Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Australia Gets Serious About Space

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

The Australian government announced that it would create a national space agency at the 68th annual International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide. We’ll talk with IAC 2017 CEO Brett Biddington about what this means for his country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Australia gets serious about space, 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. The 68th International Astronautical Congress just wrapped up in Adelaide, Australia. We'll talk with Jason Davis about the revised plans Elon Musk announced there for putting hundreds of people on Mars by the mid-2020s. Then we'll talk with the man who headed the IAC effort. Brett Biddington will also tell us about the Australian government's imminent creation of its first national space agency. Bruce Betts will tell us where and when we can chase the next decade or so's total eclipses in this week's What's Up.

And he's got a really easy space trivia question for you this time. Jason Davis is the Planetary Society's digital editor who follows space developments around the world. Jason, it's still an audacious plan that Elon Musk provided more details of at the IAC, the International Astronautical Congress last week. I'm a little disappointed that the rocket now, the so-called BFR, will now be shorter than a Saturn V. Yeah, come on, Elon. You can't do 111 meters. You stop short at 106. I mean, I just feel like we're not trying anymore here. Yeah, just put a big tower or flagpole on top of that or something. An antenna, maybe. Yeah. Okay, so I've already given away the code name for the rocket, BFR, which we cannot actually say on the radio.

cannot actually say on the radio. Yeah, yeah. I hear some other people call it the big falcon rocket. So, you know, we'll just go with that. We'll go with that. It's a big falcon rocket. Yeah, we'll go with that. All right. Tell us, what has he revealed about this system and when it might actually lift off? Yeah. So, this is an evolving concept. And, you know, that's not surprising that happens for any rocket system. But essentially, Musk revealed this slimmed down concept. When I say slimmed down, we should specify this is still a gigantic rocket. Oh, yeah. You know, it's hardly the Falcon 9. It's slightly scaled down, uses less engines. Before it had like 42 engines. Now it's only going to have 31 engines. Looks like they've thought about the concept a little bit more and added a few more details to it. You mentioned the date that it would fly.

They're still aiming for Mars landings in 2022. That would be a cargo ship of some kind or two cargo ships. And then they would try again in 2024, which would be a cargo ship of some kind or two cargo ships. And then they would try again in 2024, which would be the next time the launch window aligns, you know, so that we can, every two years, we can send stuff to Mars. And in 2024, two ships would be actually crewed, meaning in Elon Musk's timeline, humans could be walking on Mars in just seven years. Still pretty aspirational, but that's what they're going with for now. And we're still talking about 100 people riding up in the nose of this thing? Yeah, it's still this giant colonial transporter ship that can hold up to 100 people.

They had a cutaway view of it this time that showed a bunch of suites because, on your multi-month trip to Mars, you got to have your own little hotel room. And it said, I think, two to three people per room. So you might have to have a roommate, big sacrifice when you're going to Mars. But yeah, so the design is slowly coming together. And I think one of the important things to stress about this presentation is he's clearly thinking about ways they're going to pay for it. One of the things that was important that he showed was this concept of one of these things landing on the moon. So by shrinking down the design, making it a little more flexible, he's clearly got his eye on other concepts. So if NASA ends up going back to the lunar surface and setting up a base of some

sort there, SpaceX obviously would like to be a part of that. And they would like to get paid to help develop a system that can do that. So we're starting to see some of the practicalities come together, but still a long ways off from eventually becoming reality. But it's cool. It's cool, right? And he added, almost as an afterthought, oh, yeah, we can go point to point on Earth. Like, what's the sample trip he mentioned? I think it was New York to Singapore in 39 minutes or 29 minutes. I can't believe I can't remember. 39 is what you put in the article.

Yeah. So, you know, as soon as I saw that skyline of New York in the background and I imagine this giant rocket lifting off, I can just see all the red tape and regulatory framework, you know, piling up beside the rocket as tall as the rocket practically. That's pretty ambitious. And I think that I think that would be the most complicated part of that is not that it couldn't be done. It's just that I think you have a hard time convincing people, one, to allow you to do that so close to a populated area and two, getting people to feel safe about it. If I'm going to go to Singapore on a trip of some kind, I don't want to die. So if I'm going to get on a rocket that goes to Singapore, I want to have a really good feeling that that thing is going to be safe. So, yeah, interesting. Getting to Mars, no big deal. But getting from New York to – and it's Shanghai that you put in the article, by the way. Oh, yes, Shanghai, yeah. So much better than Singapore for a 39-minute trip. That's the hard part.

It's why we love him. It has to be said, though, that though it sometimes costs more and almost always takes longer, SpaceX has a really good record of achieving what they set out to do. Yep. Yep. I wouldn't put it past them that, you know, something like this is feasible in the far future, like you said, a little more expensive and ending up being longer than he's predicting. But, you know, if anybody can do it, it's them. Take a look at this blog post from Jason. It was posted on September 29th at planetary.org, of course. And it has a terrific table where you compare this new version of the concept to the previous one from a year ago and to other craft like the Saturn V. It really

is fascinating. Thank you, Jason. Thanks, Matt. That's Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society. So you thought Australia already had a space agency, didn't you? So did I, till very recently. After all, it's a modern, industrialized nation, one of the first to put a satellite in orbit. But it wasn't till last week's International Astronautical Congress that the country stated its intent to create a central department for nationwide coordination and promotion of space development, assets, industry, and possibly even education. The International Astronautical Federation held the first Congress back in 1950,

seven years before Sputnik 1 became the first artificial object in Earth orbit. This year it was hosted in Adelaide by the Space Industry Association of Australia. The association chose its past chair, Brett Biddington, to lead the effort as CEO. Brett is founder and principal of Biddington Research and a director of the Space Environment Research Center. He served for many years as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and is a member of the Order of Australia. I got Brett on Skype the day after the week-long Congress ended. By the way, our own Bill Nye was there.

He delivered a keynote address about the LightSail 2 project. We'll talk with him about the Congress next week. Brett Biddington, welcome to Planetary Radio. Good morning, I should say, because though it is late afternoon here, it is early morning Saturday for you, Saturday, September 30th. And you have just completed what I understand from my colleagues who attended was a tremendously successful International Astronautical Congress. Yes, Matt. And thanks certainly for talking to me. I think it's fair to say that IAC 17, certainly for the people who were there, was a grand and

happy occasion. And of course, from the point of view of Australian space, I think it's probably fair to say that it's an inflection point in this country's journey in space. It certainly was wonderful timing for your nation to announce that it is going to form a space agency. Indeed so. It's been a long time coming. In fact, we had a half-hearted attempt at doing this back in the 1980s, and that didn't come to success. But I think this time the world has changed in so many different ways. Small satellites, technology change, cheaper to launch, all those sort of things mean that countries like Australia, small powers, medium powers, can now be genuine participants in space, as indeed can start- startups in countries such as Australia.

And in the last five years, there's been an absolute burgeoning of small companies, all very, very keen, hustling and bustling to launch all sorts of things. I do want to talk more about that and what a space agency will mean for Australia. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about, get your thoughts about IAC and what some of the highlights were. I suppose we would have to start with what has become now a, a two-year tradition of Elon Musk having a session that people almost literally run each down, run each other down for to be able to attend. Well, let me tell you that there was no running down this year.

Good. We were very, very concerned about the behavior of some people who should have known better, actually, in Guadalajara. And so this year, it was a much more orderly and organized entrance into Musk's presentation. I would think about 3,000 people went to listen to him. The hall wasn't full, which is, it was full for our opening ceremony. Fascinating. That's not to say that, of course, many others did not listen to him on the webcast through SpaceX website and other places.

on the webcast through SpaceX website and other places. But certainly those who were there, I think, were very excited to hear his plans for Mars. What were some of the other highlights, things that really stood out for you at IAC? I assume that you had some opportunity to enjoy and attend sessions, in addition to being the top person responsible for making it all a success. Matt, I did not get to one session. I'm sorry. That's okay.

My job was to make sure that everybody who was there and attending had a fabulous time. I think the feedback we have is that the opening ceremony was indeed the word that was used was emotional. Some of the Australians who attended said that it brought a tear to their eye and made them feel proud to be Australian. So I think it's fair to say that we probably got the opening ceremony right. The welcome reception on the Monday evening, particularly the Europeans, many of them came up and said they'd never seen so many oysters in one place at the same time and eaten so many.

So we got the food right, at least at the welcome reception. It just continued through as a very, happy productive friendly week and I think that was the tone we tried to set and therefore the conversations that were had both within the sessions and increasingly and more importantly beyond them the bilaterals around business to business business to universities those sorts of conversations coming back to me as being productive, positive, helpful, all of these sorts of very good words mean to me that I think we hit the mark with this IAC, and not just for Australia, but in fact for the many people from around the world who attended. Do you know offhand how many nations, spacefaring and otherwise, had representatives at this Congress?

We had in the order of 70 nations. The reason I don't have final figures is that we had people actually register on the last day just to hear Musk. But we had in the order of 4,500 registrations, in the order of 70 or 72 or something like that nations represented. Very large delegations from the United States, as you would expect, China, Japan, the European nations, Russia was very well represented. The surprise to me was that of the 4,500 delegates, one third of them were Australian. I thought in the planning phase of this Congress that we would have about an 85-15 split,

and in fact it was more like a 65-35 split. Well, that must have been especially gratifying. I want to go back to your comment about the bilateral discussions that took place, because while I am sure that the attendees enjoyed the many sessions, it is also a fact, isn't it, that many people attend conferences like this, and specifically the IAC, because there is so much business that can get done. I think that's right. The IAC is a changing animal. It continues to evolve. that's right. The IAC is a changing animal. It continues to evolve. When I first became involved, and the first I attended was in 2012 in Naples, what I saw there was, I think, a whole lot less

business. But the Global Networking Forum, which is the conference within the conference, in a sense, is becoming far more popular. And I think there's an opportunity now for the IAF to actually rethink its entire strategy for its Congress. Does this leave you with any doubt that the time is now for space to come into its own as a place where people do business? I think that we are seeing the conversation around space as an environment or a domain being normalized. The way that I described this to friends is I draw a matrix and I have five vertical lines, one representing each of the five domains of human activity, the sea, the land, the air, space, and cyber. They're the only places where people do work or do stuff.

And then in the horizontal domains are the emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, 3D printing, that sort of stuff, big data analytics, and that list can go on. The point being, of course, that many of the new companies that are working in these horizontals, they're domain agnostic. Big data analytics applies just as much in the land and the sea and the air as it does in the space domain. And so a challenge for a country like Australia as these countries start to emerge is we're not seeking so much to build a space vertical,

but rather we're seeking to capture that part of the business of these horizontal companies that do stuff, have customers in the space domain. And that's a very different conversation than those conversations we've been used to in the past. I want to compliment you on that visualization of these five domains of human endeavor. That's really pretty fascinating. With that one third of attendees being from the hosting nation, Australia, it certainly was not just a coincidence,

but it was very, very good timing that this was the place where the Australian government could make its announcement that it's moving forward toward a space agency. And that is now, as I understand it, a firm commitment? There's no question that the genie's out of the bottle, and I don't think it's going to be put back anytime soon. Now what has happened is that technology change on the one hand has allowed nations as I said earlier like Australia to become far more involved. Secondly we are as a nation our government

I think has been copying it from international partners for actually not quite living up to its responsibilities as a good citizen internationally. The Australian chair at many international conferences and congresses has been vacant, and it should not have been for a long time. The next point about that, of course, is we've now got a massively changing economy and industrial base. We've got state governments closing down car industry. Well, the nation is shutting down its car industry. And we've got to find different sorts of employment for lots of people. And it's not going to be the jobs of the 20th century. It's going to be the jobs of the 21st century. of the 20th century. It's going to be the jobs of the 21st century.

And space has two particular aspects or elements in creating those jobs. One is there are new jobs in the domain itself. If you think of the industry as a whole, it's a $420-odd billion a year industry. Australia is not even playing at its weight. This country's share of global GDP is in less than 2%, but our contribution to the space economy is orders of magnitude below that 2% that even just playing at weight we should be aspiring to. So there's a huge untapped potential just there that we need to exploit. And there's a bit of a paradox or a disconnect there because Australia is well known for its

technical prowess, the quality of its universities and researchers, but it does not seem as of yet to have been translated into that proportional representation that one might expect from what is a first world nation like Australia. Well, I think this comes to the fact that Australia's strategic interests are fundamentally tied up in space. Initially, it was through the WOMERera programs with the United Kingdom when we looked to London as our great and powerful ally in the 40s and 50s, and that very rapid transition to the United States. But the programs that we support were very, very highly classified and sensitive. And so secrecy has always been an issue in terms of what we would aspire to do beyond the secret domain, the classified domain in national security.

There's been a bifurcation, if you like. That has meant that people who have not known what's been happening in the strategic end of things have felt powerless, unloved, unresponded to by governments and so on. And governments have not really been, have not thought how to tell that story properly. There's not been a coherent narrative from the national security right through to the other domains. In the application domains that are unclassified, we have the Geosciences of Australia, domains that are unclassified. We have the Geosciences of Australia, we have the Bureau of Meteorology, we have our scientific Commonwealth and Scientific Industrial Research Organisation, the National Labs, if you will, all with very well established credentials nationally and internationally, including as great users of data from other people's satellites.

as great users of data from other people's satellites. What we've come to understand in the last five or six years is that we now have better articulated requirements for Earth observation that the data that we've been used to getting from other sources no longer meets our requirements as well as it used to. And so the time has come now to start to invest in our own Earth observation capabilities and indeed our own capabilities perhaps certainly from a national security perspective for space observation as well, understanding what's happening in our space environment.

More in a minute from Brett Biddington about the just completed International Astronautical Congress and plans for the Australian Space Agency. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be but to find them we have to go into space we have to explore this endeavor unites us space exploration truly brings out the best in us

encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal to know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Brett Biddington is Chief Executive Officer for the just-completed 68th International Astronautical Congress.

He's also a former chair of the Space Industry Association of Australia. We're talking with him about the announcement made by the Australian government at IAC that it has begun formation of the nation's first space agency. I want to ask you about what I assume are more than one, probably many small pockets of success in Australia, and specifically because you are a director of this center, the Space Environment Research Center, which I looked at the website for, and there's some very good work going on there. Is that the kind of work that you think an agency, a centralized national agency, might encourage?

I think the agency will do maybe three things. The first thing it'll do is, I I think provide a point of coherence for the established organizations that do downstream processing for them then to be able to roll up their requirements and with new money, not taking money out of existing pots, be able then to build a program of satellite construction or design construction operation that meets a range of national requirements. And I think there'll be some dual use aspects to that. So there'll be some military involvement and national security involvement as well as the agencies I've mentioned.

That will also involve the states, because the states are responsible for land management fundamentally, and they, of course, need access to this data as well. The next thing it'll do, I think, is start to pull together a coherent set of understandings for STEM education. There's no question at all that space is still a vector to get young men and women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. True around the world. True around the world, absolutely. Those horizontal emerging industries that I described earlier absolutely will only work if there are

men and women in them who are numerate not just literate. We are not producing enough men and women who are numerate in the Western world and in Australia included. I don't think it's an add-on I think it's actually something that would be integral to this agency's mission. And what I see happening there is pretty quickly we will see a small office funded probably in the May federal budget next year, maybe 10 or 15 people, given the job of getting the international piece sorted out quickly, getting a sort of a badge on the door and a place where says we're open for business, starting to encourage industries, giving the little startups that we have now a place where they can call home. And at the same time, the next task will be to start to think about what the program looks like. What would you do first, second, third, fourth?

Not projects. This has to be long-term, systematic, ongoing. There is a legislative aspect to this. I suspect there's a new Act of Parliament to be drawn up called something like the Australian Space Agency Act so that this organisation has continuity, has life, has purpose and can't be easily simply pushed aside. So there's a whole lot of work to be done in that first year but my view is that in the 2019 May budget, we will start to see funds starting to flow through to initiate whatever program it is that we start to do. It's also worth noting that the opposition party, the Labor Party, has essentially come out and said, it's about time, let's endorse this,

let's do it. So if there's a change of government at our next election, which is due early in 2019, I would not expect this announcement of a few days ago to other than continue, which is great. So I'm pretty optimistic about this. Do you see any potential for development of an independent launch capability, an Australian booster rocket? I can tell you that yesterday a signature was achieved in northern Australia with the Northern Territory Government to establish a small launch site near Gove on the Gove Peninsula, a small company, Equatorial Launch Australiaia there are several companies actually in australia that are seeking to develop launch capability some through building rockets some through building

the ground-based infrastructure the launch infrastructure i think that we will see rockets being launched from australia within the next five years. The Department of Defense certainly is interested in responsive space capabilities, and that involves some degree of indigenous launch. You've talked about some of the challenges that the nation has faced in this effort. Does Australia have certain advantages that might not be present in other nations, perhaps in other hemispheres? Well, I think there are several advantages. Firstly, of course, the northern part of Australia is relatively close to the equator,

12 degrees south or thereabouts, so that's not bad. There are launch windows in a geographic sense that won't offend neighbours if we launch responsibly. Secondly, this country is, with its tiny population, responsible for 15% of the Earth's surface. So it's a no-brainer that we actually are big users of space-based data. And that's actually where we've placed our emphasis and our investments, after all, in the last many years. But as I said earlier, those requirements no longer fully met. So we now develop indigenous capability and become somewhat more self-reliant. And at the

same time, of course, have something to trade and something to contribute back to the international community in the civil domain, which is quite important. So there's that advantage. And then finally, is the advantage of in the southern hemisphere, when we look out, we look through the disk of the Milky Way. And that's something that our northern hemispheric neighbors don't enjoy. This gives us some advantages from the point of view of astronomy, ground-based stations like the NASA facility at Tidbinbillini where I live in Canberra. Those opportunities of geography don't go away.

We also, of course, are a Five Eyes nation in the Asian region. From the point of view of sort of global security, I think that Australia will probably become more prominent as the United States and the Five Eyes community works out and resolves the relationship between, in particular, the United States and China over the next 10, 15, 20 years. This is not something we need to hurry. It's something that's going to evolve. Nobody wants other than a very good and strong relationship between the great powers of the world. That just takes time to put into place. But Australia will play a part in it. Are you personally excited about the direction that

things seem to be going in? Absolutely. Firstly, one of the reasons we put a lot of effort into this Congress was, I guess, some of us saw that the change was coming. We saw that the time was right. We persisted. It took us three years to win the bid, three years to deliver the conference. So I've been at this now for six years. And of course, we've seen technology evolve in the ways that we anticipated six and seven and eight years ago we've seen the geopolitical circumstances evolve we've seen interest grow we've seen the space environment space debris management especially in the low earth orbits australia is very well placed to do this because there are very few ground-based sensors in the Southern Hemisphere adding to a space surveillance system. that if we can get a more highly, a picture of higher fidelity of where particular objects are as they circle the earth,

that allows us then to think far more carefully and constructively about which object you might nudge or move, which is the idea of the work I'm involved with at Mount Stromlo in Canberra. Thinking about using laser pressure from Earth lasers to just nudge objects. Now, that's okay for once, but you want to know what that nudge might mean in five or six or 700 orbits time. You might have made things worse for yourself.

And you can only do this space traffic management issue in the low Earth orbits, indeed anywhere, as an international collaborative effort. Brett, I think you have, right at the end here, come up with, could be the topic for yet another discussion in the future on this program, the Planetary Society. I don't know if you've heard about the Laser Bees concept that we've supported for moving near-Earth objects around. This idea of directing big laser beams at objects in orbit around the Earth to make sure bad things don't happen, I'm going to keep that in mind. We'll bring that up again. You will note that I waited until the very end of the conversation

to ask you to pass along any gratitude you can to anyone you know involved with those big dishes that are not far from where you live, who, of course, had a movie made about them called The Dish, which I highly recommend, back in Apollo days, but also were the ones who brought us the grand finale of Cassini just a few days ago. Yes. There was terrific media, certainly in Australia and I suspect around the world, about Cassini. The Parkes Radio Telescope, which is the hero, as it were, of this movie,

there's a little bit of poetic license in that movie because actually the first TV signals were received in a much smaller dish at a place called Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra, and then the task was passed to the bigger dish, which is a radio telescope primarily, at Park some hundreds of kilometres away. But the actual dish that took the first footprints imagery is still in operation.

It's been shifted down to a site at Tidbinbilla, and it's now used, among other things, by school students to learn. Again, it's part of sort of STEM outreach activity that is done on site, and she's a grand old lady. That is a great place for us to finish. I want to congratulate you again on the completion of the 2017 IAC, International Astronautical Congress, and wish you and all of your countrymen, a fair number of whom listened to this radio program, a great future in space development. Thanks, Matt. Pleasure to talk. We have been talking with Brett Biddington.

He was, I suppose still is, the CEO for the 68th International Astronautical Congress, just completed in Adelaide, Australia. He's the founder and principal of Biddington Research and a director, as we mentioned, of the Space Environment Research Center,

past chair of the Space Industry Association in Australia, adjunct professor at a couple of universities. He had a long and accomplished career as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and was admitted as a member of the Order of Australia in 2012. Oh, and we will also put up a link to a paper that he created in 2008 called Skin in the Game, created in 2008 called Skin in the Game, Realizing Australia's National Interest in Space to 2025, which seems more timely than ever.

We will move on now to a timely examination of the night sky with our friend Bruce Betts. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society is Bruce Betts, who has just written, just posted a great new blog post for all of you brand new eclipse chasers out there. Tell us about this new piece. As I and others around here wanted to become eclipse chasers, I and others around here wanted to become eclipse chasers. It's my guide, my one-stop shopping for where every total solar eclipse is from now through the 2020s, the end of the 2020s, and where you would need to go and a little bit about path and even a smidge on weather. You and I need to be in Sydney, Australia in 2028, because I couldn't believe it. That one passes over zillions of miles or kilometers of nothing and then goes zap straight through the center of

Sydney. Right over the center. Yep. All right. All right. It's a date. All right. Well, we can do Dallas in 2024 first, and then we'll do Australia and Sydney. Well, I hope I make it to both of those. Although the one, I guess I should work it into a random space fact, but I found a random space fact as I was researching. I derived from the online maps. There is a point in northwestern Australia for an eclipse, a hybrid eclipse coming up. It has one second of totality. I think we should go there and just see what the heck that would be like.

Yeah, would you do that? And just give me a call and tell me how it went. All right, we'll just do Sydney in 2028. I'll book the hotel. So that's the update for what's coming up over the next more than 10 years. How about this week? This week, Saturn's in the evening sky in the southwest, but the action still remains in the pre-dawn in terms of planets hanging out with each other. You got Venus and Mars. Venus over 100 times brighter than Mars at this point,

but super bright Venus low in the east in the pre-dawn. And then right near it, and if you pick this up right after it comes out, on October 5th, they're very close, but they stay close for days and weeks after that, with Mars above and Venus below. And on October 17th, there's a crescent moon between the two of them, making for a lovely sight. And I want to alert people that the racing cars they hear in the background, that's the famous little old lady of Pasadena going past the Planetary Society, I think.

It's the little old lady from Pasadena. Yes, it is. Except I thought she stuck to Colorado Boulevard. Apparently she's moved a block south to Green Street. Well, she likes Circle Back. It's kind of a circle route. Anyway, this week in space history, you may have heard of this. It's the 60th anniversary of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in space.

I'm so glad you brought that up because we're not otherwise celebrating this anniversary, the beginning of the space age. Well, yay. How's that? Very nice. Thank you. We move on. Do we have any singers this week? Not this week.

No, no singers, no celebrities. It's all up to you. A-da-dum-bum, space fact. Oh, that's great. No loss felt there at all yeah right almost everything about a star pick a star any star almost everything about it is determined by its initial mass at least in basic uh outline including the such things as luminosity so how bright it is size evolution what it's going to end up as. Lifespan and its eventual fate. All pretty much you can figure out from its initial mass.

Wow, that is such a contrast with so many humans where a lot is determined by their final mass. Oh, oh. You know, maybe we should study baby weights and whether they correlate. Never mind. Put them on the main sequence. Exactly. All right. We move on to trivia.

And we just had a flyby from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flying by Earth on its way to the asteroid Bennu for gravity assist that happened on September 22nd. And I asked you over what continent was it at closest approach to Earth? How did we do? Was it Antarctica? It was indeed. Then I am so happy for Brittany Blankenship, a first-time winner in Westland, Michigan, because she said she found this in Sky and Telescope, the magazine. Closest approach, 1252 Eastern Time over Antarctica,

when apparently the spacecraft was going over 30,000 kilometers or 19,000 miles per hour. So, Brittany, as you've heard, you got it right. Congratulations. Yay. She is going to receive our collection of Cassini mission stuff, including a poster, the official pin. It is such a cool pin for the grand finale of that mission, and a Cassini sticker. Also, a Chop Shop designed Planetary Society t-shirt, the overlapping Mars and Earth, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account.

and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. 200 points worth a couple hundred bucks American from that nonprofit international global network of telescopes. That is quite a package. Once again, Brittany, congrats. Yeah, you really put together quite the deal. Yeah, I should have cut out a couple of things. Brittany deserves it. You're absolutely right. Brian Mangold

of Maricopa, Arizona. If his back of the envelope numbers are close, it robbed the Earth of about 70 nanometers per second in orbital velocity. Thief! Stephen Coulter, Woodville,

Australia. He says it flew right over him. I guess Woodville must be right outside of Adelaide, Australia, where the IAC was. He didn't see anything, unfortunately, because of bad weather. I know there were some people who were hoping to catch a little bit of a flash from OSIRIS-REx. This from Randy DePasquale in Marlton, New Jersey. From Randy DePasquale in Marlton, New Jersey, he says that OSIRIS-REx flew close to Antarctica, not because, as most people thought, to fly out of the plane of the ecliptic to get to Bennu, but because that's the continent with the most scientists as a percentage of total population.

And finally, from Mel Powell, who we hear from all the time in Sherman Oaks, California. Could have been really dangerous. Spacecraft buzzes Antarctica. Someone yells duck. But there are no ducks. They're all penguins. And we're ready for the next contest. I've got one that I think is an easy one.

So don't shout out the answer. In English, what does the Russian word Sputnik mean? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. That shouldn't be too difficult. I think you're right. Give people a little relaxing break for a change. Why not? And it's appropriate. You have until the 11th. That'd be October 11th,

Wednesday, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And we have a lot more artwork to give away. This time, it is a print from the great space artist, Michelle Ruch. Michelle has a whole bunch of great work, but she's done this great series called Astro Girl, the Astro Girl series. And she takes famous women of the past. In this case case Marilyn Monroe, puts them in a sort of 1950s spacesuit, in this case as well, on Mars.

So it's Marilyn Monroe on Mars from Michelle Roosh's Astro Girls series, a print, a fine print from her. You can see more of Michelle's work at www.rooch.com. And she is part of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, the IAAA, IAAA.org. You can see work by Michelle and lots and lots of her colleagues at that site. Oh, and a Planetary Society t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account. Wow. No.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about a dad on a bicycle, or what I like to call a popsicle. Thank you, and good night. I think I saw that in highlights in the second grade. But I just came up with that. I just invented it. No doubt. No doubt you did. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology and Humor for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by its members, the ones down under and across our world. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.