Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Big News From Little Worlds

Episode Date: March 24, 2015

Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla has returned from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas with the latest revelations about our solar system. She shares them in an extended report. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Emily's special report from the LPSC, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. You're used to hearing my brief conversations with Emily Lakdawalla at the beginning of each show, but now and then there's more to report than we can fit into two or three minutes. This is one of those weeks as the Planetary Society's senior editor returns from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. She'll be with us right after we hear from the CEO of the Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bruce Betts will make his usual interplanetary whistle stop to tell us what's up in the night sky, along with this week in space history and a new random space fact.

We've got a very special prize for this week's space trivia contest. Bill, as we catch you, you are just, well, off the street. You walked from Penn Station, I hear, but you were in Washington, D.C., attending what? The White House Science Fair, the fifth. And I've been to them and it's really cool that every year the students just have more remarkable things. They're extraordinary. And the president, say what you will, the president of the United States takes the time to talk with every invitee and takes the time to find out what they're working on. And it's pretty impressive.

And he or somebody in the administration acknowledges that investment in science, investment in basic research is what keeps the U.S. economy going. That's what keeps us in the game. And it's really gratifying to be there. I saw our good buddy Charlie Bolden, call me Charlie, the administrator of NASA, former shuttle astronaut, a pilot, I guess, commander of the shuttle. Yeah. And I talked to him about planetary science briefly and then on our Mars, humans to Mars workshop, which is next week. And we are going to send humans around Mars. We're going to have many of the usual suspects and several people that haven't been involved in this kind of thing before.

And the idea is to engage the human spaceflight community in a doable and achievable, something that you could afford to fund for a decade or more to get humans to orbit Mars and take pictures. I mean, the way I think of it, to take pictures akin to Earthrise, which was taken from Apollo 8. So we're getting a bunch of experts together

to, what, lay out a blueprint for this orbital mission? Yes. Now, the word blueprint, Matt, can be written with dollar signs. If you're going to send people to Mars, you've got to figure out how to pay for it. And it's got to be done in a way that people will accept. This is not hand-wringing. This is, we need to go back to Mars because it is hard. It's not like that. This is real thinking about how we're going to get people to Mars. It's exciting. And it's next week. And, you know, I mentioned it to the administrator. So it's cool. And speaking of paying for things very briefly, our colleague Casey Dreyer has written a blog post. I think it's March 13 about NASA wanting to cut funds for a couple of pretty impressive missions. For Opportunity, the rover that's still roving on Mars. I mean, it's still working. You know how hard it is to get a rover on Mars? Even think about shutting it down, I think we need to

rethink. How about that? And it's, what is it? Did you say 14 million or something? 14 million a year is what Casey reports. Which I know, to you and me, that's nothing. Yeah, it's, what is it? Did you, 14 million or something? 14 million a year is what Casey reports to. Which I know, to you and me, that's nothing. Yeah, it's not a jump change. If your budget is 14, is 18 billion and it's 14 million. It should be squeeze outable. Somebody should figure this out. One would think.

It's an exciting time, Matt. Yes, it is. And thank you, Bill, for helping to bring it to us. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye, the science guy. What do you get when you gather several hundred scientists under one roof to talk about what they love? Well, other than a lot of empty beer bottles, you usually get a lot of terrific science. In fact, it's generally much more science than any one attendee can possibly absorb. much more science than any one attendee can possibly absorb. The long list of brief presentations may be accompanied by nearly endless rows of posters from the researchers who weren't given a few minutes at a podium.

Another thing you may get is the chance to meet our own Emily Lakdawalla. That is, if you attend one of the primary planetary science conferences offered each year. Last week it was the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in the Woodlands, Texas, just north of Houston. I talked with the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist shortly after she returned to Southern California. Emily, welcome back. You gave us a little preview of LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, last week.

This time, we've got more time to go through what you have written about at planetary.org. Let's begin, as you did, with Philae. Sure. Well, I saw three talks on Philae at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, looking at two of the cameras on the lander. One of them was a descent camera, and the other one was the panoramic camera that worked after landing. And the third talk had to do with mass spectrometry. And that one was actually kind of interesting because images came into that one as well. So in order to study the composition of a world, you try to sniff some material into your mass spectrometer, either through its atmosphere or by collecting a sample. And that's exactly what Ptolemy was designed to do after

Philae landed. It was supposed to sniff the little rarefied bit of slightly dusty cometary atmosphere and get a sense of what the comet was made of. Well, it worked exactly as it was supposed to, except that Philae was not actually on the surface of the comet at the time because it was mid-bounce. And one of the coolest things about the talk on Ptolemy results was the fact that he showed a photo that was taken by the orbiter of Philae in the vacuum above the comet at just about exactly the moment that Ptolemy was trying to take its measurement. And one of the cool things that Ptolemy found was this funky rhythmic mass spectrum. A mass spectrum is basically just a bar graph that shows how much of given atomic

masses the instrument sniffs in. Lower masses, you might have ice and carbon dioxide. Higher masses, you have organics. And this mass spectrum was rhythmic. It had like a repeating peak at multiples of atomic masses. And what he said that meant is that it was tasting some kind of polymer, which is cool. And also not the first time that's been measured on a comet because another European mission called Giotto measured something similar at Halley's Comet way back in 1986. And polymers, these are long chain molecules. They're pretty complex. They are complex. They're not necessarily related to life, but they are organic molecules. So this

particular polymer is made of a repeating chain of carbon and oxygen atoms linked together with little hydrogen sticking off to the sides. It's the kind of naturally occurring complex organic molecule that comets are full of and that we now think that comets would have brought to Earth and Mars and all the other inner planets as the solar system was forming. Philae really is living up to its billing of helping us understand the building blocks of what the solar system was made of and what the first ingredients for life were on Earth. How about those mysterious dunes? And now some pictures that you saw of what looks like even more, well, we would think of it as wind action around a rock on the surface. Yeah, there are these features that Rolise saw.

Rolise is the descent imager, the one that was looking down as Philae was approaching the comet. It's kind of a neat way that they took this data. They took a set of images when they knew they were going to be distant from the comet. But then as they were getting close to the time of landing, they had something called a ring buffer, where they stuck the last seven images that the camera took in this buffer. And then after taking seven, the eighth one kicked out the first one. And so what you end up with is that right at the moment that Philae landed, you have the last seven images before landing were kept in the buffer and then sent back to the orbiter. And what those images show is this approaching, this rotating surface with these kind of linear parallel, slightly wiggly ridges on it. And then you look at, there's a couple of boulders in the

images and the boulders have this characteristic moat on one side and tail on the other side. And both of those things make an Earth observer think wind and sand dunes and wind erosion, the moat around the boulder is something that you would see in a desert situation where you had wind plowing into a boulder, getting turbulent, digging up sand on the upwind side, and then carrying it around and depositing it on the lee side of the boulder. Except that this is a comet with A, no atmosphere, and B, hardly any gravity. So how you can have these wind-carved things on a comet surface, they tried to model.

They said, well, what if there was an especially energetic comet jet that could be spewing out wind enough to scoop up particles? And the physics really doesn't work. So they're really having to go back to the drawing board to try to figure out how you can get these wind-like features on the surface of a world that shouldn't have any kind of aeolian features on it. Exactly the kind of mystery that we all love in cases like this. Speaking of these zero-g physics in a vacuum, you know, it's just something we can't duplicate on Earth, you point out. And that makes it maybe a little more difficult to understand just how a lot of this comet came together. It does. You know, I was talking with

a comet scientist after that session, someone who was not on the mission. They were telling me about how the physics is so challenging. You have extremely low gravity, so that force is small. You have no wind. You have tiny atmosphere. You've got molecules just bouncing off each other and then wandering off into space you have these fluffy aggregates of comet particles that have electrostatic forces that are almost as strong as gravity holding them together until you get to some point where they're big enough that gravity is stronger than electrostatics the tiny amount of gravity the tiny forces it's really hard to understand how all those things come together to build the structure of a comet. But Rosetta is the first mission that has ever accompanied a comet in order to watch it over a long period of time. So this is our best chance.

The Rosetta data set is our best chance to understand what is going on at comets. All right, Emily, don't go away. We're going to talk about more of the results that were revealed at the LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, just last week. You're listening to Planetary Radio. We'll be right back. Greetings, Planetary Radio listeners. Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The Planetary Society's remarkable LightSail spacecraft is headed for space. We want you to come along. LightSail is a small spacecraft propelled by photons from the sun.

The excitement is building as we count down to our launch in May. Follow every aspect of the mission at sail.planetary.org. Let's change the world. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right.

We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merk. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. And our extended guest this week is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla. She was attending at least a few days of the LPSC last week, that annual gathering of planetary scientists in Texas, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Before the break, she told us more of what has been learned about that comet that has been landed on by Philae and is still being circled by Rosetta. We're not quite done with those. We've got a sort of charming finish for today's conversation, but you'll have to wait for that.

It's worth sticking around for. Let's go now to Ceres. What has been going on out there as dawn? It's kind of a lull in the return of data as it stays in the dark out there, quite literally at the moment, right? That's right. Dawn, in order to get captured in orbit at Ceres,

kind of had to overshoot the asteroid, and now it's on the night side and is on a long looping orbit that will eventually bring it back to the sunward side of the asteroid and allow it to do some surveying. That comes up in a few weeks, and then we'll finally get really, really excellent images that hopefully will answer some of the questions that the first images have raised. Well, it's not as if nothing's been going on. You know, just when you think scientists have run out of names for features on other worlds, they come up with a whole new collection. What have they done or what are they doing with Ceres? The IAU determines a naming theme for features on each of the planetary bodies that planetary

geologists want to map. And Ceres being the goddess of the harvest, they decided to name craters on the surface of Ceres for international harvest deities. And there's names like Ebisu, there's Rongo, which somebody has told me is a Maori god of the harvest. And then there's Chris Russell's favorite. Chris is the principal investigator on the mission, and he pointed out the name Yum-Yum. Which is good for Gilbert and Sullivan fans. It's a little obscure, but you can look it up. So you actually took these names, and there are sections that are so-called quads, and you mapped them onto an interesting map. Tell us about that.

Yeah, we found, those of us at UnmannedSpaceFlight.com, the home of space imaging enthusiasts, found that there was actually a shape model of Ceres posted to a public website. A shape model is a digital elevation model. It shows you all the ups and downs on the surface of a world. The shape model is made from early Dawn Ceres data, and it shows you the interesting shapes of all the craters across the surface. And so you can begin to see how they're going to be mapping the surface, what the major features are in each area. There's a strange, large, flat-floored crater, and there's other craters that seem to have rings. And then, of course, there's the mysterious crater with its bright spots. We need to talk about something we devoted

an entire post to, and that was one of the people who was delivering some of this fascinating data, who began with a warning to those of you who were there covering the session. Yeah, he requested people not to blog about the session. The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is really interesting in the way it has embraced social media. They don't really do much for professional journalists. They don't host many press briefings. What they do do is they encourage people who are actually attending the conference, scientists and journalists alike, to post Twitter and other social media, what's going on inside the sessions. And occasionally, you get someone who says,

who prefers that their talk not be blogged about. You know, it's sort of interesting, I think, to stand up in front of a crowd of hundreds of people. And it's a public crowd, anybody could attend this meeting who wanted to pay the registration fee and say, I'm going to tell you 500 people about my work, but I want you to keep it a secret. And you know, it's a it's a request. I've honored such requests in the past. In this particular case, the speaker said something that was so sensational that it was within an hour it was posted by Eric Hand, the journalist who writes for Science magazine. His results were posted on Science's website. Alex Witsey, the journalist for Nature magazine, got it on Nature's website very shortly after that. And so I think it's difficult

to expect a crowd of 500 people to keep silent. My advice to scientists is if you don't want people talking about your work, you really shouldn't talk about it in public. most prestigious places where people hope to get their stuff published and hear their own bloggers putting this information out on the web. So it doesn't seem like there's much to be nervous about. And I wouldn't even call them. I mean, they're journalists. They are bonafide journalists. And so and it really wasn't clear. Was he only talking about bloggers? Did he mean all the journalists in the room? Did he mean people who were not officially microblogging for the conference? It was very unclear. All right. So we've teased people enough. What were those results? It was the behavior of this bright spot in a Ceres crater. This bright spot has intrigued us ever since we saw it with Hubble. It is so bright, it's visible to the Hubble Space Telescope.

And as dawn has gotten closer and closer, the bright spot stays bright and just seems to get smaller. What's going on there is that it's very bright compared to the rest of the stuff around it. So it dominates whatever pixel it's in, no matter how big that pixel is. And the pixels are getting smaller, but the spot is not getting any brighter or bigger. It's still just inside one pixel. But what they said about this pixel is that as you watch Ceres rotate and this bright spot comes into view on the edge of Ceres' disk, you see the bright spot in the middle of a crater even at a point in time when the rim of the crater should be blocking your view. And what he said that meant is that we are actually looking at a plume above Ceres' surface, which would be absolutely sensational if it was true. It would be one of very few places in the solar system where we have observed active plume activity. And that list includes Earth and Celadus and Triton and Io.

Those are the only places we have seen active plumes in the act of erupting. And so Ceres would be on a very short list. Personally, I'm kind of uncomfortable drawing such a sensational conclusion from such low resolution pictures. But yeah, he stood up and said it. It's on Science and Nature's website. It was all out everywhere. So I was like, okay, I'll write about it. Gotta hope that's correct, though. And we'll know, of course, as that spacecraft comes around the other side and starts getting much closer to this body. What is this about red and blue hemispheres? We're close enough that Dawn's visible and infrared spectrometer is capable of starting to see interesting color variations across the surface.

It's not as colorful as Vesta was. Vesta was uniquely colorful. That was the last asteroid that Dawn visited. But Ceres' colors definitely correlate with where craters are on its surface, and there's definitely a rich geologic history for scientists to interpret here. There is more in Emily's blogging from the LPSC, which took place last week in Texas. Go to planetary.org if you want to take a look at more of that stuff. She is going to have more material posted there sometime this week as we are speaking about Messenger and Curiosity.

Right, Emily? Absolutely. Got a lot more notes left to write up. All right. As we finish here, we're going to go out with this cute little animation. You want to tell us something about this? Sure. European Space Agency has really been capturing hearts and minds with these adorable animations of the Philae and Rosetta spacecraft.

animations of the Philae and Rosetta spacecraft. And now that they have a better sense of what happened after Philae landed, they posted the next installment that shows Philae's tumbling and difficult descent, but final safe landing on the surface. And apparently, according to the cartoon, he's covered up with a blanket and waiting for the sun to rise. There's somebody on Twitter remarks that maybe if he took off the blanket, his solar panels would work better. I suspect, right, unless it's a transparent blanket. All right, we're going to finish with that. It's about 45 seconds worth. It'll take us into this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce.

Emily, thank you so much for the report, and I look forward to talking to you in the regular format again next week. See you then. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine. And now, a little fairy tale, but a true one

about Rosetta and Philae. As the sun set over Philae's new home, he fell into a deep sleep, safe in the knowledge that he did his main job well, and that his family of comet-chasing heroes would be proud of his achievement. Who knows, perhaps one day enough sunlight would fall on his new landing site and wake

him up so that he could carry on investigating this incredible world. investigating this incredible world. And so, as the comet moved over closer to the sun, Rosetta prepared for the next part of her exciting adventure. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line because he's going to tell us what's up in the night sky because this is What's Up, the way we end every Planetary Radio episode. Welcome back. Thank you. So let's dive in and then we have some fun responses to the question that will be answered this week and a pretty cool prize as well for whoever wins the contest you'll

announce today. Total lunar eclipse, Matt, I know you're looking forward to it. It's April 4th, visible from most of North America. Most of North America, South America, Eastern Asia, and Australia. You see less of it. It's partial if you're all the way on the east coast of North America, but you still get some lunar eclipse time. So you can check out NASA's eclipse site or elsewhere to get the details. But it's going to be cool. I don't know why they didn't just wait a couple of days for my birthday, but it's okay. I'll settle for this.

Maybe next time. Yeah. No, next time will be this fall. Sorry. Planets, they're still up there. Venus, super bright, low in the west, can't miss it. And Jupiter, super bright over in the east. And Jupiter making a lovely sight near the moon on March 30th. Saturn coming up in the

middle of the night over in the east, as it will have want to do. We move on to this week in space history. 1655, Christian Huygens discovered Saturn's moon, Titan. And hundreds of years later, the Huygens probe would land on Titan. Nice full circle there. On to... Is this because I said you were muffled before we started today? It is, so I'm just working to do whatever I can to help out.

Jupiter. Jupiter's great red spot. It's been shrinking for more than a century, ever since it started using acne medication. But it's slow. In the late 1800s, the feature was about 40,000 kilometers in diameter, or about three times Earth's diameter. By the time the Voyagers flew by in 79, it had shrunk from 40,000 kilometers to about 25,000 kilometers, although it's staying pretty similar vertically, so it's getting less elliptical and more circular. And then more recently, it's down from 25,000 kilometers to more like 16,000 or less, again, getting more and more circular. It's a fascinating mystery. So how long before we can start calling it the small red blemish?

And we still have a few decades for that, probably. But with new medications, it's shrinking faster. But Jupiter's been experiencing a lot of stress lately and figuring out on chocolate, so anything can happen. They still do tetracycline for this stuff? Yes, yes, they do. People still debate chocolate one way or the other, but it tastes good. On to the trivia contest. We asked you, what is the approximate rotation rate of Ceres, where Dawn recently went into orbit? How'd we do? Another very good response this week.

People going after that itelescope.net account and a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Here's the one that Random.org selected this week. It's John Shepard of Key West, Florida. Cool place to live. He says he's a huge fan of the Planetary Society. Thanks for that, John. He has this answer, 9.075 hours, which is about nine hours and four minutes, which is what we got from nearly everybody. Is he our winner?

Yes, indeed. Pretty fast spinner for a body that big. All right, John, you picked up that itelescope.net account and you'll have, oh, about 200 points worth a couple hundred dollars, American bucks, to spend looking at things all over the universe with their network of telescopes,

itelescope.net, a non-profit. I do have some other fun stuff. What a surprise, huh? Yeah. Mark Schindler said the rotational period of Ceres is just over 18 planetary radio shows, episodes,

about nine hours. I like this one a lot. It came from Daryl Gardner in Lake Stevens, Washington, and of course, that's in the same state as Seattle, where everybody knows what is the number one site to see in Seattle. He says the rotational rate is about 11.58 space needle rotations.

The restaurant up on top. I like this one, too. It's Alexander Fruart. Alexander Fruart in Lugano, Switzerland. He says nine hours and four minutes. Indeed. Fruart in Lugano, Switzerland. He says, nine hours and four minutes, indeed. But he adds that since the night on series would be just about half of that, figure four and a half hours,

that's about as long as the typical PhD student is allowed to rest each night when they're not, you know, being a minion for it. Studying series. Yeah, exactly, right. And he said, please greet all other fellow PhD students out there in any kind of field, hang in there and grab a Snickers, which I'm speaking of chocolate. I mean,

isn't that illegal to mention a Snickers bar when you're in Switzerland? I don't know. I don't know. We'll check the laws and not get back to you. Just one more from Torsten Simar, whose name apparently I've been mispronouncing for years. He said, I have no pun this week. Seriously. Okay, let us please move on to the next contest. The Great Red Spot. What is the approximate latitude of the center of Jupiter's great red spot that's remained,

as far as we can tell, pretty constant for a few hundred years. Approximate latitude of Jupiter's great red spot. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us that answer really quick because the spot might disappear before we're done. By Tuesday, March 31st at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And the prize will be, all right, this is really a chance just to plug a really cool thing. It's Storytime from Space, which was started by Patricia Tribe and astronaut Alvin Drew, where they actually read stories to kids from the International Space Station. And they have an Indiegogo campaign to expand this,

do some more things, educational science demonstrations from the ISS. And our friend Jeffrey Bennett, Jeff Bennett, the author of all those wonderful Max books, he's on tour right now going around the country talking about the 100th anniversary of general relativity. around the country talking about the 100th anniversary of general relativity. But he is going to donate a copy of the great kid's book, Max Goes to the International Space Station, signed by Jeff, but also by an astronaut. We're not sure which astronaut yet, but that's a pretty cool prize. And that's available to the winner of this week's contest. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about cellophane.

Thank you, and good night. I love the way it crinkles. I'm sorry cellophane is almost obsolete. By the way, we'll put up the link to the Indiegogo campaign for Storytime from Space on the episode page, where you might be hearing this, and where you just heard Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its always series-us members.

Sorry. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.