Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - At the EuroPlanet Conference With Doug Ellison

Episode Date: August 28, 2007

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We're off to Europlanet, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Hundreds of presentations were made at last week's European Planetary Science Conference. One of them came from Doug Ellison, but what really kept Doug busy were his reports to the world from the Potsdam, Germany meeting site. We'll conduct our debriefing of Doug on today's show. Emily Lochtewall is coming up with her report on the Messenger spacecraft's close call at Venus.

And Bruce Betts puts the payload before the booster during today's What's Up review of the night sky. News? Yeah, we've got news from everywhere in the universe. Everywhere, that is, except for this big hole in the cosmos. I am not kidding. Astronomers using the Very Large Array radio telescope have found a big hole, a gigantic void in the universe that is devoid of matter. It doesn't even contain dark matter, and it does not fit anywhere in current cosmological theory. I think we'll need to talk with these folks at the University of Minnesota.

Endeavour is back safe and sound. The STS-118 mission ended with the August 21 touchdown of the space shuttle. NASA says the Dawn mission to the two biggest asteroids will launch no sooner than September 26. The Japanese lunar orbiter called Kaguya will lift off on September 12, if all goes well, reaching the moon just five days later. Speaking of Japanese missions, the little Hayabusa's long tale of interplanetary survival just gets better and better. Engineers have announced that they've managed to get three of four ion engines working. The spacecraft continues its long journey home from asteroid Itokawa.

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy 30th birthday, Voyagers 1 and 2, your humanity's most distant emissaries, and many more. I'll be right back with Doug Ellison. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, The Messenger flybys of Venus were very close.

Did navigators have to consider the effects of the atmosphere on the spacecraft? Messenger is a mission that was launched in 2004 and is taking a seven-year cruise to Mercury orbit. On the way, it has already completed one flyby of Earth and two of Venus. The second Venus flyby was very close to the planet, only 350 kilometers above the surface. Venus's atmosphere is well known to be the thickest of all the terrestrial planets. The visible cloud tops reach up to 60 kilometers or so above the ground, but of course the atmosphere doesn't end abruptly at that altitude. It gets thinner and

thinner with height above the planet. MESSENGER's navigators had to perform computer modeling of their spacecraft's flybys to see whether Venus's atmosphere could disturb its path. They found out that so long as MESSENGER flew at higher than 200 kilometers altitude, there was no detectable effect, so the atmosphere wasn't a problem. However, the closeness of the flyby did cause a different problem for the navigators. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. Doug Allison is not working on an interplanetary mission. He's not a professional astronomer. He's not a planetary scientist. But he sure is one heck of an enthusiast and a great writer, with lots of evidence at his unmannedspaceflight.com website. With that in mind, and his conveniently located home in Britain,

my colleague Emily Lakdawalla recruited the multimedia producer as the Planetary Society's guest blogger for last week's European Planetary Science Conference in Potsdam, Germany. It didn't hurt that Doug was also asked to give a presentation of his own. We connected via Skype just a few hours after he returned home, tired but still thrilled to have made the trip. Doug, though you may be exhausted, it sounds like you had a terrific time at what I guess you insiders called Europlanet. Yeah, it has a much longer, more complicated name,

but everyone there just called it Europlanet. It was a very mad week, and even though I was technically on holiday from the bit of work that pays my mortgage, diving into your hobby, your love for so long with so many incredible scientists. It was an absolutely fabulous week. And as usual with these kinds of conferences, far too many sessions for you to cover, much less make it to. Yes, I mean, people who are regular readers of the blog will have read Emily's entries when she goes to various conferences in the States. And people probably don't understand just how hectic these things are. When you register, you get this 40-page Bible that tells you every different session,

and all the subjects are broken down into groups. Those groups will be split into sessions, and at any one time at Europlanet, we had four, five, six concurrent sessions, and so I had to think, okay, what are people going to be interested in? I had to put my kind of prejudices of loving anything that's Martian, frankly, to one side and think, what do people really want to hear about? I think I've, you know, I picked a few requests of people who said, go and see this thing. But overall, I think I covered all the important stuff. I couldn't agree more. Not that I had the full panoply to choose from, but I certainly was very happy with all of the entries that made it into

the blog. The very first one was about Koro, this pretty amazing telescope in space, which is apparently performing far better than was expected. And its team is now expecting to find Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits. Yeah, quite extraordinary spacecraft. The scientist, like orbits. Yeah, quite extraordinary spacecraft. The scientist Malcolm Friedland was very, very pleased at how Koro has been performing. It's a pretty small telescope. It's a 27 centimeter telescope. You know, a lot of amateur astronomers have telescopes bigger than that. And what it's doing is very, very accurately, incredibly accurately, down to kind of three thousandths of a unit of magnitude, measuring the brightness of thousands and thousands of stars constantly for 150 days. And they've had one kind of introductory session getting used to how the spacecraft performs for not quite that long.

And now they're in the middle of their second session. They've been observing stars down to magnitude 11, magnitude 16, very, very dim stars. And they have discovered more transit in that first opening, kind of getting to know the spacecraft session than a lot of people thought they'd discover in the entire mission of a couple of years. It's performing so much better than they hoped. The sensitivity is much better than they expected. And as I wrote, it's going to be, you know, they fully expect to be able to identify Earth-like planets around orbits, around sun-like stars. So the potential for targets for follow-up observations,

I mean, Koro can't tell us a great deal about these planets. It can just tell us that they are there. And they have scheduled every 150-day transit observation, they have a follow-up of 15 days. And it's those observations will be telling us, okay, we've got an Earth-like planet here, and it's looking really, really interesting. Something else that was very exciting, and I think you were just as enthusiastic as I was, your report on the Uranian ring crossing done by a former guest on this program, Imke de Potter. This was a session that unfortunately overlapped with the session that I really did actually have to be at

because I was giving a presentation. And we haven't talked about that. Yes, we'll talk about that in a minute. But I caught the very end of it and there was a big press release. And actually I caught up with her in the press room. This is extraordinary. Back in the Voyager days,

they measured essentially how thick the rings are across the full width of the Uranian ring system. And they've measured the kind of density of the rings. With the ring plane crossing, they get a good chance to measure the rings all over again from ground based observatories and indeed Hubble as well. Now, the thing, the difficulty is because if you're looking at the inner edge of the rings, you're also looking through all the rings at the same time. inner edge of the rings, you're also looking through all the rings at the same time. So they have to peel apart the rings mathematically to get a graph that shows the depth of the rings against how thick they are. And they've changed significantly in the last 20 years. The outermost ring has essentially vanished. The innermost ring has come to something much, much deeper than it was 20 years ago.

And they're not at the point to say what they think is actually going on, but something really is going on. Perhaps, you know, something as crazy as impacts causing massive changes to these rings. And, of course, we've got this rare opportunity with this ring crossing that Imke and others have talked about on this show. It's crazy, but they get three observations in 12 months or so, this May, this August, and I think they go again early next year. Then that's it for, I think it's dozens, tens, I think it may be even hundreds of years until we get to see another ring crossing. Well, other than your own, which we'll get to, as I said, what other presentations really stood out in your mind?

I think two I really enjoyed for three different reasons. There was a lot of stuff about Smart One. Essentially, this conference almost coincides with the first anniversary of what Bernard Foying described as Europe's first landing on the moon with Smart One, although the word landing is perhaps a little bit liberal. But they crashed Smart One in September last year. At the conference in Valencia last year, which I i also blogged on they had some very early results but they've got some detail the level of detail these scientists go to is unbelievable they were tracking smart one with radio telescopes on earth i've got the numbers here the last full frame of science data from smart one came down at 05 42 and 21.759 seconds that was the

last full frame of science but it gets better because addition australia accurately received the signal and timed when that signal vanished and they took it to be 42 minutes past five and 22.394076 seconds. Now they're just competing. It's crazy. But the error bar they've got in that means that they can tie down where SMART-1 first impacted to about two centimeters down track. And so this gives us, hopefully, when we've got so many spacecraft heading off to the moon in the next few years, that this fresh, shiny impact crater, which another paper talked about trying to estimate the size of, it's going to be a nice point reference.

We know exactly where we made that crater, and it can tie in kind of the global network for the moon of where the imagery actually is geographically. That's Doug Ellison. We'll get more of his report on the European Planetary Science Conference after a break. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride.

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Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Doug Ellison was our man at the Europlanet Conference in Potsdam, Germany last week. The multimedia producer and space enthusiast raced from session to session, filing regular reports on the Planetary Society blog. One that I wanted you to be able to say something about, because you described this mission as hideously under-publicized, is Venus Express. Venus Express is extraordinary. Europe undersells itself in terms of space science.

ESA has as many people within its member states, very nearly a kind of similar population to that of the United States. We should be doing, and we should be telling people about what Europe's doing in terms of space science as much as America does America does some amazing things but Europe really is playing catch-up and doing a good job of it and Mars Express and Venus Express are both excellent examples of that Venus Express has been doing observations Venus for quite a long time now one of the things they've been trying to do is get measurements of the surface of Venus with an infrared instrument. Now, people might remember the Magellan mission and the Pioneer orbiter before that, where they used radar to map the surface of Venus. But in some respects, a little bit like Titan, there are

wavelength windows through the clouds to the surface. And what they've been able to do is very carefully model what the temperature of the surface should be like from the altitude data we have from Magellan, and then identify any mild deviations from that. And if they find a big deviation, then the expectation is that might be something volcanic. And they've not found anything like that yet. They've been doing the studies to kind of subtract out the clouds, take into account the topography and see if there is any, you know, dramatic temperature changes on the surface. They've not found anything yet. But using these spectral bands, they're actually being able to identify some of the mineralogy on the ground as well. The opportunity

is there over the next year or so, perhaps at Europlanet next year, and they'll be able to say, okay, guys, you know, we're getting some mineralogical maps of Venus. We're rapidly running out of time. And of course, I want to recommend to listeners that they visit Emily's blog, which for a good week there was also the Doug Ellison blog at planetary.org. And we'll put a link up to that at planetary.org slash radio. But can you give us a couple of other thumbnails of other stories before we talk about, well, maybe life around the Viking spacecraft, or at least what it could look like, and explain the strange results that came back from those spacecraft 30 years ago. But what, anything else stand out in your mind? It would be crazy of me not to say that I think the outreach

session on Thursday morning, in which I played an interesting role, I think is the word I'd use, Alice Vessen, who is in charge of Cassini Outreach at JPL, very kindly said she's co-chairing this session, and would I like to go and give a presentation? And the answer was, let me think, yes. And so Alice and a colleague of hers from JPL, Kevin Hussey, they both went over to Potsdam. And the three of us actually, our talks backed into one another on Thursday morning. We all followed one another. Alice was talking about various Cassini outreach techniques. And it was actually fascinating.

I had no idea how much work they're doing. There's some fantastic stuff in schools, some astonishing results on what school kids are learning and how actually they're using space science to improve their reading and writing, which was a great idea. Kevin talked about some absolutely brilliant 3D visualization in real time. A few months from now, we should actually be able to see on the web real time 3D simulations of where Cassini was, what it was pointing at, what it was doing. It's absolutely fantastic. I tried to kind of rattle the European space science cage by saying, hey, guys, look what they're doing in America. You can go online every day and look at pictures from the surface of Mars. You can go out and look at pictures from Cassini.

You've got people from New Horizons saying, hey, which pictures should we take of Jupiter that are going to look cool? And in Europe, we're sadly lacking in that regard. And not just look at those pictures, but a lot of amateurs doing some wonderful things with them. Yeah, it's extraordinary. There's one gentleman in particular, a guy called Michael Howard, who has plunged what must be hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work into a little piece of software called the Midnight Mars Browser. And this will go and get the raw pictures. It will make color pictures. It will make the anaglyphs.

And then from pointing data, it can then reproject all these pictures into 3D space. So you can sit there and pan your way around, and then I helped him out with my kind of professional life in multimedia production and made a little 3D model of the rover. So you can sit there panning around HomePlate and tap your keyboard and see Spirit driving around the edge of HomePlate. It's fantastic. It's very nearly the sort of stuff that the science team use themselves to figure out what they're going to do with the rovers. Doug, I don't know if we've saved the best for last, but it may be what has gotten the most press. And that is this

interesting paper that was presented that said, OK, we got these weird results from Viking. How could these be consistent with life? Yeah, these two guys, Joop Houtkooper and Dirk Schultz-McCooch, they presented this paper. And in fact, Joop gave me a copy of his science paper, Possible Biogenic Origin for Hydrogen Peroxide on Mars, the Viking Results Reinterpreted. What these guys are saying is, you know, we've got some results from the biology experiments on both Viking landers that don't say, you know, wow, biology, bugs, we've got it nailed. But we still struggle to fully answer chemically.

We can't think of chemistry that answers all these results that we got. And so they've thought, what about, you know, we thought about peroxides in the soil producing some of these results. How about some sort of microbe that has a 60-40 mix of hydrogen peroxide and water as its bulk composition um so that's hence my blog entry life's a bleach and um if you mix these two together the the freezing point drops down to about minus 50 degrees celsius um i don't know what that is in fahrenheit you know pretty cold pretty martian cold not only that but below that temperature

peroxide will tend to super cool super freezing will go below freezing yeah it doesn't it doesn't want to crystallize this life unfortunately and perhaps this is almost too conveniently as well because of the peroxide if you treat it like like an ill relative and give it chicken soup and wrap it up warm as they did with with the viking lander experiments it will spontaneously decompose um so you say oh a little microbe here have some have some soup yeah have some soup have you know wrap it warm and in both cases you just it goes away it decomposes instantaneously it's you if these things exist you feel for them because because when we go we we give them a really hard time the point they made was that things you

consider an extremophile on earth for mars they're normophile. And all of Mars would be very good for them. And it's very isolated, not going to have outside conditions coming in and ruining their day. But the only time that has happened is when we go there, we drench them, we warm them up, and we kill them. That's their suggestion. Now, they're not saying there are peroxide bugs on Mars. But the question they're asking, and I think it's a valid one, is that perhaps the way we go about asking the question, is there life on Mars, is so centric that actually they might not like Earth conditions. They might not like the sorts of things that we would do or we would expect bugs to like. And perhaps we have to think about how to go looking for life on Mars and how to go treating the soil.

You know, if we're going to look for life on Mars, then let's look for it in Martian conditions. Let's not try and make it think it's Earth. Let's not be Terra-centric. Exactly. Let's not take home all the way to Mars with us. Doug, tantalizing results, as has been this conversation

about the European Planetary Science Conference. And we will simply recommend again that people head over to the website, planetary.org, and check the archives of Emily's blog for your entries from last week. Thank you so much for giving us this review. Absolute pleasure, Matt. Doug Ellison is a multimedia producer in Britain. We were speaking to him at his home. He is also, though, the master of unmannedspaceflight.com, and we'll put up a link to there as well.

And we'll be thanking Bruce Betts, I'm sure we will, for another installment of What's Up right after this return visit from the usual originator of that blog, Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. When Messenger flew by Venus in June, it skimmed just above the atmosphere at an altitude of 350 kilometers. This was far enough away that Venus' air did not drag on the spacecraft. However, the flyby happened on the night side of Venus, which caused a different problem. Venus is almost as big as Earth, about 12,000 kilometers across. Even though MESSENGER whizzed by at a fast 13 kilometers per second, the sheer size of Venus meant

that MESSENGER spent almost an hour in Venus' shadow, out of sight of the Sun. Solar-powered orbiters do not like to spend much time in shadow. Their batteries are usually kept at a constant state of charge by continuously operating solar panels. Just 10 or 15 more minutes in eclipse could have drained MESSENGER's batteries to a low state of charge that would have posed a risk to the spacecraft. Having successfully passed Venus, however, Messenger is now baking in the intense sunlight of the innermost solar system, enjoying solar energy nine times stronger than it felt

just after it launched from Earth. The spacecraft is now homing in on the first of three flybys of Mercury to take place in January. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetary radio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We're back in person with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, to talk about the night sky and other sundry topics in this edition of What's Up. Hey, welcome back. Hey. Hey. Total, total lunar eclipse. Now, if you catch this hot off the presses,

it may still exist, but most of you, well, this will be a casual retrospective, and I hope you all enjoyed it. Unless you were just listening to it on the 27th, in which case you can go out there tonight if you're living in the Americas and check out the lunar eclipse. Check out our website for a link where you can find out exact times and such.

But speaking in the future, it was glorious. Oh, boy, I've never seen one like it since the last one. Hey, they do vary, you know. It would be a nice random space fact, but the color really varies in a lunar eclipse. The color? The color can vary from a reddish and fairly bright to a deep, dark, dull gray. It depends on which part of the Earth's shadow it goes through and therefore how dark. And it depends on how much stuff is in the Earth's atmosphere, particularly dust apparently in the high atmosphere.

Because if you were on the moon, as I know you want to be, during one of these things, you would be seeing all the sunrises and sunsets of the Earth as the light comes around through the upper atmosphere. Depending on how much of that light is getting blocked, how much of it is getting a reddish hue like you see at sunset, you can get different colors. That's a very nice random space fact. There, good. Now I don't have to give another one.

But say random space fact. I will, but not right now. We don't do it right now. Don't mess with my pacing. But other things to look for in the night sky. Venus, if you're up in the pre-dawn, Venus is starting to become that bright. Morning star, that's not a star. It's the brightest star-like object up in the pre-sunrise.

It'll get better for a while, though. In fact, for the next half a year, it'll be up in the pre-dawn sky. Mars up rising around midnight. Over there in the east looking reddish and also kind of near it is Aldebaran, which is also kind of a reddish star, but not quite as bright as Mars is right now. Jupiter still lovely in the south-southwest-ish shortly after sunset and the brightest star-like object in the evening sky. Saturn's on vacation.

On to random space fact! I knew it was coming. Already did it. By the way, it was fun. We're just messing with you. At Space Fest, I had a couple people come up to me and call me the random space fact guy. The random space fact guy. Did they ask you to do it with the echo?

Because people think you just do it with your voice. Hey, hey, let's not tell people what's behind the curtain. Okay, I'm sorry. You're right. If anybody should know that, I should. Well, that's great. I'm sorry. You're right. If anybody should know that, I should. So, yeah. Well, that's great. I'm thrilled. Yeah, various people who listen to the show and a couple particularly enthusiastic.

One, Rick Sternbach, the artist. Good guy. Out there. And then Carl and his friends. Carl? Yeah. Who Carl? What Carl?

Which Carl? Just a Carl. That's all I know. All right. Just Carl and his friends. Carl. Carl has sideburns and his friends like to say random space facts. No kidding.

No kidding. Okay. Well, hello, Carl. And everyone else is very excited to hear all of this, I'm sure. And with that, let us go on to the trivia contest, since we've already given you some lovely random space facts. More next week. We asked you, in what was perhaps a little tricky, but not really, who is the third woman

in space? Since most in America don't think of her with that titling. And how'd we do? We? We? Kim Wasabi wasn't us. It was the listeners. They did great.

How'd the listeners do? They did really well. Only one person got it wrong. It's taking you years to criticize me for saying how'd we do. I know. I've wanted to for five, almost five years now. Good. Let it out. But nothing else.

Keep the rest in. How'd the listeners for five, almost five years now. Good. Let it out. But nothing else. Keep the rest in. How'd the listeners do, Matt? They did great. And you know what they came up with, of course? Sally Robb, as you said. We don't think of her as third, but she indeed was. In fact, went up twice and was also the first woman to go on a spacewalk, to go EVA. You are a wealth of space facts and trivia. Stop. Okay. It's my job. No, please wealth of space facts and trivia. Stop. Okay.

It's my job. No, please, keep coming. This is good stuff. You got it from the listener, didn't you? I haven't told you. Yeah, of course. That's where I get all this stuff. And this week I got this stuff from Keith Olson of Portland, Oregon. Keith is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And let me tell you, Rowena Cadiz, who won last

week, you saw her note, right? I did. She was excited. Man, there was some, can you imagine if somebody really gave her a valuable prize, what would happen? She was thrilled. Well, the side note is that, you know, she's also the artist who has... No, no, no, no. That's Bettina who has the inside back cover or the back cover of the planetary report. Oh, Rowena and Bettina, I sincerely apologize for my confusion. Different fans of, I'm sure, Random Space Fact. Back cover of the planetary report, by the way. Yes, and one of them is named Carl. Well, this has all been very embarrassing for me. Are we ready to go on to another question?

I think so. So I can stumble over something else in a couple weeks?. All right. I'm going to stumble over this actually. What do you call the darker central part of a planet's shadow? The darker? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. So that's the basic question. I'll say a little bit more, which is again, if you were on the moon during a total lunar eclipse, this is the part that when you would see all of the sun blocked out, it would be a total solar eclipse for you when you enter this part of the shadow as opposed to the other parts,

which are like a partial solar eclipse where the Earth, in this case, is only blocking part of the sun. Excellent. How do Carl and Bettina and Rowena enter? All of you, go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter. There's a little salt for those wounds.

And you want to get it to us by September 3rd, Monday, September 3rd, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Can you pass the lemon juice, please? Alright, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about salty lemon juice. Thank you. Good night. Give us one more. Give thank you good night give us one more give us

one more do it one more time all right go out there look up in the night sky no no no not that random space fact this is a setup no trust you can trust me we've been doing this for almost five years random space fact see it was beautiful he's br Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up? And he always gets the echo. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.