Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Astronomer, Astrobiologist and Fast Pitch Outfielder Woody Sullivan

Episode Date: May 16, 2005

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Thank you. takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. You really should see Woody Sullivan's resume. No time? Then stay tuned for our delightful conversation with the University of Washington astronomer whose interests run from searching for E.T. to designing sundials for a cloudless day on Mars. Emily Lakdawalla will get all moony on us in Q&A, and later Bruce Betts will become particle man

right before our ears. Here's a review of all the news from around the solar system and beyond. Really, every bit of it. Remember our conversation with the European Space Agency's Gerhard Newcomb? Gerhard expressed some worry about whether the ground-penetrating radar instrument on the Mars Express orbiter would deploy and work successfully. Well, so far, so good. A 20-meter or 65-foot-long boom has been deployed, with two more waiting for the command to unfold. Read more about how the experiment will look for subsurface Martian water at planetary.org.

You think you've got computer problems. Commander Sergei Krikalev and flight engineer John Phillips have finished their first month on the International Space Station where at least four laptop computers are acting up. One had a corrupted hard disk, two don't boot up properly, and another, well, just kind of sits there. Don't worry too much, they have spares. But I wonder if NASA opted for the on-site extended care package. Hello, Dell Service Department, can you come right over?

I mean up. Apollo 17 Mission Commander Gene Cernan has received the first Ambassador of Exploration Award from NASA. He and Harrison Jack Schmidt spent more time on the moon than any other human beings. I wonder how this honor compares with hot-rodding a lunar dune buggy across a crater or two. Congratulations, Gene. I'll be back with astronomer, astrobiologist, and fast-pitch outfielder Woody Sullivan right after Emily takes us to infinity and beyond. Emily takes us to infinity and beyond.

I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Which planet has the most moons? That distinction belongs to Jupiter. Jupiter has 63 known moons, Saturn has 49, Uranus 27, and Neptune 13.

How can one planet have so many moons? The answer is that most of the outer planet's extended families of moons were adopted. Jupiter has only eight regular satellites. These satellites orbit relatively close to the giant planet in circular paths that lie in the same plane and move in the same direction as the planet's rotation. Four of these regular satellites are quite large, larger even than the planet Pluto. The large size and dynamical similarity between these moons and Jupiter suggests that they all formed at the same time that the giant planet did, condensing from the solar nebula as a mini solar system. But if only eight of Jupiter's 63 moons formed in place, where did the rest of them come from?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Woodruff T. Sullivan III is far, far better known to his friends simply as Woody. And he has lots of friends, including fellow Pacific Northwest cyclist and science guy Bill Nye. He has been on the astronomy faculty at the University of Washington for 32 years, but as you'll hear, he hasn't let the walls of that department stop him from wandering through other disciplines. We've wanted to have him on the show for ages, and I'm glad to say we finally got around to giving him a call.

Woody, I barely know where to begin. A glance at your website certainly shows that your interests are many and varied. I think you know what I'll start with is your list of titles for yourself on the website. Radio astronomer, historian of astronomy, astrobiologist, ETI searcher, extraterrestrial intelligence, gnomonist, gnomonicist, there it is, outfielder, scrabbler, cyclist, wordsmith, quinquagenarian, and sublunarian. Tell us about those last two, first of all. You said that quinquagenarian has to be updated?

Yeah, I'm afraid that I haven't changed my website. I'm a sexagenarian now. So quinquagenarian, I worked hard for that. You have to be in your 50s. I'm there. And now I've worked even harder to become a sexagenarian now. So a quincagenarian, you know, I worked hard for that. You have to be in your 50s. I'm there. And now I've worked even harder to become a sexagenarian last year. So that's what that is. And a sublunarian is someone who lives below the moon, you know, subluna.

Yes. And so we're all sublunarians. It's a term that goes back to Aristotle, where you had the four elements that make up our world down here, earth, air, fire, and water. And then the fifth element, the quintessence, was this ethereal substance that made up the crystal spheres and so forth. And so we were all, and that started at the moon, we were all below the moon in this mortal, changeable world. So I suppose it's also safe to say that we are sub-Aryan, as in below Mars?

Below Mars, definitely in the Aristotelian sense, because, of course, the Earth was at the center of it all. And some people still live that way. That's exactly right. We know better, and you certainly know a good deal about Mars. You've put one of the loves of your life up there. Well, that's right. I'm a sundial nut, in a word. That's what the mnemonicist is.

Mnemonics is the science and art of sundials. You and Bill Nye. What is this craze for sundials? Well, Bill Nye also is a sundial nut, and he was the one that had the idea first for let's make a scientific instrument, a simple one, but nevertheless an important one, on the Mars rovers into a sundial. You can go to the Mars rover site and easily see it and go to the Planetary Society and see how we made it into a sundial. But it's for the main camera's calibration. And so it has standard

colors, gray scales, and so forth. The camera looks at it all the time. And so, in fact, it's the most photographed thing on Mars by far. Every day it takes 10 or 20 pictures of this thing. And it has a post and a plate. And so Bill and I looked at that when he became associated with the mission now, what, seven or eight years ago, and said, we could make that into a sundial. And that would be fantastic, you know, for outreach and to get to K-12 kids and so forth. And so he then roped me in, and a small group of us designed it and made it into a working sundial, the first extraterrestrial sundial. Also the first sundial

on a moving vehicle in the whole universe. Oh, I didn't know that. It's a little strange if you think about it. A sundial has to maintain its orientation in order to be able to tell the time. So if you've got one on a moving vehicle, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But we got around that anyway. And sundials traditionally have mottos. Two worlds, one sun. And so that motto was actually dreamt up by the Planetary Society director, Lou Friedman, two worlds, one sun. So this thing was fabricated here at the University of Washington. And

as I held it in my hands out in the sunlight here on Earth, it was really quite thrilling to think that if all went well, it was also going to be in that same sunlight, although a bit weaker since Mars is further from the sun, you know, a couple years hence. This instrument is only one, though, that came to life as part of a grander project called the Earthdial Project. Right. So the Earthdial Project, we launched simultaneously with the Mars landing

in order to take advantage of all the publicity and so forth. The idea is that people around the world set up their own sundials in their backyard and put a webcam on them. And we had a common site, which once again one can find at the Planetary Society site, allow you to see in near real time these images of sundials from around the world, Australia, Malaysia, Spain, France, several in the U.S., and so forth. So you get a palpable sense of time because half of them will be in darkness at any given time. Some of them will be snow-covered, the sundial.

That happens sometimes. They become weather dials, too. And some will be clouded out. But when you do have the shadow, you can see how it's just changing its angle as you go through the time zones. And this page, the first page that you come to, you see this collage of little webcam images build up on the page. On a map of the world, yes. And then you just put your cursor over the small postage stamp thing, and it blows up. So at maximum, we had about 20 people actively participating.

We're now down to about 12 or 14 around the world. They have a similar design. They have the motto, two worlds, one sun. But instead of saying Mars, like the Mars dials do, they say Earth. And then you do this in your local language. If you're in France, you say Le Monde. In Spain, you say Terra and so forth. And then you can also decorate your dial with local cultural things,

and there's been some very nice ones, especially an observatory in Spain at Valencia made theirs out of tile. It's very nicely constructed and put it out in the middle of a pond on a platform and so forth. The most delightful one was at the South Pole Research Station. It only lasted for a week. By the time the guy got it built, it was just a week before the sun was going to set for six months. But he did get it up. There's images that you can see of it at that time.

And then it was in darkness for six months. And then when he went out to find it after six months, it was lost in a drift. And now he's left the South Pole Station. So it was short but sweet. And the nice thing about a dial at the poles, if you think about it, is that it's then exactly aligned with the Earth's equator and the pole. The axis of the Earth is straight up when you're standing at one of the poles. And so it makes it into a uniform kind of a clock. And that's the other thing, is that you look at dials in the northern hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere, you realize that in the southern hemisphere,

the sun goes through the northern sky. And it appears to go in the opposite sense, from right to left, rather than left to right, as you're facing it. So there's a lot of interesting lessons that can come out of this. As you said, people can find it at Planetary.org, the Planetary Society website, both Mars Dial and Earth Dial projects. We're going to come back and talk with you about some of your other loves that you've carried through your life right after we take a quick break.

You're listening to Woody Sullivan, our guest, this week on Planetary Radio. 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.

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The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Woody Sullivan is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington. He's been on the faculty up there since I think I read 1973. That's correct. You've been at this for a while. Certainly haven't restricted your interests any, though, because you also teach history of science. You are part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, or I guess I should say that your astrobiology department at University of Washington participates in that NASA Institute.

And that's appropriate, since I want to move on to another project that you helped to get rolling. We started out with the Mars Dial Earth Dial project, but another one that you had a kind of seminal role in, I guess, is one we talk about all the time on this show, and that's SETI at Home. Indeed. That was invented by a guy, a computer scientist up here in Seattle, who knew about distributed computing, and he had just read about SETI and wondered whether SETI researchers would be interested in using a lot of CPU cycles if they could gather them together to

process their data. Through a mutual friend, we got together, and I was very skeptical of the idea at first. This is now about 10 years ago. But the more we looked into it, the more feasible it seemed. To make a very long story short, it took another four years of trying to raise the money for it and so forth, and the Planetary Society were the ones that finally stepped forward and made it possible. And we've been able to get money from computer firms and from the University of California. Since then, I've now stepped to the background, and it's run from the University of California at Berkeley.

How do you think those guys are doing with the project? Oh, well, fantastic. They know exactly what they're doing. Because the thing was, I did not have an ongoing SETI search. I tend to work more with SETI strategy, where should you look, how should you look, and so forth, rather than crunch the data like they do. So we had to go somewhere else in order to have all the data input. But we've just been delighted with the response. We were hoping for 100,000 people over a couple of years. Of course, now we're up to 6 million

participants after, what is it, six years, I think, this month. So it's just been fantastic. And the thing I really like about it is that it has, the search should be our globe participating. You know, it shouldn't just be a bunch of geeks, you know, with their toys. It should be the whole earth participating in this search for extraterrestrial life. And so I like the symbolism of that as well as the public's involvement with science and, of course, the opportunity to educate people about what science is and what it isn't and so forth. So the fact that it runs in a lot of classrooms is delightful.

To say nothing of what this concept that you and the other guys introduced of shared or grid computing is now doing across the world, not just for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but many other forms of research. Well, absolutely. It's being used for looking into how do proteins fold and into searching for drugs, into global warming calculations. into global warming calculations. A number of problems are amenable to being split up into a million little pieces and parsed out and then brought back together for this. And so this distributed computing, of which SETI at home was definitely the pioneer, has now become a standard, so to speak.

Woody, were you another admirer of Philip Morrison? Oh, absolutely. I was really saddened by his dying a few weeks ago. I have to say, without exaggeration, that he was the one scientist that I admired the most, if I had to name one. He had eclectic interests like I do, and so I guess I was trying to emulate him in that regard. He, of course, was the father of SETI in many regards and just full of wild ideas. a father of SETI in many regards, and just full of wild ideas. And I also greatly admired his views on the international arms race and nuclear proliferation and so forth.

Just an amazing man. His book reviews in Scientific American, you know, for decades were just eye-openers whenever he got a chance to read them. I was lucky to take an undergraduate course from him at MIT, which was one of the things that just wowed me. My notes are just full of quotations, you know, Morrisonisms. You know, he says things like, if you've seen New York, you know about all cities. And so, you know, what does that mean? Well, when you get into it, you know, you realize that, well, sure, New York is different in many regards, but there's an awful lot of commonality about cities. Back to SETI. Do you have any ongoing involvement?

I know that you were also part of creating the Serendip project at the great radio telescope at Arecibo. Not exactly. No, Serendip is pretty much a Berkeley creation, and the SETI at home is piggybacking on Serendip, so to speak. No, I've sort of gotten off into this astrobiology thing, which has changed my focus more to the microbes. Although they aren't as smart, so to speak, I'm coming to realize from my biology friends that they, in fact, rule. The Earth is dominated by microbial processes.

The cycles of the elements and the nutrients in the Earth is just absolutely controlled by microbes. You know, humans could disappear, and it just would be a tiny effect overall on the Earth. But if the microbes disappeared, then the whole system would collapse. Are you one of those who now suspects that life may be common in the universe, but it won't be much to write home about? Those are actually two of my University of Washington colleagues, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward, in their Rare Earth book, who have made that claim. But in fact, I disagree with them.

I believe that microbial life, simple life, is much more common than intelligent life. But as to what the ratio is of civilizations that can build radio telescopes to those planets where you only have microbial life, we just don't know. And what we do know, though, is that you can much more efficiently search for the radio waves. You can search for literally millions of possible sites by sweeping your radio telescope across the sky. Whereas with the microbial search, you know, you have to put a lot of effort into examining a planet like Mars to see evidence for life today or in the past. And so it's a much more difficult search for microbial life.

So the upshot is that although the intelligent life is undoubtedly much rarer, it's not clear which might get found first. And so we should be doing both approaches. We have only about a minute and a half left, and I want to get into one other topic that you care deeply about, as do I as an urban amateur astronomer, and that is light pollution, which also extends, I guess, to radio frequency pollution. So there is a not-so-odd tie between this and SETI and astrobiology. Well, absolutely. It turns out that SETI is bedeviled by the tremendous amount of radio interference

that comes from all the things that we love, the satellites that carry the television transmissions, and in fact this radio show, and radars and so forth. I never thought the work part of the problem. Yeah, right. It is a real problem. Radio astronomers cannot escape from it because their satellites are always above you. In optical astronomy, you can go to an extremely dark site at great expense.

We are enshrouding our globe in this haze of light, which has denied most people who live in urban areas now, and they just don't know the beautiful Milky Way as an everyday thing. They think of it as kind of a tourist attraction. You've got to get outside the city to see it. And it's a real shame because all that light is wasted. If it went down properly on the streets, you would save a lot of money, as well as make the skies dark so that you could see the Milky Way

and see more shooting stars, meteors, and so forth. So the Earth at Night image, which shows all the city lights around the globe, is something that I put together now 20 years ago. With no clouds? With no clouds. A very unrealistic image. The entire Earth is at night, which never happens, of course. But it shows that the way we reveal ourselves on this planet is actually at nighttime

in visual wavelengths much more than in the daytime where you can't see our presence. Last question, Woody. Are you still part of the old-timers' fast-pitch softball league up there? I still am, indeed. Not quite as fast as I used to be, but still fast-pitch, and I love it compared to lobbing the ball in 15 feet high, and you wait forever. You know, you can strike out, can steal, and you can bunt, and it's a much more interesting game. Well, you fit one out of the park with us today, Woody, and I thank you you for joining us and certainly hope that you'll be able to return to Planetary Radio. Great. Thank you very much.

Woody Sullivan, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, has been our guest on this week's Planetary Radio. He is, I'll just read half of him, a radio astronomer, a historian of science and astronomy, an astrobiologist, a searcher for extraterrestrial intelligence, and we didn't even talk about Scrabble. We're going to come back with Bruce Betts and what's up in our latest trivia contest right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A.

Of Jupiter's 63 known moons, only eight were likely original to the planet. The rest are small, dark bodies that orbit very far from Jupiter. Their orbits aren't the nice, neat, planar circles of Jupiter's regular satellites. Instead, the orbits are elliptical and inclined to the plane of Jupiter's rotation. Many even orbit around the planet backwards. These irregular satellites were likely stray bodies that originally formed elsewhere in the solar system and were captured by Jupiter's gravity into these eccentric orbits. But there may not have been 55 separate capture events to create this large family. Astronomers have observed that the

irregular satellites are easily divided into distinct groups. Each group of moons has similarly shaped orbits, and each group is dominated by one relatively large body. These groups were probably born after Jupiter captured one large body, and a chance collision shattered the large body into a family of smaller ones that have continued to move together around Jupiter. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

We're joined by Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And Bruce, you know Woody, don't you? He's a neato guy. He's pretty cool. He is. I agree. He's spiffy keen. And he's one of those people that's really impressive because he's reinvented himself in so many different fields.

Made big contributions from study to astronomy to now astrobiology, and in the meantime is a big sundial guy, so he's all over the place. Multitasker is, I think, much too weak a term for people like him and Phil Morrison, people like that. Mega multitasker. Easy for you to say. Really, not actually. And what's easy for us to see in the night sky? Well, of course, our friends, the planets.

In the evening sky, now, a little bit tricky is Venus. It's still pretty darn low. You have to look right after sunset, low in the west, but it'll just keep getting higher and higher in the coming months, and it's the brightest star-like object there. So take heart. But in the meantime, check out above, higher than that in the west, is Saturn. Still hanging out kind of near Castor and Pollux.

Great through a small telescope, as is Jupiter, which is high in the sky in the early evening, high in the south if you're in the northern hemisphere. And it's also a wonderful small telescope. And in the pre-dawn sky, you can pick up Mars off there in the southeast, looking kind of yellowish-red. It'll keep getting brighter, too. So for most of the planets, we're going to keep getting better and better. Saturn's going to vanish in a little while, but you still have plenty of time. Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do.

On to random space facts. Did you know, Matt, that in the extrasolar planets world, where first of all, there are over 130 extrasolar planets that have been discovered so far, planets orbiting other stars, one thing I find very interesting is that 80% of them, roughly, are planets that are in highly elliptical orbits, much more so than the nearly circular orbits of all of the major planets in our solar system. This has an implication for those who think about astrobiology and life, which is it's probably a lot harder to keep life kicking around on a planet

in a very elliptical orbit because you have trouble keeping things like liquid water. Everything runs hot and cold in those places. Hot and cold running stuff. Yeah, right. Well, you've always probably got something liquid. You know, it's just that in summer it's water and in winter it's methane. Uh-huh.

Anyway, before I think about that too much, let's go on to our trivia question that we asked. We asked people about the three flavors of neutrinos. Neutrinos, as people know from a couple weeks ago, one of my favorite weird subatomic particles, because there are billions of them coursing through you every single second.

I kid you not. And they just don't interact with much of anything. They have three different types or flavors. How'd we do, Matt? We're getting more and more entries, which, you know, is wonderful because we're glad more people are joining into the contest. But there are so many deserving people out there. We want you all to win.

Our winner this week is Ivan, or Ivan Ulrich, of Campana, Argentina, Argentina. And he said the three flavors of neutrinos are the electron, the muon, and the tau neutrino. He got it right, didn't he, Bruce? He did indeed. Interesting little tidbit about the flavors. The solar neutrino problem has now been solved in the last two or three years. I bet you're relieved. Oh, I'm so relieved.

I can live again. This is actually a huge problem in those who ponder things like stars and neutrinos because we were seeing fewer neutrinos, which, first of all, are really hard to detect. You have to build these big, giant detectors with thousands of tons of heavy water. Way underground, right? Like in mine shafts. Exactly.

Way underground, because you don't want other things triggering your system, like cosmic rays. Anyway, the point here, which is a long point, but I'm going to make it anyway, which is that the sun produces only one flavor, electron neutrinos. And they were seeing only about a third to a half of what they expected to see at these detectors. And so either our neutrino physics was off or the solar physics was off, which would affect everything that we understand about stars. Well, it turns out these weird little neutrino buggers in their eight-minute travel between the sun, roughly, and Earth, they change flavors.

They bop around. Oh, no kidding. Electron neutrinos become tau neutrinos and muon neutrinos, and the original detectors were not very sensitive to those other flavors. Huh, that's fascinating. They did, however, pick up the chocolate neutrinos, the vanilla neutrinos, and the strange pistachio neutrinos. Oh, what happened to the strawberry? Dude, those are not neutrinos. Those are much heavier, much more massive particles.

Fruitons, I think they call them. Good one. What do you got for us for next week? Baryons. Wait, that actually is four next week. We go to the land of black holes. Ooh. Very on. Wait, that actually is four. Next week, we go to the land of black holes. Ooh. Tell us, what do you call the radius distance away from the center of a black hole to which light cannot escape?

If you fire off some light just outside that radius, it can get out. But if it's within that radius, then the light, there's too much gravity, and it will actually bend the light back around due to wonderful general relativistic effects, creating that whole black hole thing. There's a cool name for it. What do you call that radius? Get that information to us by May 23rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. May 23rd, 2 p.m. Pacific will be the deadline for you to get us the answer to this newest space trivia question from our

friend, Bruce Betts. Go to planetary.org slash radio to find out how to enter our contest and win another beautiful solar sail poster. Bruce, I think we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about jumbo shrimp. Thank you, and good night. Or wait, maybe, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about jumbo shrimp. Thank you, and good night.

Or wait, maybe, no, not jumbo shrimp, perhaps a king prawn. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up? I wonder if there's a point near a black hole beyond which jumbo shrimp cannot return. Yes, it's called the shrimpy radius. Join us again next week when we begin our special coverage of the solar sail. Cosmos 1 is almost ready to ride the light of the sun. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

Third Rock from the Sun, Alpha Quadrant of the Milky Way. Have a great week, everyone.