you the very important question. Planetary Radio is, of course, now on 150 stations, roughly, in SiriusXM. A lot of you get it by podcast, but what was the first radio station to air Planetary Radio, the only radio station to air the very first episode of Planetary Radio? What was it? How did we do, Matt? If you turn away from space on this program, the audience response plunges.

There weren't that many people who were interested in finding out which station was our first. Gave them better odds for winning the prize. It certainly did. And somebody, I will know in just a moment, won that terrific Year in Space wall calendar, space calendar for 2013. I am looking at it right now at yearinspace.com, created in cooperation with, guess who, the Planetary Society. So it's quite nice. You can check it out there as well, yearinspace.com. So here is a guest that came from T.J. Schick in Allentown. I'm sorry,

T.J., this was our, I believe, second radio station, WMUH, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which continues to air Planetary Radio. They contacted us. I don't even know how they found out about the show, but they wanted to run it on the station, so we're very grateful. But the actual first radio station is KUCI in Irvine, California. No coincidence, it was my old college radio station. It was on there for quite a while before it went anyplace else. It was Mark Wilson, whom Random.org selected this time. Mark Wilson of San Diego, California, is going to get that year in space wall calendar. He added this. I'm kind of glad he won because he had maybe the most humorous response.

The signal from that first episode just recently arrived at the star named Ross 154 in Sagittarius, a distance of 9.69 light years, where it has become a huge hit. On local radio, the inhabitants there are demanding more episodes, or an invasion will be launched. Ooh, excellent. Luckily, they'll be getting more. All right, we move on to the next trivia contest, and we haven't had a humor one in a little while,

and Matt suggested this. Emily's already run a version of this on Twitter. Of course, I alluded at the beginning of the show, the project scientists for MSL, John Grotzinger, during an NPR interview, basically they've got a discovery they'll announce, but they're not there yet. They're confirming it, and it'll be one for the history books.

It's Earth-shaking or Mars-shaking, I don't know. But our question for you, if you put on your thinking caps, and specifically your humor caps, what did Curiosity find on Mars that's going to be announced? And we're looking for humor, creativity and originality, not reality. Humorous entry will win. Yeah, we know everybody else is doing this, but they're just not as funny and creative as the listeners to Planetary Radio. So it's your shot, folks. This got started because my son-in-law said, you know what they found, don't you? It's a Roman sandal.

So just get us your best entry by Monday, December 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about big, giant air purifiers. Thank you. Good night. Maybe they'll find those on Mars, except they're all probably clogged with dust. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the worldwide members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.