Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Bringing Astronomy to the People With Mike Simmons

Episode Date: March 9, 2009

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Bringing astronomy to the people, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It starts April 2nd. 100 hours of astronomy will span the globe with events designed to awaken a love of the night sky and everything it contains. Our guest is the co-chair of this extravaganza. Mike Simmons will tell us how to get involved and talk about his many years of grassroots advocacy. Emily Lakdawalla will take us to Saturn's moon that don't get no respect,

and Bruce Batts unveils a brand new online catalog of planets beyond our solar system. We'll get started with Bill Nye. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. Last week, I was given the opportunity to testify in front of the House Appropriations Committee at the United States Congress. The hearing was about science education. Now, science education is more important than ever because our world is changing, and there are billions and billions of us trying to make a living on what's proving to be a very small planet.

So a couple weeks ago, the orbiting carbon observatory blew up. It didn't get off the launch pad especially well. And when the fairing tried to separate, something happened to the rocket and it fell apart. So everyone was very, very concerned when a very similar fairing was being used on the Kepler telescope. This is the telescope that's going to trail behind the Earth as we orbit the Sun and look for planets that are like the Earth orbiting other stars. See, this is the old thing. If we find a place to go looking for life around another star, we might find it, and that would change our world. Meanwhile, our ability to observe our own world got wrecked in the atmosphere somewhere in the Arctic. So all this is connected because we have to ask ourselves,

where do we spend our money? Do we spend our money on science education? Do we spend our money on observing the Earth's atmosphere and the amount of carbon in it? Or do we spend our money observing planets orbiting other stars? Well, the answer I told the Congress was, we got to do it all. We have to do everything all at once. We have to keep reaching into this cosmos, looking for other places that might be like our own to answer the oldest question of all humans. places that might be like our own to answer the oldest question of all humans, where are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? But we also have to keep an eye on our own world because it's changing and the climate is changing. And in order to be ready for that, we have to have a cadre, a cohort, a huge population of people who are scientifically literate to address these

questions in the future. You see, it's turning out that we all live on this small planet and we are all citizens of the same world. And that's why here at the Planetary Society, we promote planetary citizenship. You see, it turns out space exploration is hard. But I'll tell you what, it's worth it. Thanks for listening, my friends. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. When I talked with co-chair Mike Simmons,

there were already well over 600 pushpins on the Google map at 100hoursofastronomy.org. Each of those pins is an event designed to spread interest in our universe among men, women, and children worldwide. There should be thousands of pins by April 2nd when the celebration begins. The site is already getting more than 100,000 hits a day. Mike is also the founder of Astronomers Without Borders and a past leader of many other organizations that managed to be both starry-eyed and down to earth. We got together via Skype. Mike, I am so glad that you could join us, primarily to talk about the 100 Hours of Astronomy, in time for, I hope, some of our listeners to become involved. Are you still looking for amateurs and others who want to be a part of this? Oh, absolutely. We're still registering events on our site.

It's not necessary, but we hope everyone will register there. If they take telescopes out to show the public the sky, it doesn't take a lot of planning. You know, the people that do this take their telescopes out, put them on a sidewalk street corner someplace where there are people going by. Show them the moon and Saturn. It's a great thing to do. You have such a history of bringing astronomy to the people. I mean, I only think of one other name that is really connected with that kind of effort, a fellow named Dobson.

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I first met John Dobson back in the 70s when it was just a band of hippies going around in a bus with great people. And don't put me in the same category with John Dobson. Nobody belongs in that class. He's really done fantastic things and he's still doing well. And in fact, the Sidewalk Astronomers and International Sidewalk Astronomy Night, is the one that's really coordinating this, the 24-hour global star party, part of 100 Hours of Astronomy. So he and his disciples are really still at it doing fantastic things. We should say right now that the website that you mentioned is www.100hoursofastronomy.org, and we will, of course, put that link up

at planetary.org slash radio along with some other sites that I think we may talk about before the conversation is over. Before we go back to the sidewalk, talk about that 24 hours. Well, there are a couple different 24-hour components of this.

There are several different parts of it. I can mention them briefly, but the 24-hour Global Star Party is really the big event where we get everybody out to actually look through a telescope. We hope to have as many as a million people look through a telescope during that one night. And the one night, and the reason it's 24 hours, is of course that the darkness sweeps around the world. It'll start at the international date line, and it'll move on around the rest of the world on the night of April 4th. So wherever people are as it gets dark, the Star Party will begin there,

sort of hand off from one to another. And some solar observing. Some of the people will be out there with specialized telescopes or various other viewers and filters to do safe solar observing during the daytime. But the night before that, we're going to have a 24-hour event, which is coming from the biggest and best telescopes in the world and off the world, including the control rooms of the space telescopes. And that will go from one observatory to another, beginning with the biggest telescopes in Hawaii, and move around the world for 24 hours also. And that will be a live webcast going from one to another.

And will people find that at the website, 100 Hours of Astronomy website as well? We'll have a viewer there for it, and Ustream is partnering with us, so they're actually going to produce the feed. It's coming from the European Southern Observatory, ESO headquarters in Germany. And so that viewer actually can be embedded onto other sites as well. But everything that we do, whether it's on our site or someplace else, you'll find the information and links, and in this case, viewers for all of the live webcasts on our site. I don't want to call this the climax of your life of amateur astronomy, because you're hardly done. You've been doing this kind of thing all over the world for many, many years, in places like Iran and Iraq. I think you were telling me you just came back from India.

You were there in October. Yeah, and I have been doing this in an international way. It's sort of been my niche. You know, I've done outreach here in the United States in various ways for quite a number of years. But when I first traveled to developing countries or countries that were more isolated, developing countries or countries that were more isolated, and they didn't have the resources, and they weren't as wealthy in information, in equipment, telescopes, binoculars, the things that we take for granted here. I just felt like what I was doing there was getting, well, sort of like a bigger return on the investment of my time. And plus, of course, I loved interacting

with other cultures. This led to your formation of Astronomers Without Borders. That's right. You know, I found that astronomy really is something, we all say it, but I found this is really the case, really is something that crosses borders. When I first went to Iran in 1999 for a total solar eclipse, I found extreme interest in astronomy, a very young population with a lot of interest. They just really didn't have much there. But when I look up at the sky from Tehran, I see exactly the same sky I do at home in Southern California. And they were looking at it the same way as us. They just didn't have the same resources, but they had tremendous enthusiasm. So coming back here and talking to people about astronomy there, you know, it really personalizes these other places. They see people not only have the same desires as us in most ways, but they're doing the same

thing as far as astronomy, sometimes not having as easy a time. You've even brought Iranian and Iraqi astronomers together. Well, that was something recently. I'd been to Kurdistan region of Iraq in 2006, and I did manage to introduce them to each other, and the Kurds especially have a lot in common with the Iranians. So the Iranians did extend an invitation to the Kurds for an observing event to come across to Iran and take part. And it was the same thing. They found here they are in the night looking up at the same sky. They really enjoyed each other. And it kind of gets rid of some of all those old feelings, you know, and it just pushes it aside. There's more ahead from 100 Hours of Astronomy co-chair Mike Simmons.

This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show,

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slash radio. The Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Longtime amateur astronomer and booster of astronomy, Mike Simmons, is our guest. He is co-chair of 100 Hours of Astronomy, which begins on April 2nd. Mike also leads Astronomers Without Borders, encouraging and enabling sky gazers worldwide. We said we'd want to provide other links, and one of those should definitely be to Astronomers Without Borders, but I guess

there's a little caveat here, because you are just about to post a new site as we speak to each other. Well, my involvement in 100 Hours of Astronomy has been intense. This is the biggest outreach event ever, and it's taken a lot of my time, and Astronomers Without Borders is relatively young. So the website there, we're redoing it, and we're getting some content back up there. And in fact, there is a connection between the two, while Astronomers Without Borders is doing a lot of the organization of 100 Hours of Astronomy. We don't want 100 Hours of Astronomy to be a one-time event. With all the work that's gone into it, all the resources gathered, the networks of astronomers

from around the world built, this will continue in Astronomers Without Borders with many different kinds of projects, more interactive to connect people with each other, but we'll have other observing events and so on. And this kind of thing is popping up spontaneously around the world now with new technologies as the Internet gets into more areas. So it'll provide a place to continue on the legacy of 100 hours of astronomy and repeat some of the things that we're doing now. But the new website is the place where that will all be able to happen.

So this coming week, perhaps the week that this airs, we'll be able to show people more about what we're going to be doing. And that's just astronomerswithoutborders.org? That's right. Okay. We will, of course, post that as well at planetary.org slash radio, one that our listeners may be somewhat more familiar with, at least we would hope. Speaking of broadening things and making sure it's more than 100 hours,

the 100 hours celebration I think fits into the International Year of Astronomy. Well, that's right. The International Year of Astronomy is this year. It's being organized by the International Astronomical Union, the IAU, and UNESCO, and was approved and declared an international year by the UN General Assembly as well. of Galileo's first use of the telescope to look at the sky. He didn't invent the telescope. He may even not have been the first person to point it at the sky. Some people claim other people did, but all the credit goes to him for having done regular observations of the moon, of the sun, Jupiter, other planets, and discovering some things that completely change our view of the universe and our place in the universe.

Some simple things that are very easy to do with the smallest of telescopes now. But he was the first one to do these exactly 400 years ago. How did you get into all this? I think I read that you loved astronomy right from the start, although life, at least on a professional level, took you in a different direction. Well, that's true. I can't remember how old I was when I first got interested in astronomy. I remember watching the space age start as I was a young child in the 50s. Sputnik saw my first satellite with Echo 1.

I used to try and find planets and things like that in the sky. I really wasn't very successful. But, you know, I was a real space geek from the beginning and always loved astronomy. I planned on being an astronomer, and I was in school for astronomy as a major. But I had some connections with the medical research community through my father as a doctor and really went in that direction, which was a different kind of career move, but it turned out to be a good one. So I was a medical researcher, but I've retired now and I'm devoting my time to this sort of thing. I know you're in a rural area of LA County, at least about as rural as we get

in Southern California. How are the skies there? Well, surprisingly good. You know, I'm in the Santa Monica Mountains in between Los Angeles and some communities out to the west. And, you know, we have sky glow here, but I can go out on a good night and see the Milky Way and see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye and things like that. So it's not what I'd call a dark sky, but, boy, it doesn't take much to get away from the city, something everybody should do out of the city and just see some of the things that you can see with the naked eye,

things we've sort of lost touch with the rest of the universe just because of the glare we have in the city. I'm going to be selfish here and ask you about some of the things going on in this region, Southern California. I know that you were president maybe more than once of the Mount Wilson Observatory Association, a place we've visited at least a couple of times on this show. Anything going on up there? Well, actually, there are big plans. Mount Wilson Observatory is famous for its history, big plans. Mount Wilson Observatory is famous for its history, where Hubble used the 100-inch telescope to discover some things that come close to the kind of things that Galileo did. There were

more people working on it then, but he was the one that showed that it was true that we are not alone in terms of this galaxy being all there is to the universe. And there's a great deal that comes from that. But the observatory is not just history. There are some modern instruments as well also working, including the largest optical interferometer in the world. And it's getting details on other stars that nobody has ever gotten before. And there also are some big plans up there, which I guess I can't talk about too much, but they will be announced. There's going to be a lot of outreach expansion at Mount Wilson. We have Griffith Observatory here in LA. It's kind of a mecca for astronomy for the public,

but Mount Wilson will have a lot more going on in the years to come. Good. Thanks for the hint. We'll keep track of that. We're just about out of time, Mike. Where are you going to be during the 100 hours and especially during that 24 hours of observation around the world? Well, that's interesting. We do have an opening event in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute, which features an exhibition that includes Galileo's telescope. Wow. So we're starting with the first one and then moving on to the observatory webcast with the big telescopes of today

and then out to look through an IP. So I'll be in Philadelphia for the opening. I hope I get a chance to go out and join some people and look through telescopes with them during the big star party. But we'll see. I haven't been able to think that far ahead yet. Mike, have a wonderful time.

Good luck with the 100 Hours of Astronomy and clear skies. Thank you very much, Matt. Mike Simmons is the co-chair of 100 Hours of Astronomy, part of the International Year of Astronomy, a celebration lasting 100 hours, taking place all around this globe of ours. He is also the founder of Astronomers Without Borders, the Los Angeles Astronomical Society,

and at the Mount Wilson Observatory Association, as you heard. A Johnny Appleseed for stargazing, you might say. We're going to look to another fellow who's done that kind of work for a very long time with some of the largest optical instruments on this planet. Why, it's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He'll be here for this week's edition of What's Up after we hear Q&A from Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

Will Cassini ever be able to get pictures of Rhea's rings? Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons, but it's often been considered one of the less interesting ones. It doesn't have an atmosphere like Titan, or geysers like Enceladus, or a two-toned surface like Iapetus, or fans of fractures like Dione, or a single great chasm like Tethys.

Rhea is just a big ice ball with lots of craters. But a close flyby of Rhea in 2005 produced a big surprise. Saturn's powerful magnetic field rotates with the planet, dragging all kinds of charged particles, including electrons, with it. planet, dragging all kinds of charged particles, including electrons, with it. Saturn's moons block this electron flow, casting a shadow of sorts in the magnetic field. As Cassini flew into Rhea's shadow, the magnetometer did see the number of electrons plummet, as was expected. But unlike flybys of any other of Saturn's moons, Cassini actually saw the number of electrons decrease

significantly even before it reached Rhea's shadow. That decrease only occurred within Rhea's Hill Sphere, the region of space around Rhea where the moon's gravity is strong enough to counteract Saturn's. The magnetometer team realized that there was something in the space near Rhea, gravitationally bound to it, that was blocking the electron flow, and data from other instruments showed that it couldn't be gas or dust. The only explanation they can defend is that there are particles the size of pebbles or larger in orbit around Rhea.

In other words, they may have discovered that Rhea has rings. Unfortunately, Cassini's cameras probably won't ever get a picture of these putative rings, because the ring particles are too small and too sparse to be seen by reflected light, and too big to be seen by scattered light. We'll have to settle for the picture painted by the magnetometer. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. I don't know if the audience can hear it, but I can hear that

clock ticking in the background. Did you reset it? Did you spring forward? It is. It is reset for U.S. Daylight Savings Time. And I hate Daylight Savings Time. There are fewer waking hours to look at the sky now. So your service has become more important. Well, in that case, let me tell you things. me tell you things we've still got at least for another couple weeks venus looking hugely bright over there in the west after sunset but it's gonna drop out of view incredibly fast we've also got

saturn over there in the east as it will have want to do up high by the mid evening and looking kind of yellowish they're hanging out in leo and in the pre-dawn, it's getting kind of nasty with planets. We've got Jupiter, the really bright star-like object over in the east, in the pre-dawn, Mars down below it, reddish, dimmer, and crawling upwards over the coming weeks and months. That's the gist of the planets. Let us go on to this week in space history. You know, appropriate for the trivia answer that we'll talk about a little bit later in the show. It was this week in 1781. William Herschel discovered Uranus.

Oh, what brilliant timing. Let us go on to random space fact. You're going more melodic, I think, lately. And it's very innovative. And I think that you should write an entire opera based on Random Space Fact. That's so cool. How did you know I'd already started it? Just a lucky guess.

Random Space Fact. Random Space Fact. Hey, the Planetary Society launched our Catalog of Exoplanets website this last week to coincide with the launch of NASA's Kepler exoplanet hunting mission. So you can go to planetary.org slash exoplanets and find out all sorts of wonderful random space facts about the more than 330 known exoplanets and there's random space fact piece one all of this exoplanet game just started in the mid-90s with the first discovery of exoplanets and mostly is discovered by the so-called radial velocity technique where we stare at the parent star and look for red shift and blue shift in the light caused by the tug of the planets, causing the star to move a little bit more towards us and a little bit farther away during its orbit. Also, spacecraft like Kepler and ESA's Corot, which is already in orbit,

and a little bit in ground-based using transit method, where you look for the minute dimming of light as the planet passes in front of the star. We've got to get Jeff Marcy on the show again soon. Jeff Marcy of UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, who is responsible for the discovery of a lot of these, and I guess is working with the society on some of this stuff? Yes, he is indeed. In fact, this catalog grew out of funding work by him and his colleagues and published by Butler et al. And we're about to fund a new exciting project by Deborah Fisher at San Francisco State

and Jeff Marcy to upgrade their capabilities to hopefully start looking for Earth-sized planets in the future. And we'll get you more information on that, including from the horse's mouths in the coming weeks. And the guide is great. I mean, I say with no fear of expressing bias. It really is spectacular.

I mean, you can actually see the orbits of these individual and multiple exoplanets. It's a very cool guide. Yeah, we're pleased with our little baseball card, like orbital animations for each planet. That's what they are. They're like baseball cards for planets. Exactly. We're trying to figure out how to distribute gum, but haven't gotten that far yet. Base gum.

Okay. All right. We better go on to trivia. All right. We asked you about Uranus, although that was the answer, as I give it away, because we asked you, what's the only planet in our solar system besides Earth that is not named after a Roman god? How'd we do, Matt? A couple of people who are just too clever for their own good who pointed out that you did say not a god, but you didn't say anything about a goddess.

So obviously Venus, because Venus is a goddess. Yeah, okay. Honorable mention. I'll tell you who really got it. You already said the answer. Uranus, of course. And it is pronounced Uranus. I always love to mention my beloved professor who said this is an astronomy class, not an anatomy class. And it was Katie Botzel. Katie Botzel might be from Marion, Illinois. First time winner. Katie got it. She said Uranus. Mary in Illinois, first-time winner.

Katie got it, she said, Uranus. The father of Saturn in the Greek panoply of gods. We also got a couple of minor planets, dwarf planets that people pointed out. You could say Maki Maki from the people of Easter Island. Or Haumea, named after the Hawaiian goddess of fertility. And brings you back to Venus. Yes. Now, often dwarf planet land, and don't even get me started on asteroids.

We have all sorts of other stuff. Well, we're going to send out another copy of the 2009 Year in Space calendar to Katie and offer her an Oceanside Photo and Telescope rewards card that's worth about $20, gets you a bunch of discounts from that good supplier of all things astronomical. How about next time? For next time, we return to the fabulous exoplanets. And if you browse our catalog, which I hope you will, you will see that an awful lot of the planets' names, which usually are quite boring, start with HD,

followed by a bunch of numbers. What does HD stand for? High def. Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are much higher resolution. Well, I guess I need a new trivia contest. No, oddly enough, that is not what HD stands for in this case. So go to planetary.org slash radio if you, in contrast to Matt, think you know what it actually stands for. Get us that answer by Monday at 2 p.m. March 16, that Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. We're done. Thank you. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about claymation versions of your favorite people.

Thank you, and good night. Which is a lovely thought, but I'm going to call attention instead to Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who with his boys rescued two beagles and actually had them recovered by the owner, who I'm sure showered you with appreciation and love. Yes, indeed. Very gratifying. It's what we do. Anyway, he joins us every week here for What's Up. Next time, staying in bed for space. Drop us a line at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.