Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Back to Planetary Radio Live With the Mars Rovers

Episode Date: February 4, 2014

Our celebration of the Mars rovers continues from Southern California Public Radio’s Crawford Family Forum, this week featuring planetary scientist and author Jim Bell, Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, JPL Mars Engineering Manager Rob Manning and Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye. Emily takes us to Curiosity’s latest find on the red planet, and Bruce Betts joins Mat to gaze at the night sky and give away ISS-Above, the little device that tells you when the International Space Station is overhead.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. More excerpts from our great conversation in front of a live audience, this time with Curiosity Project scientist John Grotzinger, JPL Mars Engineering Manager Rob Manning, and planetary scientist Mars Exploration Rover PANCAM lead and author Jim Bell. You'll hear Bill Nye, the science guy, too. Later, Bruce Betts and I will give away the cosmos, not the universe, the book. Emily

Lakdawalla gets us underway with a report on the latest geological wonders imaged by Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. But first, some interesting news from orbit around the moon. That's right. This little lunar orbiter named LADEE is getting a one-month mission extension, which is good news. It may not sound like a whole lot, but mission managers warned from the beginning that this little spacecraft wasn't going to be able to survive into an extended mission because it's orbiting so low at the moon and has so little fuel that it would just crash. So the fact that they get a month to operate a little bit longer there to go at an even lower orbit and scoop up some atmosphere and dust from closer to the lunar

surface is really fantastic news. So the mission should now end on or around April 21, 2014. Just how low of an orbit are we talking about? Well, project scientist Richard Ulfic talked about it being just above the treetops. And of course, there are no treetops on the moon. But he did mention a figure of five kilometers, 5,000 meters, which is very low, even lower than commercial jets fly when they're going coast to coast. So it's going to be flying extremely low. We'll see some really cool new dust species and some more of the atmosphere, and I wish them luck. Let's head out farther to Curiosity on Mars, which is getting some wonderful images from a spot that sounds like it ought to be in the Australian outback.

Yes, they've named the spot Dingo Gap. They're calling all of the places in this particular region of the landing site after sites in Australia. And it's really a wonderful geology field site. You can look out and see these layered rocks exposed in the walls of this canyon. It's exactly the kind of site that a geologist wants to investigate to see layer upon layer and read the geologic history

from the different kinds of rocks that we see here. There's very flat, finely laminated rocks. There's rocks with little rounded pebbles in them. And then you step back and you look out across the landscape and it's just gorgeous with these flat topped mesas and eroded canyons. So the sites are really getting quite beautiful on the Curiosity mission. Why were you excited about those rounded pebbles, among other things? Well, a rounded pebble is just a telltale sign for a geologist that you had rocks that were being tumbled in liquid water. You know that there was copious liquid water affecting the sediments that became rocks at

this site. Now, that's not the best kind of environment for the ultimate science that Curiosity is looking for. Curiosity is looking for organic materials preserved in rocks, and the high energy of a river-type environment is not really a good place for preserving that. But you know that wherever there was a lot of water flowing, eventually it had to come to rest somewhere. And you will get a pool of waters out of which settles very fine sediment. And that's a really good place to preserve organic materials. So it's looking very hopeful for Curiosity to find this kinds of elusive stuff

that it's been looking for since it landed on Mars. And you include with this, sort of for context, although it's not from the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but from HiRISE, this image of the region that Curiosity is traveling through right now. And, you know, in this picture, it looks like pretty challenging terrain, but is that correct? Well, there's certainly topography here. There are canyons and mesas and low areas and high areas. But Curiosity is a very capable robot. The mobility system can handle fairly steep slopes, 10, 15, 20 degrees.

And so as long as they're allowed to keep driving on the wheels that they keep poking holes into, they're going to be able to manage this landscape with no problem. Yeah, sadly, no place to change a tire and no spare tire in the first place up there. Well, we'll continue to follow this along with you, Emily. And these reports are in her blog at planetary.org. You can check them out there along with all of her other good reporting. Thanks a lot, Emily. Thank you, Matt.

Senior Editor for the Planetary Society and our Planetary Evangelist. She is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Coming up next, more from our recent Planetary Radio Live that talked about Curiosity, but also all of the other rovers that have visited Mars. Last week, we relived a few minutes from our two-hour Planetary Radio Live celebration of all the Mars rovers, and especially Opportunity, the little explorer that has just completed 10 years of wandering and discovery on the Red Planet. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye stayed with me on stage at KPCC Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum to welcome Mars Science Laboratory Project

Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Lab Mars Engineering Manager Rob Manning. Also joining us via Skype on that great evening was astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell of Arizona State University. You can hear and see the entire wonderful evening on KPCC's website. The link is on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. We'll begin this time with a question for Rob Manning, the man who led the teams that have figured out how to land four rovers on Mars. Did you believe that this was going to work? Sky cranes, an incredible seven minutes.

Powered by rockets? Yeah. Lowered on a winch down to the surface of Mars. Rob. Of course you thought it was going to work. You wouldn't have said it if you didn't think it was going to work. In fact, I actually had higher expectations of success for MSL than we had with the airbag landers. On the other hand, this beast was so much more damn complicated.

It was a very complicated machine. There was so much more things that could go wrong that we had our fingertips on, things that we caused. It wasn't Mars I was worried about. With airbags, I'm worried about wind gusts and sharp rocks and hills and slopes. On this vehicle, I'm worried about the spark on touchdown messing up the signals that go up from the rover to the descent stage,

and the descent stage going, eeeer, and on top of my head. And so there's a lot of things to worry about. And people often wonder why these people are so excited. and on top of my head. And so there's a lot of things to worry about. And people often wonder why these people are so excited. It's because they've worked very hard, and they've been practicing and practicing getting this right. This is the last run they've ever done of any test they need to do. So after years of getting it, it's a heck of a relief.

John, far too many project scientists have had moments like this that did not go as well. You must have been thinking, wow, now I get to start doing science. You actually have an idea of what you think you're going to feel like, what you should feel like, and then it happens. And I think it's the same thing. When you realize that this was going to happen, there is a sense of, you know, a $2.5 billion priceless national asset has just landed on the surface, and now you have to make something happen. And so, you know, these guys all go off to the local bar, and it's 10.30 at night. None of us have slept anyway. And we actually have to go to work.

That's not really true. Those guys are, we're all looking at the systems, making sure things check out. But it is, it's the beginning. It's all zero. And, you know, the beginning of a mission. And you wonder what's going to happen. And those pictures that came down,

you know, that's a great story in its own right because it was very much of a negotiation between science and engineering because what you're really doing at the instant of landing is you want all of the telemetry to come down that tells you about the spacecraft's state of health. But at the same time, that's offset against any data volume that sends down a picture. Are pictures really important? Well, I don't know. Do we really need them?

It's important to know exactly if the spacecraft fails exactly how, or if it's not safe, if it's there but not functioning properly, we wanna know how. To get those pictures down, what I was wondering at that moment was, hoping and praying that the data volume that would execute would allow the one picture

to come down, but the other one that came down 39 minutes later with the dust covers off that actually showed Mount Sharp, that to me is possibly still my favorite picture of the mission. Because there you see the iconic vision of what we had always wondered from orbit, is it there on the ground? That was amazing. And it was all a matter of data volume. How tall is Mount Sharp? It's a little over five kilometers. So it's taller than any mountain in the lower 48, taller than Mount Whitney. About 16,000 feet.

Yeah, it's big. Higher than Mount Rainier. And how far are we away from, I say we, how far are we away from it now? Us. 200 million miles. Oh, cool. Wise guys. That's brilliant.

I spent a lot of time that far away, actually. So how far is the rover from there? We're about halfway from where we landed, more or less. We've got about five kilometers to go. But here's what happens. You guys, you start rolling. Hey, here's a rock. Hey, look at this.

Yeah. You know, that's where it comes back a little bit to what Matt was saying. What do we learn from the previous rover missions? Going from rock to rock to rock. When we landed with Spirit and Opportunity, I can remember Squires going on and on about how we cannot stop at every rock because we have bigger aspirations. We got to do things. We have to put them in context. And so we still looked at lots of rocks. And so with Curiosity, it's such a capable vehicle that looking at individual rocks is not as rewarding.

vehicle that looking at individual rocks is not as rewarding. There's much bigger prizes there. So we benefited from rock looking in earlier missions, but we still do it. So how long do you think before you get there? We get there. It. Us. That.

You know, every mission has its challenges, and we got a new one. We're in kind of a briar patch right now. We were booking along, going as fast as we could, and suddenly... Just punching it. Punching it and with rocks punching through the wheels. And so when we realized that actually this terrain is really rugged and pointy. And so we've had to slow it down a lot because we want to protect the rover and try to understand exactly how the mobility system is interacting with the terrain. And then as we build our confidence up, we'll pick up the pace again. I got to apologize to our next guest, who is patiently waiting on Skype, has been waiting for a little while now.

Now he's a professor at Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration. He has served as lead scientist for the Panoramic Cameras, or Pan Cams on Spirit and Opportunity, and his books include postcards from Mars, and most recently the space book. I call him the Ansel Adams of Mars. Incidentally, he's also president of the Planetary Societies Board. Please welcome, via Skype, Jim Bell. Hey, Matt. It's great to see you.

It's great to see one of my heroes, Rob Manning, right there. This guy can do anything. Just that line, he could land a washing machine if somebody let him. Awesome. And I recognize Bill Nye's left knee right there. It's good to see it healed. Most famous dancing engineer scientist in the world. Way to go, Bill.

We should tell the audience here and at home that there's a little tiny webcam over there that is giving Jim this lousy wide-angle view of the stage. He's not getting to see the nice picture that we have of Jim. Jim, you're sitting right up here on the panel next to us. I think a lot of people identify you with the Mars Exploration Rover mission, but you're also part of the Curiosity mission, right? Yeah, yeah.

So I work really closely with John. And what is it, John, 500 science team members now on Curiosity, you know, a huge collection of principal investigators and geologists and atmospheric scientists and geochemists and students and, you know, just a great collection of people. How have you seen things evolve? And we can even take it all the way back to Sojourner, if you like, but at least from those glorious days 10 years ago when spirit and opportunity came bouncing down onto the surface. What have we learned about Mars?

Well, that's a really great question, Matt, and I suspect all of us are going to have different answers. One of the answers, one that Rob already gave, we've learned how to operate remote control cars on another planet. We've learned how to operate remote control cars on another planet. We've learned how to tweak our own crazy circadian rhythms to live on Mars time for months before going crazy as the sun rises on one rover and the sun sets on the other rover. And the sun never sets in the JPL Mars Empire, right?, we've learned how to operate on another world, and we've learned a whole bunch of science about these very special places on Mars. You know, the Gusev site for Spirit, the Meridiani site for Opportunity,

now the Gale Crater site for Curiosity. All of those places could have been habitable environments by the way that we define them here on the Earth. You know, presence of liquid water interacting with the rock, heat sources, possibly organic molecules. We know that organics are raining down on Mars from asteroids and comets all the time, and Curiosity is well equipped to try to find them if they're there. Just knowing that there were habitable environments by the way we define them on this planet, and that we're good at finding them, you know, based on this spectacular array of orbiters that have been up there for decades now, taking pictures, making mineral measurements from orbit, adapting

our own way of thinking from the Pathfinder results, Spirit, Opportunity, now Curiosity. One of John's colleagues at Caltech has figured out where we should look in certain kinds of cliffs and exposures to find the most freshly exposed material on the surface. And so we're learning how to explore this place, and I think that's just a wonderful thing. More of our Planetary Radio Live Mars Rover celebration is a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here.

Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along

on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan. We have continued our celebration of the Mars rovers.

Really a celebration of all the robotic explorers of the red planet. It was in front of a capacity crowd on January 23rd at KPCC Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum. Bill Nye joined the conversation with Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger and JPL Mars Engineering Manager Rob Manning, while Mars Exploration Rover PanCam Lead Jim Bell participated via Skype. Again, you can see it all on KPCC's website with a link leading there from planetary.org slash radio. Jim Bell had just told us what we've learned about Mars when I turned to John Gratzinger with the same question. John, I want to let you get in on that. What have we learned? I think Jim really hit the nail on the

head there. You know, Mars is special for many reasons, but one of the things, this process of having alternating orbiters and rovers and landers, and they iterate and they go back and forth, I think that we have benefited tremendously from that because you can start to explore for something very systematically. And, you know, Bill's got his two big questions. And this issue about are we alone is actually very much related to how did we get here? So if you go back to the early Earth, where I did most of my exploring early on in my career, what we're doing now on Mars is very close to the state of the art of what we do on Earth. We know that this planet teems with life, but if you

go back and look at rocks that are billions of years old, you almost never find evidence for it. And I'll skip all the mumbo jumjumbo and chemistry, but the important thing about it is that by studying the Earth, we can learn how to study another terrestrial planet. And by having alternating rovers and orbiters, we can hone in on the thing that we're most interested in and take that grand question and break it down into bite-sized chunks, that if we're just patient enough, we've got a decent chance to honestly address this question. I never dreamed that in my professional career that we would advance from looking out the

window and just barely tasting Mars. I mean, really, 20 years ago, we had these fantastic images from Viking and Viking as well as Mariner 9 and other missions that gave us a hint that Mars was a more interesting place than we would dare dream. I remember talking to Mike Carr and suggesting, Mike, maybe we might see true evidence of water altered rock. And he goes, no, no, rock, don't go there. You know, we don't have the evidence. It's too soon. You know, don't get your hopes up. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I won't get my hopes up. But the fact is... Could have been liquid carbon dioxide, mercury, something. Yeah, yeah, but the fact that we were able to get to this point where now we're doing terrestrial science, Earth-like science on another planet, that's the part that in just really a small number of years has blown me away. The thing that scares me most is how do we top this?

Oh, I got some ideas. You got some ideas? Well, maybe I'll land it for you. But it is pretty astounding that we've gotten to this level of detail. I mean, it's a whole other generation of scientists and engineers who now think about this problem so much more differently than we did. Our fundamental job is just getting out there and looking around and barely interacting with the surface and barely doing much science with it.

And suddenly now we're doing very – It's taken for granted. You're going to land on the surface with any instrument you can think of, right? Pretty much, yeah. So it's really a whole other level. I mean, there are several key scientific exploration milestones that happened that just revolutionized. One was when we went backwards down Endurance Crater, and we did this stratigraphic section. Remember that?

We walked down. Jim remembers that. We went down. Think about that. That, to me, I got chills down my back when that happened because it was no longer just going out and going, ooh, what's that? What's that? It's actually doing systematic science. And, Rob, 10 years ago, that was kind of state of the art of what we were doing on the early Earth, doing chemo stratigraphy, bed by bed, looking not just if there's water,

but how the water changes through time. Right. We're doing a time series. And did you, would you have guessed, would you, Jim, or would you have guessed that we could have actually found a section without having, we actually thought to do this, we'd have to build these giant drilling gantries to go down tens of meters on Mars. Instead, Mars provides a way to do it. We didn't even know we could do that.

We'd never seen outcrop on Mars before January 24, 2004. So, you know, of course not. So it's been revolutionary for us. And then the other iconic thing for me is the coverland, the second hole, drill hole. We drilled into that hole with this fantastic camera, the MOLLE camera on the end of the robotic arm. We looked into that hole and you could see little tiny veins. And what's more, we were able to target the ChemCam laser and produce duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, and shot holes inside a dime-sized hole.

Humans sent a ray gun to Mars. Damn straight. And I mean, the level of exploration has gone down to another couple of orders of magnitude, it seems to me, in terms of our ability to understand. The problem is, how do you get to the next order of magnitude? Mars is looking bigger all the time. Rob, the other thing that's happened is, you know, we've been able to take the public along with us in this incredible ride, you know, not just members of the Planetary Society who can follow Emily's blog and Bill's posts, and, you know, it's great stuff, but just the general public who's interested in downloading images, we put it out there almost as soon as it comes down from the Deep Space Network.

There's this big community of amateur enthusiasts who make mosaics and panoramas and false color, and they do spectacular work. And that community is growing, and they're connected to this exploration enterprise in a way that I never could when I was a kid. The way I connected was to join the Planetary Society in 1980 when Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray and Lou Friedman founded it. That's how I connected. But nowadays, it's all out there on the web. We work really hard to involve people in these great adventures. I was going to bring this up when we watched the video, because when you guys were celebrating in your control room, Bill, you

know, you remember where you were that day. Pasadena Civic Center, the auditoriums. We had 3,000 people going crazy for a rover landing on another world. It was amazing. People are just engaged. It's exciting. just engaged. It's exciting. So this brings me, if I may, gentlemen, this brings me to a routine question for Bill the little kid.

When are we going to send people there? Because people can explore so much faster than, I know you guys are, and I am too. I'm a mechanical engineer, alright? I'm into it. But I'm excited when we go a kilometer, yes! It only took three months. But if people were there, I mean, one of the numbers you guys throw around, the geologists throw around, what a rover can do in a week, a human does in about a minute.

Bill, it really depends which RP's on duty. But let me amplify that question about beginning with, when do the humans get to go? What have these rovers done to help pave the way? How are they making it easier for us to contemplate sending humans? Jim? Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of information that we need to know about Mars before people can really go there and be effective. It was the same with the exploration of the moon.

Prior to the human exploration of the moon and the Apollo missions, there were rangers, there were surveyors, and of course there was Mercury and Gemini. So there was the human side getting ready for that part of the adventure, but also the science, the robotic side, was doing a lot of the supporting but also the science the robotic side was doing a lot of the supporting measurements the basic physical properties what are the temperatures like what's the environment like how hard or soft is the soil is it potentially toxic in some way so just making those basic fundamental measurements and that's partly what pathfinder spirit opportunity and and curiosity have been doing for the past few decades, helping us get that basic fundamental information. It's probably what the orbiters are doing up above Mars, mapping the

planet globally, trying to find the best places to send people, because there'll be somewhere that's the first place that we send people. And that's going to be a really important place, because it will have been identified as a potentially habitable environment. It will have had to have been identified as safe to land. And probably, and this is just my guess, and John and others should speculate, it will have been identified as a place where we need people to go, probably to go in this direction instead of that direction. Go set up drill rigs, get down into the subsurface, which is protected from the ultraviolet, and maybe where it's warmer, maybe there's a water table, et cetera, but get deep into

the subsurface doing the things that it's worthy of sending human explorers to do. Can I rappel down a cliff? Let's do it. I'm really up for it. I want to go. John, what do you think? Well, for example, we don't want the astronauts to show up and have the rocks poke holes in their boots. I mean, these are aluminum wheels, right, with holes poked in them.

It's true. Yeah, bring steel-toed shoes with you on Mars. What kind of steel? Before we get back to you, John, Rob, do we know now how to get a really big can full of people down onto the surface of Mars? I think the answer to that is we know how it might happen, but we don't know the way it will happen, ironically. One of the challenges is that Mars has such a thin atmosphere. It's not like the moon where you can fire engines backwards.

There's too much atmosphere to do that. And there's too little atmosphere to land on Mars like you do on Earth. Like with the space shuttle, it uses its belly as a heat shield and then uses its wings to slow down further and land on the runway. further and land on the runway. So we have these Rube Goldbergian contraptions that we've invented that convert from an Earth-like landing system to a lunar-like landing system at the very end. And it's very, very complicated. So that will be true even worse for larger systems,

because the larger you are and the heavier you are, the less you slow down, unless you have a really big flat area that slows you down. So it's really hard. And it's not impossible. The laws of physics don't prevent it. It's just that you're going to see some very large things get to Mars to help slow you down in order to do it properly. So the answer is we could do it. It's just a really big challenge. But I think it won't be all that different from Curiosity's landing. I mean, I do think that it would be able to land at an elevation similar to Gale Crater. It would be able to land in a region as small as, if not smaller, than where Curiosity landed in our little landing area, the 12 by, 7 by 20, 7 by, we actually

got down to 7 by 12 kilometer. Huge little 12 kilometer long. Yeah, postage stamp. And that's something closer to size. Yes, it's still not too small. It's like greater Pasadena, right? But I can't land on the corner of Lake and Colorado, but I can land somewhere in that general neighborhood. And I think that will be true

with these systems too. But it's going to be a while. And so I'm not going to raise people's hopes that we've got our act together yet. John, before we take a break and go back to Hedgehog Swing, actually, during that break, do you want to see people on Mars to pick up where these robots have left off? Yeah, absolutely. I think that I'd be lucky enough in my lifetime to have that happen. And the reason why is because I think with the rovers, what you do is you learn how to explore and you get a sense for how Mars is different from Earth and how it's similar from Earth. But then after that, MSL is the right idea, but what you really want to do is set up a big lab.

If you want to address this question, are we alone? And that leads you to the ancient rock record of Mars. You got to have up there what we have on Earth. We can return samples, and hopefully we'll learn some very general things about Mars that will teach us where to look specifically. But then once you're there, what Earth teaches us, a planet that we know has life, is that you have to look and look and look and process. And John Callis made this comment today about why opportunity lasts as long as it did. John Callis, the project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Right.

And, you know, and Rob and Steve were talking a little bit about it tonight. At the end, being smart only gets you so far. At the end, you just have to get a little bit lucky. This is the legacy of understanding the record of early life on Earth. You just got to find that sweet spot, and you have to process enough rocks to get in the sweet spot, and then when you're there, you're still not done looking. And you have to process a lot of rock until you know that there was a microbe on Earth that lived three and a half billion years ago.

And that's the reason to send humans. John Grotzinger, Jim Bell, Rob Manning, and Bill Nye with me for a Planetary Radio Live celebration of Mars rovers and all other robotic exploration of the red planet. Bruce Betts and What's Up are next. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome, and since I can't talk to Bill about it because we're not recording any new material from him this week, I'll just pretend you're Bill.

How about those Seahawks? Well, gosh, Matt, it was really great. It showed you the passion, beauty, and joy of football in the Northwest. You've got to work on that impression a little bit. Yeah, I'm not good at impressions. I could bring in my sons. They're really good. Yeah, you could do Scooby, I suppose, but he doesn't sound anything like Bill. No, it's all right. Just talk about the night sky, something you're really good at. I was rooting for the Broncos. Yeah, I just have to say, as a Vikings fan, every Super Bowl without the Vikings is an exciting thing because it means the Vikings aren't going to lose the Super Bowl.

Yeah, right. At least that's how I try to look at it. You can't win if you don't play. So far, so good. All right, on to look at it. You can't win if you don't play. So far, so good. Alright, on to the night sky. Up in the night sky, Jupiter, the easy thing to see all night long. Up, getting higher in the east shortly after sunset, but then crossing the sky throughout the night, looking bright. On February 11th, it'll be hanging out near the moon, making for a lovely sight.

In the early evening, shortly after sunset, you can catch Mercury very low in the west. Then we got Mars coming up in the middle of the night in the east, and Saturn coming up later. And then Venus, super bright Venus, low in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history. Forty years ago this week, a couple interesting things. One, Mariner 10 flew by Venus, used a gravity assist, which was a party. First time doing that to head off to using one planet to get to another planet. Mariner 10 flew by Venus, headed on its way to Mercury. And then also this week, four years ago, Skylab 4, the last of the Skylab missions, ended after an 84-day mission by its crew.

Oh, and also I have to mention, for your benefit, Matt, 1971, Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon this year. Yeah. Thank you. All right. On to random space effect. Yeah. Your Italian accent is about as good as your Bill Nye.

Yes. All right. Skylab 4, we just mentioned, the last Skylab flight, was very unusual in that all three crew members, for all three of them, this was their only space flight. They were all rookies, and they never flew again. Wow. Getting up there just once is so much better than so many other astronauts that they really shouldn't feel bad, should they? No, no. I wasn't being critical.

I was just noting it as a random space fact. Yeah. Fascinating, though. Thank you. On to the trivia contest. Although, first, I want to mention a couple things quickly before I forget. One, I'm starting up my class this week. California State University, Dominguez Hills, planetary.org slash bets

class, B-E-T-T-S class. You can participate in the classes, watching them live on Wednesday afternoons, Pacific time. Or you can always catch them in archive form. And if you do watch them live, you can ask questions via internet, or even calling in. It's groovy.

Matt will be joining me in a week and a half and playing at the class. We'll record one of these segments, but if you want to leap in right off the bat, there's the story. Yeah, join us on the 12th of February. You can join us live or watch the archive. Either way, it really is a great class, and he's done it a bunch of times now, so it's even better now. It gets smoother, and I update it and everything. Also, don't forget you can submit your name to fly to an asteroid at planetary.org slash Bennu, B-E-N-N-U, on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, on to trivia. We asked you

what bodies has Rosetta, the European Space Agency, Rosetta spacecraft flown by on its way to its comet encounter coming later this year? How did we do, Matt? Like last week, when we had a huge response, not quite as big this time, but still quite large. Our winner, Joseph Scaife of Sheffield, United Kingdom, who said, now a lot of people missed some of these. A lot of people in particular left out Earth as one of those that Rosetta has flown by. Here you go. Earth, Mars, Earth again, asteroid 2867 Steins, Earth a third time, asteroid 21 Lutetia. So six different flybys. Pretty amazing.

different flybys. Pretty amazing. We actually had a question for you, Bruce, from Kevin West, wondering if any other spacecraft has made more flybys than Rosetta. Huh. Well, off the top of my head, probably not in terms of if it hasn't gone into orbit around a planet. Now, if you look at Galileo and Cassini around Jupiter and Saturn, even if you don't count the planet, they did tens and are doing in the case of Cassini, tens of flybys of the moons. We had Voyager 2 doing four planet flybys, working its way through the outer solar system. But six, I don't think so off the top of my head, unless you count those moon flybys by the Galileo and Cassini. We're going to send Joseph the Cosmos, this wonderful new textbook, The Cosmos, Astronomy, and the New Millennium by Jay Pasikoff and Alex Filippenko.

Maeve Hamrick came up with some movies. If we were to make a movie or somebody was to make a movie about Rosetta, he came up with several titles, but one of them is Gravity Assist. Yeah, it sounds familiar. Sounds like some other movie that was out recently. Yeah, starring who was it? Somebody. Yeah, I know.

You'll want Gravity Assist to also star Sandra Bullock. Kurt Lewis is also saying that we should all chip in maybe on Kickstarter and take up a collection. Buy the European Space Agency a bigger rocket for Rosetta 2 so that it can get there sooner. But they have so much patience. And they got some nice science out of some of those flybys. Now, speaking of Kickstarter, he said in a Segway-ly way, that has everything to do with the prize for this coming week.

Our friend Liam Kennedy has invented a device that he calls ISS Above, International Space Station Above. This is a little tiny box. It's actually an entire tiny computer in a teeny weeny box that has programmed into it for your location, because he'll create it for you, when the ISS is flying over your town, your home, and it lights up. It starts flashing when it does that. And he's got several models of this. He actually has it on Kickstarter, and he made his goal.

He's more than made his goal now. But he has donated an ISS Above unit for us to give away on the show. Please let us know the trivia question that is going to win somebody an ISS above unit for us to give away on the show. Please let us know the trivia question that is going to win somebody an ISS above. Well, speaking of space stations and orbits, the astronauts on Skylab 4, what comet did they make observations of? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. Get us your entry to compete for that glorious prize. And you have this time until the 10th.

That'd be February 10 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. You can learn more about ISS Above at, guess what, issabove.com or the Kickstarter campaign, which is still underway for a few more days. I think we're done. All right, everybody. Don't forget introductory astronomy and planetary science class. And while you're not forgetting, right, everybody, don't forget introductory astronomy and planetary science class. And while you're not forgetting, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about storage boxes and how big they should be. Thank you and good night. You know, the corollary

of Murphy's Law, no matter how big your storage box is, you'll need more. True. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the always-thinking-outside-the-box members of the Society. Clear skies. you