Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Become an Icehunter With Pamela Gay

Episode Date: July 26, 2011

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Can you find the world beyond Pluto? This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The New Horizons spacecraft will study the former ninth planet in 2015. Then what? Astronomer and podcast host Pamela Gay will tell us how we can join the search for New Horizons' next target. Speaking of targets, NASA has announced the destination for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, now known as Curiosity. Emily Lakdawalla will tell us about it in a moment.

She's also got an exciting update from Opportunity, that other robot that continues to crawl across the red planet. Remember the Pioneer anomaly? Bill Nye says that 40-year-old mystery may nearly be solved. And Bruce Betts will provide the solution for yet another space trivia quiz in our What's Up segment. We begin, as always, with the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. Emily Lakdawalla is also the editor of the blog at planetary.org. Emily, let's start with big news from the Curiosity team, Mars Science Laboratory.

That's right. They're getting ready for launching the spacecraft. It's being stacked together at Kennedy Space Center. But the news this week is that we finally know where it's going. It's going to Gale Crater. Gale is a crater that's 150 kilometers in diameter. It's near Mars's equator, smack dab on the boundary between the so-called dichotomy boundary between the southern highlands and the northern lowlands. But the thing that's most exciting about Gale is that it has this enigmatic mound in its center. And the mound in the middle of Gale is actually higher than most of the rim of Gale,

which is a bit of a conundrum. It probably means that the crater was once completely buried and has since been unburied and more of the rim was eroded than this mound in the center. Curiosity is going to land to the north of the mound in the very lowest part of the crater and work its way up to find out what it can find about ancient water on Mars and possible environments that may have supported life. And you've got over 20 links in the July 22nd entry in which you wrote up this announcement about going to Gale. And you've also included this video from John Grotzinger of the mission, and he talks a little bit about the evidence that this stuff was once very wet.

And now you can see at the base of this mountain where these lower layers are. And the layers are important because they allow us to sort of read a geological book. You start at the bottom of the mountain, and those are the the oldest layers and then the layers that occur up near the top, those are the youngest parts, the youngest chapters in the book. We will drive along up to this outcrop that we call the fence and when we get there we're going to study it. It's a really attractive spot for us because it contains the kind of minerals that formed in water and then when we're done with that we're going to go beyond and we're going to enter a canyon and this kind of terrain around here reminds us a lot of Sedona, Arizona.

And all the rocks around here are formed in aqueous environments. And so there's a lot of rock, hundreds of meters of it, layer after layer that we can study to tell us about the history of Mars at Gale Crater. And, you know, with the amazing orbital data that we now have from Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can pinpoint places on Mars where there definitely was water acting either on existing rocks or water sitting around and evaporating, leaving behind interesting rocks like sulfates and carbonates. So we know that those interesting mineralogical properties are there, and we just have to drive curiosity to go see them.

All right, let's switch now to that other rover that is still alive on the surface and headed toward its goal, in fact, getting pretty close. It's awfully close, and it may get there this week. And I have to say that I have not been this excited about Opportunity for years. You know, it's just kind of been humming along on the planes. And it's very monotonous with sort of wave like ripples rolling past you. But it's just driven off the ripples. It's coming up a little bit in elevation. And we're beginning to see down into the vast Endeavor crater. We've got mountains all around us. Opportunity has never been in mountains. It's basically a whole new mission. And I'm just checking the website a couple times a day to see what new pictures it sent down from Mars and what new vistas have opened up. It's so exciting. And I'll tell you what else I find exciting. The

idea of having both of these vehicles, if we get very lucky, on Mars working at the same time before too long. Not only that, but working on the same problem. What are these clays and how did they form? And the Opportunity Team's goal is to get to the clays before Curiosity does. Wow, a race too. I love it. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, is on the line. We're going to try something a little bit new here, a conversation between Bill and me, partly because we're going to talk about an entry prepared by our colleague, Charlene Anderson. It's a July 22nd entry in the Planetary Society blog about the Pioneer anomaly,

which apparently is not quite, but is almost coming to a solution. Bill, I'm just wondering, since the evidence seems to be pointing this way, are you a little disappointed that we may not be at the threshold of new physics? Yeah, I'm disappointed, but I'm also very happy that we figured or people figured it out. Everybody, the idea was these two spacecraft, which left in the winter of 1972, 73, one went up or north, the other one east and west. Well, they're not as far from the earth as everybody thought they'd be by about 400,000 kilometers. That's a long way. But when you've been traveling for almost 40 years, it adds up. So anyway, everybody was thinking maybe there's some

dark matter, dark energy, dark particles that are holding these two spacecraft back. The other surprising thing, both spacecraft, whether they're going north and south or east and west, are held back by the same amount. So everybody was thinking maybe there's this new physics. But apparently, almost certainly for sure, it's thermal. This is to say they have plutonium radio thermoelectric generators on them. And a little bit of heat they're generating, even now, is making photons that are radiating off the, if you will, the front end of the spacecraft. And they're holding them, both spacecraft, back just a little bit. Can I use my Shakespeare quote here?

Paraphrase the bard a bit here. The fault, dear pioneer, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Ah, there you have it. That's pretty good. It was Brutus, right? Yes, it was. Yes, there you go. It was indeed.

Everybody was thinking, boy, we've discovered, or maybe we've discovered new physics, but no, it's the just relativity. That's all. But there's still good science going on here, right? Oh, my goodness. So these guys were able to tease out the subtle, subtle changes in the telemetry, in the data being broadcast back. It's really amazing. But it's too bad that it isn't a new physics.

But I'll tell you, it's going to be something like this. And that's how the new physics will be discovered. People at the turn of the last century, 1800s to 1900s, were trying to figure out why the speed of light was the same every way they measured it, every direction they measured it, every distance, every configuration, they got the same exact speed of light. And apparently Einstein got to thinking about this and realized that light has a constant speed. It's the speed of time that can change. It's really astonishing insight.

And there's going to be another insight like that. And I hope it's in our lifetime. We're about out of time. I thought you might want to, in just a few seconds, pay tribute to the end of the space shuttle era. Yeah, the space shuttle, the last flight, 135, landed successfully early in the morning in Florida, and it was a beautiful landing. And many people are disappointed that the space program, the human space program, is coming to an end for the United States. But no, it's really the beginning, I have to say, because space is a political business,

it always has been. And there isn't enough money to fly the space shuttle and do something new. So it wasn't until really the politics of retiring the space shuttle got wrapped up that people could move on. You know, the space shuttle was canceled during the Bush administration. And only now is it finally winding down. And only now will the world's largest space agency, NASA, be able to do something new with humans. It's a new beginning, Matt. It's exciting. And it's exciting to talk to you, Bill. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matt.

Bill Nye is the planetary guy for our purposes, but that's because he's the executive director of the Planetary Society, and many of us still remember him very fondly as the science guy. I'll be right back with Pamela Gay and ice hunters. New Horizons is more than halfway to its cold destination in the outer reaches of our solar system. It has taken five and a half years to get this far, and it will be another five before the nuclear-powered spacecraft reaches Pluto and its moon, or rather moons, since a fourth one has just been discovered.

They are more than 7 billion kilometers from the sun, or nearly 50 times as far as our warm blue planet. The radiothermal generator will be pumping power to the spacecraft's instruments long after it passes Pluto. Can we find another, even more distant target for it to examine? That's the goal of the new Ice Hunters project. It offers anyone who visits icehunters.org the tools and training to find new objects in the Kuiper Belt, along with asteroids, comets, and other never-before-seen bodies. Astronomer Pamela Gay is probably best known as the co-host of AstronomyCast, one of the most popular science

podcasts on the web. She is also on the Ice Hunters team. She joined me via Skype from her Midwest home that is still gripped by the anything-but but icy heat wave in much of the United States. Pamela, it is a great pleasure to get you back on Planetary Radio. Thanks so much. Oh, it's my pleasure as always to be back on your show again. And it is a special pleasure to get you for a few minutes knowing how incredibly busy you are. And you've taken on yet another new project, which we've just begun to describe, Ice Hunters.

How did this get underway? Well, Ice Hunters came kind of out of the need of a bunch of astronomers who had too many images. There's a little mission called New Horizons. It's on its way out to Pluto. And it has just enough fuel to go after it visits to Pluto to one or two objects out in the Kuiper Belt, and we still need to find those objects. And we need your help and the help of everyone out there listening to help find those one or two objects in the images we're taking right now. Alan Stern has come on the show several times, given us updates on the mission,

and he has always talked about, but we're not done at Pluto. And I always wondered, well, how are you going to find these other objects? And you're really giving people a chance to be part of the process. That's exactly the way we're going to do it. It's literally a case of there's millions of images that need to be poured over. It's images from some of the largest telescopes in the world, like Subaru and CFHT. scopes in the world, like Subaru and CFHT. And we take these big CCD images and chop them up and hand a tractable piece to everyone that comes to our site. And we ask them, look for anything that looks like a nice, beautiful blob. Look for anything that looks

like the dotted streak of an asteroid passing through the field. These are difference images. Anything that doesn't move, doesn't vary, it looks like an ugly donut from the subtraction process. And I'm looking at some of these now. These are not the prettiest astronomical images. No, we like to joke that we have the ugliest images in the most awesome science. Now, this is part of Zooniverse, which is something you've been contributing to for quite a while. Can you tell us a little bit about it? So the Zooniverse project is something that really originated back in 2007 with Galaxy Zoo. And in 2008, Chris Lindhott and I started writing grants to expand the Zooniverse out to new science topics. And the idea is that there's all sorts of different places out there where scientists have more data than they can handle on their own.

And by taking that data and asking anyone with pattern recognition skills, this can include kids, to help us look in the images for specific things, we can do more science. Why are humans better at doing this? Why not just feed these all into a relatively large computer? Well, it would sure be a whole lot faster if we could trust the computers that much. But the thing is, in astronomy, not everything we're looking at is always the same focus. We have this annoying sky that constantly varies. Not everything is the exact same shape. We have these annoying interactions that cause one galaxy to get deformed in a slightly different way than another through nearby passages or differences in evolution.

And all these things add up, just like you can't trust iPhoto to consistently say which person is your grandmother in all your photos. We can't trust a computer to always say which crater is a crater and which one's just an unfortunate shadow. So the primary objective here is to find the Kuiper Belt object that New Horizons might be able to go on next. Are you after anything else? Well, along the way, hopefully we'll turn up a whole bunch of Kuiper Belt objects that, well, New Horizons won't have time to visit

or that have inappropriate orbits or other unfortunate characteristics. But we are going to be doing our best to map a wedge through the Kuiper belt and basically see what all is there to find in that one area of the Kuiper belt. Beyond that, we're going to pick up background supernovae, background variable stars, anything that varies in brightness that's behind the Kuiper Belt, and we'll catch asteroids as they pass in front of the Kuiper Belt. That's astronomer and AstronomyCast co-host Pamela Gay. She'll tell us more about the Ice Hunters project in a minute. This is Planetary Radio.

I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us.

You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. 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. You, too, can be an ice hunter, searching for the Kuiper Belt Object, or KBO, that the New Horizons spacecraft may visit after it passes Pluto in 2015.

Principal Investigator Alan Stern has turned to astronomer Pamela Gay and others to find that next destination. You can join the team at icehunters.org. Pamela is also co-host of the excellent podcast, AstronomyCast. Now, this may be more a question for Alan, but can you talk about what kinds of objects or the range of objects, I guess in spatial terms, that New Horizons might be able to reach? I mean, obviously, it can't just do a 180 and head in a different direction. Well, so the characteristics that we're looking for is something that has an orbit that is carrying it at a reasonable speed and at a reasonable distance from the sun such that its current orbit will just naturally carry it straight in front of the New Horizons spacecraft as it goes past Pluto. spacecraft as it goes past Pluto. So if you think of looking at two bicyclists going down different paths on a hill right before they almost but don't actually hit one another, we're looking for those

two bicyclists. There may be another several dozen bicyclists out there that are going to cross a specific point on the path too early, too late, not go through that particular path at all. But there's just those two that have an almost collision. Well, one of our two bicyclists is New Horizons, and that other that is on the almost collision course. That's what we're looking for. So we're looking just for the specific object with that coincidental orbital path that carries it right in front of our little mission. What a lovely description. Now, what happens if I go through your tutorial that I'm looking at right now and I learn how to mark these things off?

If I find a KBO or an asteroid, I hate to put it in such a selfish manner, but what's in it for me? I mean, is there a chance that I could name it? These things get dictated by the International Astronomical Union. And the KBOs we find will all get submitted as a catalog. And your name will be associated with what you discover. But most likely we're not going to find things that we get to give awesome names like, well, you know all the awesome names.

MAKENAKE is one of my favorites, although I'm told that's not how you pronounce it. The asteroids are a bit trickier. We could name them if we got enough observations to determine their orbits. But the field of view that we have is sufficiently small, and the return rate to go back to the same field is sufficiently long that most likely we'll see each asteroid just one time. And that's not enough time to be able to say, oh, I know it's orbit and get to name it. But we're going to put together a catalog of those as well. So that someday in the future, when someone's trying to better

understand the orbit of an asteroid they're looking at, they can say, hey, did anyone take an image of an object in roughly this place at roughly that time? And we can say, yeah, hey, we do have an image of that. So we're not always going to get to name things, but every discovery every individual makes will get their name on it in the catalog papers. You are, through this process, adding to our knowledge of the universe around us. Exactly. And what's interesting is some of the discoveries we make, some of the variable stars we discover, these are things that we're beating the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, defining these faint suckers in the background and cataloging them.

So it's neat to be on the forefront of upcoming data deluge, which will also include citizen science in the future. How did you get involved with this project? I have to thank a friend at the Space Telescope Institute, Max Mutchler. He is working on a project with me that we're going to be looking in the backgrounds of fields of Saturn and Jupiter and other nearby planets that were observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. He's part of New Horizons and got the idea, the Hubble Space Telescope. He's part of New Horizons and got the idea, well, why don't you see if Alan would be interested in using a citizen science project to look for the KBOs? So I thought it was a great idea. And I took his advice and I went out and I talked to Alan and John Spencer and Mark Bowie and a number of other project scientists. And we got a plan together.

I sat down and I started programming with my programmer, Corey Leehan. And a few months later, you had the site that you see today. Corey Leehan, he's an associate of yours there at Southern Illinois University. He's one of my programmers. He's a former student who stuck around and I couldn't be luckier to have got to keep him. We're going to talk again soon, I suspect. And that's about something that you've got coming up in October. Can you give us just a preview? Well, the moon is perhaps the most taken-for-granted astronomical object that hangs over all of our heads.

And on October 8th, we're going to give it its due and celebrate International Observe the Moon Night. And we're going to use this one particular day of the year to try and get people to realize we've learned a whole lot about the moon since the Apollo days and try and get some of the Moon Night. And we're going to use this one particular day of the year to try and get people to realize we've learned a whole lot about the Moon since the Apollo days and try and get some of the modern astronomical understanding into people's heads and minds and hearts. You and Frasier Cain still going strong with the Astronomy cast? We are. We're back to doing about 40 episodes a year instead of the 52 we used to do just because we realized life was too short to well we wish we could do a show every week we just can't but we're still going and we're going to be

doing live shows at Dragon Con this year and we're always looking for new things to talk about. Pamela once again thank you so much not just for joining us today but for everything that you do on behalf of as we said adding to our knowledge of the universe around us and allowing other people to add to that database as well. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Pamela Gay is an astronomer, teaches actually astronomy and physics at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois, and as you heard, is the co-host now for what, over four years, I think, of AstronomyCast with Frasier Cain. If you go to the iTunes store, just drop the word astronomy in there, and it will come up right at the top of the list.

It is still going strong, and we recommend it highly. We will be returning with Bruce Betts, our own weekly astronomer, for our regular What's Up segment in just a few moments. This is Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here. Actually, I'm here in his office at Planetary Society headquarters. And I'm sorry to say that, once again, I forgot to bring, I have a little gift for you. I forgot to bring it.

I hate to say that, but it gives you something to look forward to. That's so exciting. Maybe we should record again tomorrow. I'd record every day with you if I could. You know that. I do. I do. Thankfully, the restraining order does.

Quickly now, because my parole officer is waiting outside. Okay. Night sky. Saturn. You know, I was just looking at it a few evenings ago. It's really quite lovely in the west, low in the west after sunset, particularly because you can check out the somewhat fainter actual star, Poryma, to its right. And then much farther to the left is the similar in brightness but much bluer star, Spica. So check those out in the evening sky. In the pre-dawn sky, we've got Jupiter, high overhead, super bright, brightest star-like object up at that point. And also Mars, much dimmer low in the eastern horizon pre-dawn. Big week?

This week there was something very important that happened. I know we celebrate it every year. It makes Tim the Toolman Taylor happy every time. 40 years ago this week. What do you think? 40 years, 40 years, 40 years, 40 years. 1971. I don't know.

Something Apollo? Humans drove a vehicle on the moon for the first time yeah all right man i wish i owned one of those don't you you know there are three sitting there just waiting for you all you have to do is get to the moon to bring them back yeah well we're working on it somebody's working on it the lunar rover was first driven on on the moon 40 years ago this week the next day they got a ticket do you see how those things kicked up dirt when they really got going they did they did they were having big fun with that that the lower gravity yeah cowabunga dune buggies let us move on to oh my god it was a full spectrum sweep it was indeed uh you know i want to say haven't said congratulations to the whole space shuttle program and the landing of atlantis of the 133 shuttle

landings including this last landing which occurred at night a total of 25 landings, including this last landing, which occurred at night. A total of 25 landings were at night. 19 of those were at Kennedy Space Center, and six were at Edwards. Congratulations to all concerned. For all of its problems and flaws, it was simply magnificent. Magnificent. Yes, it was indeed. We go on to the trivia, and we will just keep this shuttle theme in honor of the last shuttle flight.

We asked you, how many space shuttle flights to space had functioning ejection seats? How'd we do, Matt? As opposed to non-functioning ejection seats, I guess, right? Yes, there is a subtlety to that, which I will tell you in just a moment. Oh, good. All right. This got a very good reaction. People were kind of turned on by this question, I think.

Our winner, Ron Brown, and everybody else who submitted an answer, had it right. Four shuttle flights. The first four. Indeed. STS-1 through 4. Yes, which were test flights, formally test flights, and carried only two pilots. And so nobody on the mid-deck, which is significant. Because really, how would you do an ejection seat from the mid-deck where most of the people are sitting?

Exactly. Which is why they didn't. They eventually came up with bailout procedures in the right conditions. Yeah, really right conditions. It would kind of be like putting an ejection seat on a 747, but only for the pilot and co-pilot. See you guys. They have those. What? Oh, they have those. No, I'm sorry. Never mind. Oh, no, they don't. Of course they don't. All right. You didn't hear that, folks, because if you did, Bruce would have to kill you, which would be unpleasant for everyone involved.

And you know what? Even for the pilot and co-pilot on those first four test flights, it was only good for up to, I guess, like the first hundred seconds of power descent, up to about 3,400 miles an hour. That's what Ilya Schwartz let us know. So congratulations to Ronald. And I don't know. We're going to send him a shirt. We actually didn't say two weeks ago what the prize was. So we can send him a shirt, but we could also send him Moonshot by Jay Barbary, Alan Shepard, and Gus Grissom.

Why don't you give him the option? Okay. Do that or I've got a paperclip right here. See that. Stop playing with that. Okay, sorry. Oh, so I wanted to follow up. Yes, indeed.

Oh, so I wanted to follow up. Yes, indeed. As I read it, they actually disabled the ejection seats after the first four missions. Once they started flying people in the mid-deck, they didn't take them out until they did a whole refit on Columbia, which wasn't until after Challenger, and then they actually pulled out the ejection seats. Kind of odd. Yeah. Anyway, we move on to the next trivia question, which, of course, will be shuttle related. What was the last spacecraft deployed by a space shuttle?

The last spacecraft deployed by a space shuttle. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And what shall we give away this time, Matt? This time we will definitely give away Moonshot, the just reissued or republished as an enhanced e-book by Jay Barbary, the longtime NBC correspondent talking about manned spaceflight. A couple of other guys that I just mentioned who people may have heard of, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, two of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. And you have until August 1, 2 p.m. Pacific time on

Monday, August 1st to get us that answer. Alright, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about who you would like to put in an ejection seat. Thank you. Good night. Why are you looking at me that way? Because I know you'd enjoy it. It would be a blast, wouldn't it?

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us... Punch out! Punch out! Punch out! Every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Thank you.