Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrating 35 Years of the Voyager Mission

Episode Date: September 17, 2012

Voyagers 1 and 2 just reached 35 years of travel in space. What a great reason to celebrate! Join Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone, Ann Druyan, Emily Lakdawalla and Robert Picardo in this special live edition of our show. Bill Nye reports on a separate celebration in London and on the International Space Station, and Bruce Betts is back in fine form with Mat Kaplan for this week’s What’s Up.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Celebrating the Voyager mission, this week on Planetary Radio. Music Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the final frontier, and this week that frontier is the edge of our solar system. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Join us at a little party we threw. We celebrated the 35th anniversary of one of humanity's greatest voyages of discovery. You'll hear from Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, our regular contributor Emily Lakdawalla,

Carl Sagan's longtime partner Ann Druyan, and Dr. Sagan's words about the pale blue dot we all live on. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye couldn't join us, but I did catch him via Skype, just as he had returned from another celebration of sorts. Bill, welcome back from London. Tell us, what was your adventure over there? Oh man, it really was fantastic. So, these guys at YouTube worked with Google to have a worldwide contest for students to suggest experiments on the International Space Station. These two young women from Michigan won and a guy from Egypt won. And there are two experiments that are flying.

And there's Sunita Williams doing flips and showing the experiments. Every time it was her turn to speak, she would just let go of the microphone and leave it there in orbit with her sitting right in front of her in her frame of reference. People in zero gravity, it really is striking. And this was all a live webcast via YouTube, no surprise. Yeah, yeah. Here's what they did.

There are spiders that jump on their prey. They found that the spider in space can make an adjustment and figure out how to jump without gravity. Wow. Maybe that our nerves, the cellular level, have some ability to make these extraordinary adjustments. Like it's not all top-down management of your nervous system. Maybe it's bottom-up. And then they had the two young women from Michigan. They were trying to see if this beneficial bacterium, Bacillus subtilis, see if it would grow better or more strongly in zero G because there's evidence that other bacteria do. It was really, these were worthy experiments, as good as any experiment designed by any,

if I may, grown up. And they're flying on the space station. It was really exciting. Good, cool thing to be part of. We had Babak Ferdowsky, the Mohawk man. Oh, yeah, from JPL. Sure. Curiosity.

And we had Greg Rutherford, British long jump champion. So all of this was live, of course, but I believe it is now archived on this YouTube Space Lab site, and we'll provide the link from Planetary. And more importantly, we got a deal to embed it on Planetary.org. Oh, that's even better, because I was just going to link to it. Yeah, that's very good. All right, then, folks, you can look for that there. With any luck, it'll be up by

the time you hear this show at planetary.org. So it's exciting. We're trying, we're working to integrate the planetary community with the robotic community with the human spaceflight community for, may I just say, Matt, the betterment of humankind.

I gotta fly, Bill. The planetary guy. Welcome back, Bill. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, just back from London, where he was visiting hobnobbing with folks and spiders and bacteria high above the Earth. All the tickets were snapped up two weeks before the night we gathered at the Crawford Family Forum. Fortunately, you can still join our 35th anniversary party for the Voyager spacecraft. Our host that night, Southern California Public Radio, has made the entire hour and 40 minutes of video available on its website.

And you can also find the video at planetary.org slash radio. You'll get to see the many terrific images we put on the forum's big screen, and you'll see and hear Andrewian, Emily Lakdawalla, Robert Picardo, and even a bit of classic Star Trek. We only have time for a few audio highlights in this show, beginning with the man who has been at the center of the Voyager project for four decades, 40 years. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a hero's welcome to the 1999 recipient of the Carl Sagan Memorial Award, Dr. Ed Stone. Ed has been at Caltech since 1964. He chaired the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy from 83 to 88. He directed the Space Radiation Lab at Caltech. He's also served as Caltech's Vice President for Astronomical Facilities.

also served as the Caltech's vice president for astronomical facilities. But his connection to space goes back to his first cosmic ray experiments on the Discoverer series of satellites more than 50 years ago, 1961. Since then, he has been principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft missions, co-investigator on five more. He became the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. That was in 1991. He stayed in that job for more than 10 years. This was the era of Mars Pathfinder and Little Sojourner, the launches of Cassini, Stardust, and Mars Odyssey. He remains a Caltech VP, I believe, and is the Morisot, I think I got that right, Morisot Professor of Physics? Morris Rowe. Sorry about that.

Ed, I can remember, since I'm old, when your spacecraft, when they made those runs and returned those beautiful images and all that science, I can remember how electrified the world was as that data came back.

And it reminds me now of the reaction to Curiosity's landing just a few weeks ago. Must have been a thrilling time to be part of that mission. Well, it's been a thrilling time throughout the 40 years to be part of this mission, actually quite. But those encounters were very special. I mean, we were seeing things that no one had ever seen before, seeing so many things that we hadn't expected were there to be seen. And that's, of course, really where the new science is, where you see things you didn't expect to see. And Voyager produced that time after time

and is still showing us things we did not expect to see. And we're going to get to some of that current work, the data that is still coming back from these twin spacecraft. There was a panel discussion at JPL yesterday. Your colleague Charlie Colhaze was on there, who was, I guess, mission designer. He talked about the 10,000 trajectories that had to be winnowed down to the two, one for each spacecraft, but also about what an incredibly rare opportunity, what a little window this was to make these missions happen.

Yes, it's quite remarkable. This opportunity where all four giant planets are on the same side of the sun and one spacecraft can fly by all four happens every 176 years. And it turned out that the prime time was 1977 plus or minus a year. We started this project in 1972. Think of that, five years to produce the world's first automated spacecraft. Is there a way to characterize it in terms that really could communicate just how significant this is? Well, the Voyager, I think, really has just changed our view of the solar system. Before Voyager, the only known active volcanoes in the solar system were

here. Voyager, guess what? active volcanoes in the solar system were here. Voyager, guess what? Flew by the moon aisle, found eight active volcanoes, ten times the volcanic activity of the entire Earth. And that was just the first of many such discoveries where we thought from what I call our terracentric view, we thought we understood, but in fact the view was much narrower than even our nearest neighbors were. Voyager project scientist Ed Stone. You can watch Ed on stage and enjoy his favorite Voyager images.

The video link is at planetary.org slash radio. Carl Sagan was a big contributor to the Voyager mission. He and a few others lobbied hard for what has become one of the most iconic images of the 20th or any century, it was caught by Voyager 1 in 1990 after it had passed Saturn heading for interstellar space. The spacecraft was ordered to take portraits of every planet. One of these distant worlds was our own. That image would inspire Dr. Sagan to write a book, and in that book he wrote of the single pixel in an enormous stretch of space. That pixel was Earth. We asked Actor and Planetary Society Advisory Council member Robert Picardo to read Carl Sagan's words. From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest, but for us it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,

every human being who ever was was lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings. How eager they are to kill one another. How fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,

the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness. There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is no one else, at least in the near future,

to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration

of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. blue dot. The only home we've ever known. Robert Picardo reading from Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot, a vision of the human future in space. More highlights from our celebration of the Voyager mission are just ahead. 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, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 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. It was a real treat to welcome a Planetary Radio regular to our September 6th celebration of all things Voyager. Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist. We'll find out about that term. I see some of you know her.

She is a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. You may also hear her each week on our show, Planetary Radio. But she's also a co-host of CosmoQuest's Space Hangout and the Science Hour podcast. Both of those are Google Plus Hangouts on Air. Please welcome my friend and colleague, Emily Lantawala, which you've done. Thanks, Matt. All right. First of all, evangelist.

Well, I've always liked telling people about the planets, and recently, especially with the end of the shuttle program, so many people out in the public think that NASA is dead and we're not doing anything in space anymore. And so I consider it my mission to tell everyone just how many wonderful robotic missions there are going on throughout the solar system right now, not just Voyager, but about 20 other spacecraft.

You've got another reason for us to remain excited about the Voyager missions. And for that, I know that you've got some slides that you've brought along. And, Ed, I think you're going to enjoy these. So Voyager, of course, returned an awful lot of images. Now, I was born in 1975. returned an awful lot of images. Now, I was born in 1975, so I have never known a time when we did not have these pictures of at least of Jupiter and Saturn. So it's very difficult for me to imagine how astonishing it must have been to see these moons especially for the first time, each one of them completely unique. We've got Ganymede, we've got this one's Io, we have Callisto. Each one of them completely unique. We've got Ganymede, we've got this one's Io, we have Callisto.

Each one of them was a totally unique and different planet. And I often make the mistake of calling them planets because they are, after all, as large as planets. Ganymede and Titan are both larger than Mercury. And they are just as diverse and exciting worlds to explore as many of the planets. A lot of these pictures were, of course, turned into pretty color pictures and shown to the public. All of that happened when the pictures were first received on Earth. So for Jupiter, that was around 1979, 1980,

when the images were processed and put out to the public for them to see. And JPL has actually not done a whole lot with the images since then. And so what you have out there in the public are views of these worlds that were created with the computer technology that existed at the same time that Voyager was exploring the planets. There was no Photoshop. There was not Photoshop. Well, Voyager returned so much more data than any of us has ever actually had a chance to look at. This is a screen capture

from the rings node of the planetary data system, whose job it is to archive all of NASA's data, of just a few of the images that are available from Voyager's encounter with Jupiter. And in fact, if you look at that, you'll find out that there is a huge number of images in this database. Now, a lot of them were taken from quite far away but still almost 77,000 pictures and that's just one instrument that's just the the camera instruments. 77,000 pictures are just waiting there for you to explore and any one of you can go to that website and just page right through them if you want to. Planetary Society senior editor and planetary evangelist Emily Lakdawalla. We'll close this brief review of our recent Voyager

mission celebration with a very special message. Andruyan and Carl Sagan fell in love while they were in the midst of creating the Voyager golden record. They would marry and remain partners until Carl's untimely death. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now carrying their golden records to the stars. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now carrying their golden records to the stars. Each record contains a lovingly created collection of sounds, speech, music, and images that represent the very best of humanity. On September 5th of this year, Anne came to the Jet Propulsion Lab's own Voyager party. Since she could not join us the next day, she recorded these lovely words as she stood next to JPL's full-size Voyager mock-up,

complete with its own golden record. I wish I could be with you in person to communicate my pride and joy at being associated with the epical journey of the Voyagers 1 and 2, of the Voyagers 1 and 2, celebrating the launch some 35 years ago of Voyager 1. Standing next to this model at JPL and remembering all of the planetary encounters along the way, all those milestones, knowing that Voyager has exceeded the design specifications of the brilliant scientists and engineers who worked on this project in every way, knowing that it will soon tell us the very shape and contour of our solar system as it moves through space,

and that it will begin the third phase of its mission, and that it will begin the third phase of its mission, a journey across interstellar space for perhaps a thousand million years. Having anything to do with this project is a signal honor, and I'm so proud that my colleagues and I were able to send a message to the most distant future about who we were in the beautiful spring of 1977, about our hopes, the music we made, the sounds we made, what we looked like,

who we shared this planet with. I think it's great that you have joined together today to celebrate this signal achievement of the human species. And when I say that, I mean the spacecraft itself and its great journey of exploration. We can do great things together. Our science and our technology need not be a gun aimed at our heads. It can be future oriented. It can be filled not only with our rigorous mathematical and scientific and engineering

skills, but also with the music we make and our deepest feelings. I'd like to conclude by asking you all to remember the great Carl Sagan, who participated in every aspect of this mission and who, in many respects, was that place where our science and our souls, our feelings, and our capacity to grasp our tininess in this cosmos met in one human being of surpassing genius and goodness. I'd like to remember Carl today on this 35th anniversary and say go Voyager, go Planetary Society, exciting and awakening multitudes to the glory of life in the cosmos. Thank you.

Carl Sagan's longtime collaborator, Ann Druyan. Again, a link to the complete video of our Voyager celebration can be found at planetary.org slash radio. We thank Southern California Public Radio and the staff of its Crawford Family Forum for hosting us. Bruce is up next.

You've reached it. It's that time of the show when we talk about what's up in the night sky, which is why we call it What's Up. Sitting across from me at Planetary Society headquarters is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Thank you, Matt. Good to be back. Good to see you. You're barely coughing. You're looking good. Thank you. Doing much better.

Is the sky looking good? The sky is looking good, but it never really stopped. Yeah, that's true. Yes, over in the west, low down, we've got Mars and Saturn hanging out. And in the pre-dawn sky in the east, super bright Venus and high overhead Jupiter. Jupiter also coming up in the middle of the night over in the east, looking really, really bright. We move on to this week in space history. We move on to this week in space history. I thought you would be strangely amused that in the mid-1800s in this week,

on the same day, well, the same date, different years, H.G. Wells and Gustav Holst were both born. No kidding. Neither of which studied planets, but both of which had an artistic representation of planets. We also had Mariner 10 fly by Mercury for the second time. You'll probably also enjoy that in 1962, the Jetsons premiered. Da-da-da-da. Jane! Jane!

Apparently you did enjoy this. Very much so. All right, Matt, let's move on to... Random Space Fact! You are back. All right, Matt, let's move on to random space fact. You are back. Better than ever. Due to precession, or I may use the technical term wobble, of the Earth's rotational axis, the direction of the Earth's axis varies, tracing a circle in the sky over 26,000 years.

So Polaris, for us Northern Hemisphere people, is a very nice North Star right now, less than half a degree from the pole, but only about 2,000 years ago. It was like 8 degrees, 7, 8 degrees away from the pole. So here's my question. I think I've read about this that there was some other star that took Polaris's place in pointing us northward. Do you? The last really good one was actually about 5,000 years ago. So there were still plenty of ancient civilizations popping up and it's been a trivia contest question and yet I forgot what its name is. So that's why I remember that it's come up, I guess.

That's probably where I heard it. Oh, well. I'm sorry, everyone. Bonus points, gold star if you provide that star that used to serve as the northern star in the northern hemisphere. For Earth. For this planet. Yeah. Aliens, you're welcome to enter, but it really doesn't do us any good.

Okay, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked you what was the first spacecraft to successfully do a flyby of another planet, and what happened to its identical sister spacecraft? How'd we do, Matt? Really well. Did I say really well? Really well. well, really well. As you know, it was Mariner 2 that flew by Venus on December 14, 1962,

world's first successful interplanetary mission. That's why there's going to be a whole festive celebration of craziness going on these days at NASA with their first 50th anniversary, their first planetary flyby. I've seen some evidence of that. I've seen some signs of that. We did have, there was another answer, and I wonder if you would have accepted this. You did say successful mission. Several people, they mentioned Mariner 1, I mean, or 2, excuse me, but they also mentioned the Soviet Venera 1 mission that flew by but had been dead, I guess, for weeks or months by that time. My goal in saying successfully was to lead to, I suppose one could argue it,

but it was to lead to the spacecraft that was actually functioning and returning data when it did its flyby. Then to get to the sister spacecraft that didn't even get as far as Venera 1, it was Mariner 1, which, what, made it like five minutes off the pad before it went boom? Yes, but it didn't just go boom. The range safety officer exploded it. How do you like to be the guy who has that responsibility? We had people who wrote to us and talked about, yeah, exactly that.

I mean, what did he do afterwards? Go out for a beer? Did anybody want to talk to him? What did you do? To his credit, it was veering off course in a potentially dangerous way. So my impression is it was a pretty clear call, but still weird. So you don't know, do you, what Arthur C. Clarke called this self-destruct? No.

Because apparently it was a software error. Someone left out a character on a punch card. Arthur C. Clarke called it the most expensive hyphen in history. Yeah, pesky software. Those evil punch cards. We got that from a lot of people, including William Stewart. But I should tell you, I suppose, since I didn't do it, John A. Gallant. John Gallant, who writes in all the time, has nice little things to say to us about the radio show,

but has not won in a long time. Well, John, your number came up, literally, random.org. And we're going to send you a Fisher Space Pan. We got another one for somebody. Okay, good. And here's the question that you need Space Pan. We got another one for somebody. Okay, good. And here's the question that you need to answer. So this one's for aliens, apparently, or for clever humans. What is the South Pole star of Mercury?

Okay. The South Pole star of Mercury. So star in the sky near the South Pole as extended into the sky of Mercury. Wow. You know, fairly bright. It would be naked eye if you were hanging out on Mercury's South Pole. Okay. This is going to be interesting.

Tell them how to enter. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you have until the 24th, September 24th, that'd be Monday, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this one. We'll soon be going back to t-shirts. Those of you who have worn out your Planetary Radio t-shirts, hang in there.

It was nice to see some at Planet Fest. I noticed some Planetary Radio t-shirt winners. Very, very gratifying. In fact, we had several at the Voyager event that you were too sick to attend. But there were a lot of people who showed up there in their t-shirts. And we've also thrown them at people in that very auditorium. That's true.

That's true. And we will again sometime soon. It had something to do with it. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up at the night sky and think about what you would lock to a bike rack. Thank you. Good night.

So the answer obviously is not a bike. Well, it's up to you. Maybe my telescope. Maybe my dob. My dobsonian. Your dog? Oh, your dobsonian. Okay, good.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.