Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Artemis 1 Orion capsule comes home, and the best of Planetary Radio

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Host Mat Kaplan returned to Naval Base San Diego to greet the return of the Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft aboard the USS Portland. Stay with us for a collage of entertaining excerpts of 10 of the very best Planetary Radio episodes produced over the last two decades. Incoming host Sarah Al-Ahmed points to a new article about the JWST’s stunning infrared image of Neptune. Don’t miss Mat serenading Bruce Betts in this week’s What’s Up! Discover more at  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-best-of-planetary-radio-orion-capsule-recoverySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recovering the Artemis I Orion capsule and sampling the best from 20 years of our show this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Welcome to the second to last Planetary Radio episode that I will host. How do you follow a visit with JPL's Rob Manning and author of The Martian, Andy Weir? With a visit to Naval Base San Diego, where I stood a few feet from a human-rated spacecraft that had just returned from the moon. You'll hear my conversations with the captain of the recovery ship, with NASA recovery director Melissa Jones, and with astronaut Shannon Walker. Then comes another treat. My Planetary Society colleague Merk Boyan's parting gift is a beautiful montage of moments

from some of my favorite episodes. You'll hear Sally Ride, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Freeman Dyson, Bob Picardo, Mary Roach, Linda Spilker, Bill Nye, and a cameo appearance by Buzz Aldrin. Incoming Planetary Radio host Sarah Alamed will drop by in a couple of minutes to quell over spectacular images of Neptune delivered by the James Webb Space Telescope. And here's a heads up, I sing two, count them, two songs in this week's What's Up segment with Bruce Betts. Don't say I didn't warn you. Speaking of the JWST, check out the image of two galaxies colliding that the Big Space Telescope also captured. It's at the top of the December 16 edition of our weekly newsletter, The Downlink. You can subscribe to it for free.

You know what else is free? The digital version of our beautiful quarterly magazine, The Planetary Report. The galaxy's image is one of those featured in the new December solstice issue that presents many of 2022's best space photos. It's all at planetary.org. Another downlink story shares the news that SOFIA, that Boeing 747 with a big infrared telescope, has been flown to its final resting place,

the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. I visited the museum during my recent stay in Tucson. They have several other history-making NASA airplanes there, along with a space shuttle solid rocket booster and much more. It's well worth the trip. Here's Sarah. Sarah, welcome back. Welcome back, and thanks for tipping me off at this article that details these absolutely outstanding, wonderful new observations of Neptune by the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope. Now available at planetary.org, Heidi Hamel, astronomer, vice president for science at Aura, the association of universities for research in astronomy. Of course, she's also vice president of the Planetary Society and a member of our board

since 2005 and has joined me here on Planetary Radio many times. Joined though by Naomi Roe Gurney, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Goddard, so a young astronomer coming up. We really haven't seen Neptune like this since that single Voyager flyby, have we? No, it's been since 1989. It's been a long, long time. So to get another glimpse of this planet and just really look at all the beautiful details. It was so stunning. I literally had my jaw just drop the moment I saw this picture. And it makes sense. I've heard Heidi Hamill speak in the past about how emotionally impactful it was

after decades of wanting an image like this to have it. So it's just awesome. I was so hoping, I was thinking, oh man, I hope there's a side-by-side comparison with maybe the best of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope. And sure enough, if you scroll far enough down in the article, and why wouldn't you, there it is. And it is absolutely stunning. I mean, they use the word astounding for this. And one of the most amazing facts in this article is that all of these wonderful new images are the result of what, just a couple of hours of time on the telescope? Yes, just two hours of observing revealed the rings of Neptune, all of these amazing details in the atmosphere and all of its beautiful moons, it's absolutely startling

because trying to get images of Neptune from Earth is just, I mean, to say it's difficult would be an understatement. You can try to get images with Hubble, but what JWST has revealed about this planet in the infrared is amazing in just that amount of observing time. And that's really what makes the difference here, right? I mean, like the Hubble image, of observing time. And that's really what makes the difference here, right? I mean, like the Hubble image, what we're shown is invisible light because that's really where Hubble excels,

maybe a little bit into the infrared, but nothing touches JWST for observing in the infrared. It really reveals the details that we couldn't see before with a telescope like Hubble. For example, there are these beautiful features underneath the top cloud layers that you can only see in certain wavelengths of light if you can look past the methane in the atmosphere down underneath. There are also some really bright, bright clouds that are reflecting light

up at the top. So you can see all of this dynamics to the atmosphere, all of this depth that we really couldn't see with Hubble. Something else that I thought was fascinating is that not only do we have this far more sensitive telescope, but there are features revealed that apparently just weren't there before. They wouldn't have been there even if we'd had this telescope. Yeah, well, a lot can change. And let me calculate this. It's over 30 years, a long, long time. There are some features near the poles on Neptune that we did see when Voyager 2 flew by, and they're still there. But there are whole new things about Neptune that have emerged in this time that's really cool to see. Well, again, the article is called A Deep Dive into the Neptune System with JWST by Heidi Hamel and Naomi Rowe Gurney. Highly recommended at planetary.org. And Sarah, I look forward to talking with you again next week when you will be part

of our annual year-end panel reviewing the best in space for 2022. See you then. I'm looking forward to it. And who knows what shenanigans you and Bruce and I will get into on that day. That is Sarah Alamed. She is the incoming host of Planetary Radio. It happens in just two weeks as this one is published. The Artemis 1 mission ended on Sunday, December 11, 2022, when the Orion spacecraft or capsule plunged into the Pacific off Baja, California. The splashdown was originally planned to happen a few miles

seaward from the coast of my hometown, San Diego, California. A storm made it prudent for recovery to be slightly redirected. Waiting for Orion was the USS Portland, a so-called LPD, or Landing Platform Dock. This class of huge amphibious multitasking ship has a gigantic well deck that can be partially submerged, making it relatively easy to tow floating objects like space capsules inside. It was in that well deck that Orion peacefully rested. Buzzing around it on the morning of December 13 were Navy personnel, NASA officials, and media reps like yours truly. The first person I spotted was in her blue astronaut jumpsuit. Dr. Shannon Walker is a space physicist who has been with NASA since 1995. She has also spent over 330 days in space, living twice on the International Space Station.

It was a SpaceX Crew Dragon that carried her to the ISS on her second flight in 2020. Dr. Walker, lots of reason to celebrate as we stand here in the hold, the bay of this ship. Yeah, it's pretty amazing to see the Orion capsule back on Earth in the fantastic shape it's in. It's been a long time coming and it has been absolutely amazing to get this back onto the ship. You've been with NASA a long time. You have watched the development of Artemis, of Orion, of the Space Launch System, SLS. It's been a long time coming. Yes, yes it has. But now after our first flight, our test flight is done,

and hopefully it won't be too much longer until we get Artemis 2 on its way. I'm only sorry that my colleagues and I, who went down for the first launch attempt, we couldn't stick around. Oh, you tried too? Yeah, me too. I was for the first launch attempt. We couldn't stick around. Oh, you tried to? Yeah, me too. I was for the first launch attempt and I think the second one. And then I had other work I had to do for the actual launch attempt. So I got to watch it on TV with most of the country.

So where are you going to be for Artemis II, if we're lucky, in a couple of years when some of your astronaut colleagues become the first to actually take a very similar ride in a capsule like this? Well, hopefully I will be in Florida watching them take off, but if not, I will be somewhere glued to a television set. You have an interesting advantage. You've actually been in the Crew Dragon on your trip, one of your trips to the International Space Station.

How would you say Crew Dragon compares to Orion? Oh, that's an interesting question. So, you know, on the surface, they're very similar. They both hold four people. But, of course, Orion is built to go farther distances. And so it's probably a little more spacious. I know it's definitely heavier. But beyond that, it's probably pretty similar on the inside just to ride in that spacecraft.

Would you take a ride if you could? Absolutely. So where does the really just about total success of Artemis I leave us? I mean, as I said, we've been told Artemis II is a couple of years away. Is that your hope? And what are the next steps? Yeah, if everything goes according to plan, Artemis 2 will be at the end of 2024. we're going to take the artemis the orion capsule back to florida they're going to go over with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that it

really was as good as we thought it was and if there's anything that needs to be adjusted for artemis 2 we'll fold that in but hopefully it's nothing too much that would affect the schedule adjusted for Artemis 2, we'll fold that in, but hopefully it's nothing too much that would affect the schedule. And then a little bit farther down the line, maybe a year or so after Artemis 2, that first woman and first person of color returning to the moon, pretty exciting. Very exciting. It's going to be so exciting to see people on the moon and go into a different location on the moon, which is a whole different program than we had before. What would be your advice as somebody who's been up there a number of times now?

What would be your advice to these probably somewhat more novice astronauts who may be making some of these trips? Yeah, for the first time flyers, I usually tell them that you're going to do your job. You know you're going to spend so much time trying to do everything right. But really what you want to do is also take the time to smell the roses and really live the event because it's historic what's going to happen. Thanks very much, Dr. Walker. Thank you. Astronaut and scientist Shannon Walker. Longtime listeners to this show may have caught one or both of my previous visits to Naval Base San Diego. I talked with Melissa Jones on both of those trips.

Melissa is the director of the NASA recovery team, so I wasn't surprised to see her smiling face on this visit. Have you stopped celebrating yet? Not yet. No, we haven't. We've been celebrating for several days. Everyone's just so excited. We were waiting a while for launch. You know, we had a couple hurricanes that we were dodging and we fixed the tanking leak and we've been waiting and we got off the ground and ever since then we've just been ready to do this. Congratulations to you and the entire recovery team. Absolutely flawless and right in line with essentially a flawless Artemis I mission. I agree. It seems like it's been a very clean mission.

I was on the mission management team briefs almost every day. This capsule rocket, the whole system performs phenomenally. I think of the previous two times that I saw you here, those practice sessions. And I guess there were five in all, I heard you say. Those practice sessions, and I guess there were five in all, I heard you say? There were five one-week practice sessions, and then we had a just-in-time training with this ship after launch. Was it the Navy's decision to rely on the Portland to make this actual recovery?

Because I know a couple of other captains who are going to be really, really envious. Yes, the Navy picks the recovery ship. Talk a little bit about, I mean, I think we've talked about this before, but the relationship between NASA and the military, specifically the Navy, although others are involved, and how all of this comes together. We have, I think, an amazing relationship with the Department of Defense. They are wonderful to work with.

They are professional operators. They do their jobs very well. And so the way we work with them for this, you know, we use the ship, which is obviously the Navy. There's a diver organization that's Navy, helicopters are Navy. And then we have a couple of Air Force organizations that work with us too. The 45th Weather Squadron launches the weather balloons. And then First Air Force Detachment 3, they integrate all of it for us. They're like our liaison to the

military. We could not do this without them. So they basically put together all of the support that we need. They work with the Navy for us and we all get on the same page and we work, we come out here and we do this together. Artemis II, a couple of years, will it, is it also expected to come down here off the coast of San Diego? Currently, that is the plan, that it'll be in the same area. It is slated for 24 months once we get back. There's some avionics on board this capsule that is needed for the next capsule, and of course we're going to review all the data to make sure that we're safe and ready to go. But yeah, it'll come back in the Pacific. And what will you be up to? I think I heard you

say that you have a new job. I do. I'm the operations division chief for the Exploration Ground Systems Program. So the program that is responsible for these operations, I'm the division chief for it. I'm actually my own boss right now. That's great. Well, I hope that you gave yourself a raise. I work for the government, so there's none of that. Melissa, again, congratulations. It is absolutely thrilling to be standing in front of this capsule that has just flown well over a million miles and looped around the moon

and know that one very much like it is going to be carrying humans back to the vicinity of the moon in a couple of years. Yeah, it's very thrilling for me too. It's surreal. I know we've been planning for this for years, but the fact that it's here, it just doesn't feel real. NASA's Melissa Jones, looking very proud, was the skipper of the ship that led the effort to recover the Artemis I Orion. So I'm Captain John W. Orion, and I'm the commanding officer of the USS Portland. And we are standing in the vast bay of your vessel with this amazing bit of cargo behind us. Yes, so we're actually in the well deck and the Orion space capsule is tied down in our

well deck after we retrieved it at sea. I was here for a couple of the practice sessions where the Navy learned to work with NASA to recover the Artemis capsules, the Orions. I know a couple of captains who are really envious of you right now. I would not say that those captains are envious. I think everybody who had a part in making this a successful mission, the lessons learned from those commanding officers helped make this, I mean this event went as smooth as it could humanly possibly go.

And all of that work and all of that effort made the Navy very successful this past weekend. You know I just heard pretty much the same thing from Melissa of NASA over there who is in charge of the recovery team now promoted. She talked about how terrific it has been to work with the US Navy and with the Department of Defense. I wonder, I assume you feel the same way about this partnership with NASA? Absolutely the professionalism of NASA, the training they gave the ship, both classroom training. We've run this through on simulators.

We did pier side training. And then two weeks ago, we actually ran the entire mission profile out here in the Southern California operating area, where they brought in a mock-up orbital. We deployed that into the sea, and we did the entire event a number of times to make sure that everybody was ready to go. So you were doing that even as Artemis I was orbiting the moon? Yes, we were in full practice mode to get ready to make sure that it went as smoothly as possible on execution day. Why is a ship like yours especially well suited for exactly this job? So Portland is a member of the San Antonio class of LPDs and if you look at the capabilities this ship brings, we have a large flight deck so we

can embark a number of helicopters. I can deploy a number of small boats which were critical to getting this mission successfully completed. The ship has a robust communication suite which allowed NASA essentially to have an at sea command center while here and I also have a full medical team to include surgical capabilities to keep everybody safe and also to prepare for when astronauts are actually in the orbital. We are, if all goes well, a couple of years away from the first one of these capsules that will carry humans, not to the surface of the moon, but to the vicinity of the moon. Very similar mission profile to what Artemis 1 did.

I assume that once again it will be you or one of your fellow captains on a vessel like this that will be bringing them back home. Absolutely. I think the LPD is a proven class of ship that is perfect for this mission. I would love to be part of that mission as well but unfortunately that'll probably be some other commanding officer hopefully saying the lessons learned from Portland, John P. Murtha and Anchorage also helped them be successful. Just one more, I know that every part of the mission that you and the Portland take on are important, probably equally important, but there must be something special to you and your crew

when you bring aboard something that has just gone farther out into space than any other human-rated device ever. This is a culmination of history. The Orion had traveled, I think they said, 1.4 million miles, and we greeted it back to the world. It was a tremendous opportunity to further the Navy's partnership with NASA and to honestly help push the space program forward here in the next couple years. Thanks so much, Captain, and thank you so much for this great work. Absolutely. Thank you for the interview. Captain John Ryan, Commanding Officer of the USS Portland. Captain John Ryan, Commanding Officer of the USS Portland.

I'm very grateful to the Navy and NASA for allowing me to welcome Orion home. Next up is that delightful review of some of the best of planetary radio. We'll first pause for just a minute to hear from the boss. Hi everybody, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society. Everything we do, from advocacy for missions that matter, to funding new technology, to grants for asteroid hunters, and sharing the wonder of space exploration with the world, only happens thanks to friends like you who share our passion for space. When you invest in the Planetary Fund today, a generous member will match your donation up to $100,000. today, a generous member will match your donation up to $100,000. Every dollar you give will go twice as far as we explore the worlds of our solar system and beyond, defend Earth from the impact of

an asteroid or comet, and find life beyond Earth by making the search for life a space exploration priority. With you by our side, we'll continue to advocate for missions that matter for years to come. How about powering our work in 2023? Please donate today. Visit planetary.org slash planetary fund. Thank you for your generous support and happy new year. Welcome back. Here are excerpts from 10 of my favorite Planetary Radio episodes. It's hard to say they are the best because we've produced so very many first-rate shows with hundreds of wonderful guests, so let's just call this a representative sample. I'm very grateful to the Planetary Society's great visual storyteller Merk Boyan for creating it. There's a list with links to all 10 full-length shows

on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio. I'll return with Bruce and what's up after this visit to the past. First of all, Sally Ride, thanks very much for inviting us into your San Diego headquarters, which is busy as we can hear with the telephone ringing. Oh, it's my pleasure. Almost 22 years since your first flight on Challenger,

now, when a space shuttle flies, eyebrows would only be raised if there weren't one or two or more women as part of the crew. What kind of a change does that indicate? Is it a positive bit of evolution on our part? Oh, it's wonderful, isn't it? I think it's something that was a little while in coming in the astronaut corps and the astronaut program. When I came into the astronaut corps, there were six women brought in at the same time. Six of us came in together. I had the fortune of being the one that was chosen to fly first. All six of the women went

on to fly in space. And as future astronaut classes were brought in, more and more women were brought in. And until today, the astronaut corps is between 20 and 25 percent female. And as you said, it is now very rare that the space shuttle goes up without at least one woman on board. And it's now common that there will be two women, occasionally three women, on board a flight. And with Eileen Collins now commanding her second space shuttle flight with the upcoming return to flight, you know, it really just shows how important women have become within not just the astronaut corps, but the space program in general. That's exactly where I wanted to go next, because we've followed that a bit on this program in the aerospace industry, in NASA. But I guess there's still some room, and that seems to be much of what

your life is dedicated to. There's still a lot of room, and all you need to do is walk into mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston during a simulation or during a shuttle flight. And it looks very, very different than it did back in the Apollo days. There was all male. Now there are many women who are involved in mission control, actively controlling the shuttle. But there's still a long ways to go, and the statistics are that only 11% of engineers in the country today are women. Only 20% of scientists in the country today are women. Now those numbers are way up from the 1970s when,

believe it or not, less than 1% of the engineers in this country were female. As recently as that. As recently as that. So it's been an enormous change in just a few decades. But there's still a long ways to go. And what I'm seeing in my work now is that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of girls out there who are really interested in the space program. They're interested in science. They're interested in engineering. But they still don't have quite the encouragement and support that boys their age do. They don't have quite the programs available to them. And a funny thing happens to girls in particular, as they go into middle school, you know, grades five through eight,

you know, suddenly, you know, hormones start to kick in a little bit. It's important to be accepted. It's important to be liked. It's important to do what you think your friends, maybe your teachers, your parents are expecting you to do may not be cool to be the best one in the math class. If a girl says she wants to be an aerospace engineer at age 11, she might get a slightly different reaction than a boy who says exactly the same thing. So the result is that we start to lose both boys and girls, but far more girls than boys from the technical field starting at about middle school. Sally Ride, thank you so much for taking a few minutes here at your headquarters for Sally Ride Science in the San Diego area.

We wish you continued success. Thank you very much. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. I love inviting you to stand with me at the intersection of science and art. They're not so far apart, you know. The latest proof of that overlap has arrived with Beyond Earth's Edge. It includes works from some of the 20th and 21st centuries' greatest poets. Let's hear this one from the only, well, I would say professional in this field of performance among our nine readers. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, and I'll be

reading an untitled poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by Forrest Gander, known simply as poem number 21. Those two solitary men, those first men up there, what of ours did they bring with them? What from us, the men of earth? It occurs to me that the light was fresh then, that an unwinking star journeyed along cutting short and linking distances, their faces unused to the awesome desolation in pure space among astral bodies polished and glistening like grass at dawn. Something new came from the Earth. Because the astronauts didn't go by themselves, they brought our Earth. The odors of moss and forest, love, the crisscrossed limbs of men and women, terrestrial rains over the prairies, something floated up like a wedding dress behind the two spaceships. It was spring on Earth, blooming for the first time,

that conquered an inanimate heaven, depositing in those altitudes the seed of our kind. Robert Picardo, full disclosure, he is a board member of the Planetary Society and a pretty great emergency medical hologram when you need one. You just call out and he appears. It's amazing. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday, dear Ray. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you The Planetary Society decided to throw a little party for Ray Bradbury. More than a hundred friends and admirers showed up at the Society's headquarters. You won't be surprised to hear that some of Ray Bradbury's admirers are pretty famous themselves. One of them is Peter Hyams. Director and writer Hyams brought his own birthday wishes to the stage, along with a few thousand others. I would like to read a few of these greetings. They're from people you might have heard of.

Warmer's birthday wishes and light speed to a true American icon, a visionary, and a genius. You are the rarest of gems, Ray, and it has been one of my great privileges to know you, Buzz Aldrin. Isn't it fitting that Mars should be so close to Earth for your 83rd birthday? You've been an inspiration to us all. Happy birthday, George Lucas. I had the good fortune to be seated next to Ray Bradbury on a flight from Los Angeles to Texas. I have never flown so high since or been so lucky since. What a ride. You are a joy and a genius. You are my kind of guy and I love you, Angie Dickinson. You have always been a ray of light and a hope in a world often absent of imagination. You challenge our linear thinking, and for those of us who have lived out of the box, what first got us there can often be traced

to your long and short works of science fiction and fantasy. Happy birthday. Love, Steven Spielberg. Thank you. This is great. You know, when I think back when I was in high school and I read my first Edgar Rice Burroughs books and I saw the drawings of Schiaparelli and the photographs from Lowell Observatory,

I wrote my first story, which was a sequel to The Warlords of Mars by Burroughs. So you see before you someone who started out for Mars a long time ago. So it's a very special evening. And I saw a French magazine today. They sent me an article, and the headline over my face was, I never came back from Mars. I just never came back. Because Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me how to go out on the lawns of summer and hold my hands up and say, Mars, take me home.

And Mars took me home home and I've been there forever. When I was a child I thought maybe we'd land on the moon when I was an old man. Well it didn't work that way. I was in my 40s and what a night that was and what we're going to be doing in the next few years with our Martian landers and our final landing on Mars with real people to call back to us across space is going to exhilarate all of mankind. What we need now is a substitute for war. We're engaged in a dozen wars all over the world right now in various countries,

and there has to be some way of elevating our spirit and saying that mankind is special and wonderful and space travel is the way we do it. And we'll be going to Mars with all of the people, not just a few, in the next 10, 20, 30 years. I wish I could stick around to be part of it. That's the dream I have, and that's the reason I'm here tonight. Thank you very much. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. Freeman Dyson, this week on Planetary Radio. Dr. Dyson, it is a great honor, and I am a little bit intimidated, to have the chance to sit down with you in your hotel room and have a conversation. Thank you very much for this. Good. Don't be intimidated. I'm very harmless. I did get a chance to ask you one question years ago, before Planetary Radio

existed, whether the people producing Star Trek The Next Generation had contacted you to say that they had put a Dyson sphere in an episode of that television series. And what was your answer? No. And it was a good joke. I mean, I had no problems with it. Is that idea of the solid sphere, is that what you had in mind? No.

And, of course, what I was interested in was searching for aliens in the sky. Morrison and Cocconi had proposed listening for radio signals. And I was then put the question, what if the aliens don't want to communicate? Can you still detect them? And the answer is yes, you can, because if aliens have a big civilization in the sky, they'll have to radiate away waste heat. And the waste heat you can detect with an infrared sky survey. So that was what I was proposing. But somehow or other, I talked about a biosphere which the aliens would be living in and that somehow got translated into a big round ball and the universe is just full of things

we don't understand that's what makes it exciting the whole point is we can look and see and and the important thing is to look everywhere not just in the places that are fashionable. I think the concentration on planets is probably a mistake. Everybody thinks life has to be on planets. That's not at all clear. Maybe I have a bet of $100 with somebody that the first life we discover will not be on a planet. So I haven't yet won. Speculating that it will be where? I mean, you've talked about life on comets. Comets would be a good place.

There's lots of real estate on comets, and they're scattered widely over the universe. On the other hand, it might be a gas cloud or a dust cloud. It might be an asteroid. There are all sorts of satellites of a big planet. There are all sorts of places it could be. I'll close with something else that you said, which I also have found very profound, and that is that the pain of childbirth is not remembered, but the child is.

Are we humans, are we still giving birth to ourselves? Yes, of course we are, and we will always do that. I mean, we are, of course, a species which has flourished just by hardship. I mean, the fact that we survived 20 ice ages does a lot to explain what our characters are like. I mean, these have been very tough times the last couple of million years. We are very tough and we are very good at surviving all these horrible things. And that's what's made us what we are. We're social animals, we're also fighting animals, and we'll probably stay that way. Are you optimistic about humanity's future?

Oh, I'm extremely optimistic because I grew up in the 1930s when things were horrible and much worse than they are now. So having survived the 1930s, I think we'll survive pretty well another couple of thousand years. Planetary Radio continues with our very special guest. On the phone from his home in Sri Lanka is Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

You know, I do remember one other novel of yours in which Sri Lanka played a very important part. It's a concept that you've been very excited about for many years, the space elevator. Yes, that is now taken more and more seriously, particularly since we have the material, C60, carbon 60, which would make it possible.

When I recorded the Founders of Paradise on an old 12-inch record, you remember then? Sure. Well, the one thing about those records, there was a lot of room in the back for sleeve notes. And the sleeve notes with a picture of the elevator were done by Buckminster Fuller himself. Oh, no kidding. And he never lived to see the discovery of the material named after him that would make it possible.

Isn't that an extraordinary thing? That absolutely is. Of course, the material would be a C-60, also known as Fullerenes. Exactly, exactly. The last time we spoke, which was during the Planetary Society's Planet Fest in 1999, I closed by asking you, since you have some success as a futurist and visionary, I wondered where you would point to, what you would have us watch for something that might be truly revolutionary. And at that time you said, keep an eye

on what's happening with vacuum energy, that odd quantum effect. I wonder, do you have any other thoughts you might want to add to that? I still take that quite seriously and think we should keep an eye on it. We're pretty sure energy is there. Whether it can be tapped is another question. Whether it can be tapped is another question. Whether it should be tapped is yet another. I'm always fond of quoting, I think it's Larry Niven. I'm not quite sure who said that supernovae are industrial accidents.

Well, I hope it's not an inevitable result of civilization. I trust not. The thing I'm also most involved with now, and I see the new Discover magazine has got a headline on

the subject Martian life. I'm now fairly convinced as a result of the extraordinary images coming from the

Mars orbital camera that Mars doesn't harbor life, it's infested. I certainly hope you're right. Author Mary Roach packs for Mars this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. She has been called the most entertaining science writer in America. Mary Roach may also be the funniest. The author of Stiff, Spook, and Bonk has now written Packing for Mars, a delightful and surprisingly informative book about how really, really hard it is to live in space. Mary, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Well, thanks for having me on. I knew when I saw you not long ago on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

that we had to try and get you here, and we lucked out because you happen to be in Southern California on the book tour. But please tell me, you're not going to make me talk about space poop? I don't know if I can guarantee that. Something comes over me and it just comes out. All right. Oh, really? So to speak.

So to speak. I'll start with two aphorisms that I came up with reading the book. And the first one is, in space, there is no Pepsi generation. Absolutely. Yes, they tried very, very, very hard. Have the carbonated beverages in space. And, in. They tried very, very, very hard to have the carbonated beverages in space and, in fact, made it work. Sadly, forgetting that the human body also has to be considered and the human stomach does not deal well with the gas inside. Of course, gas doesn't

rise to the top, so the stomach, you know, can't get rid of the gas in there because it's down in the middle. Burping was a difficult thing. The line that Charles Borland, who is the retired director of space food, basically said that the burps were often accompanied by a liquid spray. So you can imagine Coke and Pepsi, not very popular. How appetizing. Of course, you know, we used to do that in college on purpose or try to get our friends to. Here's the other one.

Do floating people dream of sore feet? Yeah. Floating, this was the most amazing thing to me. Well, one thing that was amazing. I had so much fun during my little 20-second bursts of zero gravity. I was so surprised to learn that if you spend weeks and months in zero gravity, it becomes irritating. That you can't put anything down, that your arm's going to float away, you can't just walk across the room.

That was incredible to me. I just thought, wow, how could you ever get tired of flying around? I envy you, many of your experiences that you had in putting this terrific book together. Extremely entertaining and highly recommended, by the way. Naja rears its ugly head a number of times in the book. I mean, really, you kind of raise barfing to sort of a tragic art, or maybe space did that for you. One of the interesting questions that you answered, and you answer many. I mean, your research is tremendous in the book, and it's kind of fun to trace how you learn things.

tremendous in the book, and it's kind of fun to trace how you learn things. For example, will I or will I not die if I barf in my helmet? This is a space urban myth. And you see it even in some of the astronauts' oral history transcripts. There's a belief that if you vomited in a suit. Well, I talked to Tom Chase over at Hamilton-Sunstrand. He's a suit engineer. I got this long email back. We've carefully considered this.

In fact, there's these channels of air coming down over the top of the forehead that would essentially blow the blow into the suit, which is disgusting but not life-threatening. Also, if you inhale your own hurl, you have a cough reflex. You would cough it up. It would be possibly painful because there's a lot of acid in it. Disgusting. Here again, not life-threatening. The worst, the most life-threatening part, what I'm told by this suit dude,

is that you would be dealing with a visor splatter. It could potentially blind you, disorient you. On a spacewalk, that would be bad news. Yeah. You know my favorite picture in the book? And the pictures at the heads of the chapters, which are really fun. It's the one of Gilligan from Gilligan's Island looking absolutely deadpan serious. He's got a table radio around his neck and a jet pack. And it just seems so appropriate. Yeah. Yeah. Just staring straight

ahead. It's a sort of funky looking, it almost looks like a walker upside down. I love that. Finding the photos for the book is one of the most fun parts of it. Sometimes you just get lucky. I was already planning a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, my first

in 30 years, when I learned about the first International Planetary Caves Workshop. It was convened by a couple of past guests of this program, Timothy Titus of the U.S. Geological Survey and Penny Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. We're gathering geologists, astronomers, biologists, and an engineer or two, all of them fascinated by caves on our own home world and by what we may find when we explore them on other worlds.

Because they are out there, you know. We've already found them on the moon and, most intriguingly, on Mars. Down the precarious steps we went, within a minute or two we were in the dark zone, where the only light came from our headlamps and flashlights. Penny Boston stopped here and there, often to point out some feature that represented one or another form of tenacious microbial cave life, including a fluffy black mass. And that black fluff is manganese oxide stars

that are being created in association with manganese oxide oxidizing bacteria. So they're a better marker than the iron organisms are. But we isolate organisms that can do all of those metals. They can also do chromium. The ones that can do manganese often can manipulate chromium, uranium, a lot of the rare earth elements. They have this ability to oxidize metals broadly across the periodic table.

Penny reminded us several times of the great diversity of caves and cave life. So this cave, even though it's not all that far from Carlsbad, it's a world away in terms of its history, I think. Would you expect to find different biology in here? Oh, yes. In fact, we've actually done some of the biology, and it's quite different. We're finding the manganese organisms, which you also find particularly in Lechuguilla Cave. We find them in Carlsbad, but not with the same enthusiasm. There's not as many strains, and they're not as abundant.

If I want to try to grow them on manganese media, live culture in the lab, it's a lot harder. So they really are a much lower proportion of the bioflora in Carlsbad than they are in Lechuguilla. But in here, they dominate. They dominate the scene. and they're very, very cute. They're actually pretty fuzzy. You know most bacteria are pretty boring physically, right? There are a limited number of shapes, but one of the things that

has struck us in the cave work is that there's a lot more complex morphology just of the cells themselves. So we have little things that look like chrysanthemums, and we have some that we call giant death stars. They're all of two microns across, which is pretty big for a bacterium. That's a giant? Yeah, that's a giant. You know, the diameter of the average hair is about 100 microns,

to give people a scale for that. of the average hair is about 100 microns to give people a scale for that. So they're big, and then they're always accompanied by these weird hairy guys that have sort of globular hair-like structures coming off them. And then there's an entire group that we're not sure what they're doing, and I have not succeeded in growing them in culture yet, but they're nanobacterial size, so that means ultra-small, and they're about 100 nanometers in diameter, which is like a tenth of a micron across. But they're truly cells. They're actually alive.

So what their ecological role is, I don't know, but there's a big controversy over whether they actually are nanobacteria, is, I don't know, but there's a big controversy over whether there actually are nanobacteria, and it sort of amuses us because a great number of the species that we find are just nanobacteria in nature. How big were those little structures found in the famous Mars meteorite? I guess they were like 60 nanometers or something like that. I've forgotten the exact size, but they were pretty small. So our bugs are very small, but they were pretty small. So, you know, our bugs are very

small, but they're getting down into the range where, you know, maybe there's some overlap. I also think that there is an issue of shrinkage upon preservation. So cells don't always retain their original size and shape when they're preserved. So, I mean, the jury is certainly out on the Mars meteorite stuff because it's been altered so many times, it's had a hard life so to speak. But I don't know whether those are microbial remnants, but I wouldn't rule it out just on the basis of size. I think there's a lot we don't know about what actually is in our own biosphere and we're discovering them all the time. Celebrating Cassini one last time, this week on Planetary Radio.

Please welcome to the stage Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, Cassini program manager Earl Mays, and Cassini Spacecraft Operations Manager, Julie Webster. There is one more person joining us, my Planetary Society colleague, Senior Editor, Emily Lakdawalla. She's here in part to represent the scores of citizen scientists who have contributed to this mission. Emily Lakdawalla. of citizen scientists who have contributed to this mission, Emily Lakdawalla. So welcome, everyone, and congratulations. I was here Friday morning before 5 a.m., about 4 a.m., for that glorious, bittersweet finish.

All of you, all three of you, have been with this mission for so many years. Linda, for you, what, almost 30 years? Almost 30 years, almost a whole Saturn year. You got to ask, how does it feel to be really at the end of an era, Julie? You know, it's amazing, but it's everything that we expected it to be, and it was time. We were starting to worry about things going wrong. Did it start to feel like a family? Oh, absolutely. I think we got to know each other really well. In some cases, our kids grew up together. We'd take vacations together, go out to dinner, and really got to know each other as people and not just professionals. Yeah, couldn't agree more.

We would finish each other's sentences, take care of dog sit for each other. It was very, very much a family. And the entire set of skills and personalities that you expect in a large extended family. Not like we always got along all the time, but that's what families do. We have one of your favorite images from the mission that we're going to pop up now. It's also one of my favorites. I had this on the back of my business card for years. But the resolution wasn't high enough to really see what's going on here.

Talk about it. This is a wonderful image. Basically, you're looking at the sun in eclipse, in this case by Saturn. And you can see all of the rings. The sunlight is shining through the tiniest particles, much like if you have a dusty windshield and it's hard to see when you drive into the sun. I like it because you can see all of Saturn's rings in one image. And as Emily pointed out, if you look at that bright ring around Saturn, it's the sunlight being refracted through the atmosphere. And you're looking at every sunrise

and every sunset at the same time. And that's just amazing. And you'll notice that the night side of Saturn is illuminated. That light from the rings is actually falling on the night side and is brightening it. And if you look very carefully, there are three other planets. So this is the Saturn view of the Earth and Moon system, and also Venus and Mars. What was really special about this opportunity is that we reached out to the public and said, okay, there'll be a 20-minute window.

This was in July, I think, 2013. A 20-minute window, go out, wave at Saturn. And we have pictures. Here you go. Here is everybody at JPL. I love the hula hoop crowd for the ring tribute, of course. It was so wonderful. And then we asked people, send us your selfies. Because you're going to be kind of small. The earth's only like maybe a pixel or two across. So we took all of these selfies and put them together and recreated that mosaic that you just saw. And so we have, I think, with the next image with those selfies. Oh, I don't think we have that.

Oh, we don't have it. No, I'm sorry. Okay, well, we recreated that beautiful image and the selfies, and it was so wonderful. It was one of our most popular images because people were going through trying to find themselves in that particular image. And I did the same thing. Where am I? Where am I in that picture?

I think somebody did the math to calculate the likelihood that a photon from a waving person's hand would have appeared in the image that Cassini took. And it was something like if you stood out there for the whole 20 minutes, like there was a one in five chance that a photon from your hand would have actually reached Saturn for that picture. Not bad. I'll take that. Okay. I was waving really hard, so maybe I got two photons.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this time to the driest spot on Earth. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I'm back from Chile's Atacama Desert with a great story to tell. You'll hear from many people who have dedicated years or decades to the creation of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array, our planet's most ambitious and highest astronomy instrument. I wonder if there's ever been a day like this here.

I mean, it really has been a big party for science. This is enormous. I mean, this is so exciting for everyone who's been involved with the project because we have a lot of VIPs, we have a lot of press who we can finally say, you know, this is what we've been doing, this is what scientists will be able to do, these are the capabilities of the telescope. We're appealing to any astronomer anywhere who is thinking about something in the sky,

who's thinking about the evolution of galaxies, stars, whatever, and they can use ALMA to contribute to the data that they already have. Our bus from the much lower OSF finally reached the magnificently barren plain where giant radio telescopes have begun to work as one, connected by fiber optic lines to the world's second highest building and the highest supercomputer on the planet, known as the Correlator. It was cold and windy, though the weather was not nearly as extreme as it can often become. I was glad to have my heavy jacket and my pressurized can of oxygen.

Commissioning scientist Gianni Marconi kept his O2 in his pocket. So here we are in the center, the core of the world's most powerful astronomical observatory. Yes, we are in the center of the Halma Ray, in the central, in the center of the central of the array of Halma, where at the moment we have only 57 antennae of the 66 that are the complete project. Only 57? Only 57, nine antennae to go.

And moments ago, they did their dance for us. So moments ago, we see 57 antennae move all together with silently, to not disturb this place that is an only place for the native here. I see one of the pads right over here. This is one of the pad where the antenna can move normally because the antenna now you can see one of the possible configuration of the array but for scientifically need you can move them then all around up to us an area of 16 kilometer in diameter so this this is a major operation though to pick up one of these and bring it over here yes to move one of these antenna takes a few hours

to move them ten and order one day to reconfigure the antenna to check if the antenna is connected and is working properly for the science. Do you enjoy coming up here? Well it's fantastic I like I like the altiplano the Chilean altiplano so I like the mountain for me this is a fantastic place and the view is amazing. It's wonderful I would stay but I'm afraid I'd have to keep sucking on my oxygen can. A lot of oxygen is fine. But you're in good shape. I'm trained. I'm well trained to stay up here. I'm an astronomer. I'm doing something, guys, not only astronomy.

Very true. Back at the operations support facility, I sat down with Avin Vandeshook, a radio astronomer and astrochemist who recently left the ALMA Board of Directors. a radio astronomer and astrochemist who recently left the ALMA Board of Directors. That morning, Naveen had delivered a great presentation to the hundreds of journalists visiting ALMA. It was your first slide that I was most intrigued by, because you had fine art. That's right. I mean, that's one of my hobbies. I like to search for astronomy and arts and examples of that. Of course, coming from the Netherlands,

Svink Zet van Gogh is an obvious target. So that one was easy. Starry Night? Starry Night, yes. And there are different versions of the Starry Night, so that's also interesting. Do you find some kinship with these artists who try and capture the wonder of the universe?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That's sort of why, indeed, I feel very much connected with that because they feel sort of the beauty of the universe and they feel this urge to paint a universe just as much as I feel the urge to do the science. And even beyond that, when you talk about the Aboriginal people in Australia or the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, they were in their own way trying to figure out what this was all about,

which seems to me you're in the same business. Yes, absolutely. They were trying to sort of do cosmology as well, and their view of cosmology and their view of order in the universe, so to say. And in one of your slides, you showed a menagerie of simple molecules that we are finding more and more of in space. I mean, water, they don't get much simpler than that. But this is one of the most exciting things that Amma is going to be able to help us to explore. this is one of the most exciting things that ALMA is going to be able to help us to explore?

Oh yes, certainly for me as a so-called astrochemist, I'm very excited about the chemistry aspects of ALMA. And it's really the combination of the sensitivity of ALMA and also the sharpness with which it can see that it really can zoom in to these regions where new planets are being formed and new stars are being born. And then also it has this incredible spectral resolution that you can really sort of see each of these peaks, see the fingerprints of individual molecules.

So yeah, I mean, it's just, yeah. I'm glad that I now can sort of finally reap the scientific fruits of this 20-year investment. Five, four, three, two, one. Yes! Ignition! Woo! Can you feel the light way over here? Go, LightSail! LightSail 2 takes flight 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. Wow, light sail 2 is now flying free, more than 700 kilometers above our world. I was standing next to Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye when the mighty Falcon Heavy lifted off at the Kennedy Space Center. I've been messing with this as the CEO my entire tenure. Nine years I've been working on this. And as a board member, certainly since 2000, 1999 years I've been working on this and as a board member certainly since 2000 1999 we've been dealing with the balcony. We're three stories off the ground, and a frog jumped up on people, and there's some frog handlers.

We seem to be having an enjoyable interaction. Life finds a way. Well, you know, the frog's excited about the launch, like everybody else. Another thing that just adds to the scene is the moon has risen, and it just adds to the scene is the moon has risen, and it just adds to the drama from our vantage point. It's rocket in the lower left, moon in the upper right.

What you're about to hear is my only slightly compressed recording of what unfolded before us. I think it's one of the most exciting and dramatic pieces of audio I've ever been able to present on planetary radio. So now the pad 39A is lit up very, very easy for us to see here on the Saturn V viewing building and you can feel that little bit of a hush, little bit of a hush. This is Ben Jurchin, go for launch. Go for launch.

So there's all sorts of automated things that have to go. This is Ben Shurton. Go for launch. Go for launch. So there's all sorts of automated things that have to go in sequence. We'll all do this together, I'm sure. Here we go. 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Yes! Ignition! Can you feel the light way over here? Go LightSail! Go LightSail! Oh man, it's beautiful. And the sky is a haze and it's just glowing. Look at this! Go LightSail! Look at this. Whoo! Go, LightSail!

Passing the moon! And now the sound will reach us just now, four miles away. I feel it. Wow. Feel it. You can feel it on your clothing and your hat. Feel it. Hat, you can feel it on your hair.

Take it from me. Wow. Go LightSail! Go LightSail! Wow. We're oxidizing. Higher and higher. It's just going perfectly.

It's going, even from here, you can see the three cores, the three separate groups of engines. Oh man. And those are the diamond shocks. Wow. Fantastic. Oh man. Everything's going just perfectly. Look at that.

We're gonna make make it, you guys. You can see the smoke trails. Wow, look at the ring of smoke. So everybody, stay tuned. You're going to see the flames from the boosters coming down. It's just amazing. Whoo! There they are.

Oh, there they are. Look at that. And now in a few seconds, there will be the sonic booms going through all this atmosphere to us. It's amazing. I mean at night it's just so striking. It's just amazing. It's a magical. So I'm the CEO. I've been messing with this since a little before I took over, getting finances squared away. Seven million dollars funded by 50,000 supporters around the world.

And we are on our way. It's just so gratifying. There. There they are. Wow. Wow. There they are. Wow. Wow. There are two of them. And you can see the clusters of engines. Nicely done, SpaceX.

Wow. Nicely done. Everyone, I want to thank you all for your support. This is yours, SpaceX. Thank you so much. You are awesome. The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America

The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America

The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America The President of the United States of America away. And it took that long for the sound to reach us. That was just spectacular. So much energy, so much power delivered in such a short time to put our spacecraft with the others on orbit. My goodness. Thank you all so much. Thanks for coming from Austria, you crazy kids. Again, you can read about and hear the 10 shows just sampled in an article on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio.

It's time for, now that I think of it, the penultimate What's Up with Bruce Betts. At least for me, the current host current host of planetary radio because in two weeks it'll be sarah alamed who takes over this uh position uh i am joined i'm joined by the chief scientist of the planetary society welcome bruce thank you matt cap kaplan I don't know. Soon they forget. Listen, here's somebody who hasn't forgotten. Laura Dodd in California, a faithful listener and enterer of the contest. I don't know what to think of your leaving plan, Rat, Matt. This month, we will also see Dr. Fauci leaving the NIH.

Trevor Noah moving on from The Daily Show. Surely it is the end of days. If Terry Gross leaves fresh air, I'll know for sure. Laura, thank you for putting me in that illustrious crowd. I'm honored to be mentioned in the same sentence. Well, hopefully you're forgiven by the listeners if we continue our ridiculousness and as we close out the Matt Kaplan era of planetary radio. Although it will always be Matt Kaplan's planetary radio. Oh, that's probably not true, but very nice of you to say. No, it's not at all true. All right, how about I give you the night's kind?

Yeah, would you? You know what I've arranged for the end of planetary radio for you? I've arranged for all five planets that you can see with just your eyes to be visible in the night sky. In the evening, even. It's even convenient. Oh, I'm so flattered. You're welcome. You're welcome.

Across the sky in the early evening. Well, let's start with the challenging ones. So this one, I talked to him at the last minute. So Venus and Mercury are going to be a little tough. But if you've got a clear view to the western horizon shortly after sunset, you'll see super bright Venus and above one and a half degrees, on December 28th. Again, very low, and then Mercury will go away, Venus will come up, Venus will be super bright with us in the west for the next several months, whether Matt's with us or not. If you walk your way across sky, you can go towards the east, and you will then see yellowish saturn and bright jupiter and then all the way over towards the east in the early evening is reddish mars and so there they are for you for you matt

but wait i've thrown in the moon we've got the moon that's hanging out near the venus uh mercury pair on the 24th of december and uh near jupiter on the 29th, kind of cruising past Saturn in between those. All right, that's all I could do for you. It'll do. Do you know that line from Babe? I won't. Can you just call me a pig? I mean, an intelligent talking pig. So, I mean, I guess that's cool. That'll do, pig. That'll do. But I have more. I have more. I have This Week in Space History. It was this week in 1968 that Apollo 8 put the first humans in orbit around the moon. 2003, Mars Express went into orbit at Mars 19 years ago. Way to go, ESA. Way to still be cranking.

All right, you ready? I am totally ready. Random Matt Kaplan facts. I forgot that you were going to start doing those. And by the way, that was lovely. Thank you. Thank you very much. It wasn't, but thank you. So here's a little bit about Matt in rapid order. Matt's favorite color is blue, which he happens to be wearing right now. His favorite pet name is Brian, named after his childhood dog, and he swam competitively in high school. That's a little bit more about Matt Kaplan. All true. And to be exact, it was Prince Brian of Killigay because he was a pedigree Irish setter. Okay.

Now I have learned a little bit more about Matt Kaplan's history. That'll do, dog. That'll do. We move on to the trivia question. And we asked you, have you got good stuff for this, Matt? I really do. Yeah. Okay.

So I asked, how long in hours and minutes was the longest EVA, extravehicular activity, carried out on the moon? How about hours, minutes, and seconds? Here's our winner, I believe, because this is what everybody had. You can confirm it, but I'm pretty sure this is it. It's Gordon Proctor. And I think he is a first time winner. If he's not a first time winner in the United Kingdom, it's been a long time. Seven hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds, an extra vehicular activity conducted by the Apollo 17 astronauts on the moon,

Gene Cernan, and that scientist, that geologist, Harrison Schmidt. Is he right? He is indeed right. Yeah, pretty amazing. About eight hours hanging out, walking around on the moon's surface. I'm just thinking of the guy at NASA Mission Control whose entire job was to have a stopwatch from the time they opened the hatch from the time they climbed back in the lunar module. That's a nice image. I mean, they had a lot of people. I don't know.

He may have been in a back room just standing there for seven hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds with a stopwatch. And got it. Gordon, congratulations. You are going to receive a Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, which we're gonna make the prize again this time in a few minutes,

but just because they're so popular and they're so cute. But I have more. Hudson Ansley in New Jersey, much of this time was in a lunar rover. So Bruce, maybe technically not extra vehicular? Ooh, I would still guess they didn't spend enough time. Anyway, food for thought. Mel Powell, our funny man in California, it ran that long, about 15 extra minutes, only because Gene Cernan and Harrison Smith, they couldn't find an empty parking space for the Lunar Rover, had to drive around the block a few times. Paul Bergel in New York, I hope that one day one of my daughters

will beat this record. Nice. Here is a poem from Gene Lewin in Washington, who also provides a short history of duck tape, which apparently really did start out as duck quack quack tape before it became duck tape. I thought it was the other way around. It's important, as you'll hear. as you'll hear. When cruising Taurus Littrow out on an EVA, having a good body and Fenderman just might save the day. A hat tip to Rand McNally and a bow to Vesta Stout. The use of maps and duct tape helped the crew to drive about. Gene Cernan used this fix-all holding lunar dust at bay. Now the maps and duct tape grace a Smithsonian display. And just to mention Vesta Stout, apparently one of the inventors of duck or duct tape. Do you know what she's talking about there? Or what? Sorry, what he's talking about? I not only know, we did a random space fact video

with special guest star Bill Nye. They had a busted fender on the lunar rover. And they thought, hey, we have maps and duct tape. And they made a makeshift fender. There are lovely pictures of it on the moon. And apparently it came back. Good times. Very impressive and awesome duct tape. Now I have to sing not one, but two songs.

There's a first. Ian O'Neill, long-time listener in Japan. M is for the mysteries you unlock. A is for that rubber asterock. T is for the tech that transmits you around this speck. Matt, we bid you fond adieu. Adieu. Oh, very nice. That's good. So no answer there. He did have an answer as well, but he provided that. And finally, this from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild in Kansas, who, by the way, Dave's wife made a ton of cookies, some of which were sent here to my home,

some of which were sent to the office. Bruce, you may want to stop by soon before they're all gone. Here goes. Well, I'm not bragging world, so don't put me down, but I did the longest EVA in town, a seven-hour trip plus a 37 drive. She's got a set of wings man I know she can fly she's my LRV coupe you don't know what I got you should have joined me on the last one you don't know what I got LRV coupe you don't know what I got

with deepest apologies to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys but thank you Dave that's fun that's very fun. You can add on with a new contest. What observed astronomical event did

Tycho Brahe write about in the book De Novella Stella? That's kind of working. Well, let me repeat that for those of you who were too horrified to listen. What observed astronomical event did Tycho Brahe write about in the book? De Nova...

Let me try that again. My Latin's a little rusty. De Nova Stella. D-E space N-O-V-A space S-T-E-L-L-A. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get your entry in. And I know the answer to this one. You have until Wednesday, December 28th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer, which will be answered the following week by Bruce and Sarah on January 4th.

Yeah. Oh, and by the way, you will win, as mentioned, that Planetary Society Kick Asteroid Rubber Asteroid. Somebody else wrote in to say, hey, if Sarah can't roll her R's, she really can't take the job. Was that part of the interview process? We forgot to do that test. I guess we'll have to run it still.

So, yeah, we assume it'll be Sarah hosting the show on January 4th. I assume it'll be fine. Well, she could tag me in. There you go. And that's nice. Gives me chills. We better go. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky,

and think about Matt Kaplan resting after the show. Thank you and good night. That'll do, Chief Scientist. That'll do. He is Bruce Betts, the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. My last show as regular host of Planetary Radio arrives on December 28. Join me for a review of the year in space with several of my Planetary Society colleagues.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our nostalgic members. Look back and far forward with them at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paletta are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.