Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrating the Admiral of the Solar System

Episode Date: December 2, 2013

The life of explorer and teacher Dr. Bruce Murray was celebrated last November 10th at Caltech. This week we present a few excerpts from the tributes paid to the former JPL Director and co-founder of the Planetary Society.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Thanks again. Enjoy the show. A farewell to the adm of the Solar System, 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, admiral of the solar system. That's what some call the towering figure known as Bruce Murray. Today we'll hear excerpts from his memorial service at Caltech. First, though, Emily will be here with news about the launch of an exciting mission. Later, Bruce Betts will tell us what's not up in the night sky.

That would be Comet ISON. And we'll find out who won our contest to put DAD in space. DAD the acronym, not the person. Emily, thanks to China, it looks like we're going to be landing on the moon again fairly soon. Yes, it's very exciting. It's going to be the first lunar soft landing in 37 years. And not only is it a lander, but it carries a rover too. So I'm truly excited about this mission.

You have shared some really terrific video that the Chinese have provided direct from this rocket and spacecraft. Yeah, they had cameras on both the second and third stages of their Long March 3B rocket. The rocket just leapt off the launch pad and there was that great Saturn V type shot looking down the rocket as it was lifting off atop all the flame. And then we saw the solids flame go out and the first stage separate from the second stage. And then from the third stage, we got this amazing video of the lander actually departing, being pushed off toward the moon with a crescent earth in the background. And then the sun glint comes and lights up the lander. And it's just really awe-inspiring. Great fun also to hear the team behind this mission cheering and applauding in the background there.

There is another blog entry from our colleague, our guest blogger, Bill Dunford, that people might want to look at along with your coverage. Yes, he's looking at the intended landing site of the lander and rover called Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows. And we, of course, have spectacular photography of that place from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as we do of all kinds of locations on the Moon. It's going to be a cool place to land. They will be able to find a fairly flat spot to set down the lander, but then, of course, they have that rover. So hopefully they'll drive around and get some really cool views down into craters or up onto mountains. I can't wait.

How far off is this landing? It's going to be very soon. It was quite a powerful rocket. It launched Chang'e 3 onto a direct lunar transfer trajectory, which means it's going straight to the moon, no orbit of Earth to begin with. So it will go into lunar orbit, 100 kilometer orbit on December 6th, and then landing is scheduled for December 14. Should be very exciting. Something very much to look forward to. And we'll look forward to it with you, Emily. Thanks again. Thank you, Matt. She is a senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, as well as a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Back in just a moment with excerpts from the truly inspiring

memorial service for Bruce Murray. On November 10th, hundreds of friends, colleagues, and admirers of Bruce Churchill Murray crowded into the California Institute of Technology's stately Athenaeum. What follows are just a few moments from that wonderful afternoon. Professor Murray wanted to be remembered primarily as a teacher and explorer, yet he was so much more, including director of the Jet Propulsion Lab and, with Louis Friedman and Carl Sagan, a founder of the Planetary Society. We are extremely grateful to Caltech and the Murray family for providing permission to bring you these excerpts,

beginning with opening remarks from the Planetary Society's Emeritus Executive Director, Lou Friedman, who led the celebration. The very first day I started at JPL, I was assigned to go down here to a meeting that he was chairing on the Marin Avenis Mercury Program. In many ways, he was the most rigorously, intellectually honest person I ever met. And sometimes even that to a fault. Which led to a particular characteristic that Carl Sagan and I used to joke about with him. He suffered fools

badly. I hope you don't mind me saying that, but he always turned to Carl and I and said, we suffered fools better than he did. He retained that rigorous intellectual honesty through all the programs and all the activities that I ever was associated with him. In many arguments, not arguments, discussions that we had, I really admired that trait, whether we agreed or disagreed. He was generally right, but he always had that enormously great characteristic. One quote that I want to say from Bruce that at least I thought, I think is original with Bruce. I googled it and I couldn't find anyone else to attribute it to,

so I think it's his. It had an effect on me. And that is, science is the work of God, engineering is the work of man. And I thought that was profound, especially appropriate today as we think about Bruce. He left the science life here at Caltech to become leader of one of the great engineering institutions on Earth, JBL, and I think that that simple statement really captured much of his outlook on things. The idea of rovers on Mars is impossible to believe it now, but it was much controversial. Scientists didn't want to put rovers on Mars is impossible to believe it now, but it was much controversial. Scientists didn't want to put rovers on Mars because it took up valuable space where instruments would go, and they thought that was just some kind of stunt.

And it was one of the early tasks we took at the Planetary Society was to advocate planetary rovers. And with Dan Golden's help, we're honored to have you here today, Dan, we saw a rover on Mars in the 90s and have been seeing it ever since. And I think it is both a testimony both to the advocacy and to the scientific perseverance that Bruce had that we pursued these things and kept at it. Bruce was very proud of the Planetary Society and he remained very close to us to the very end of his life, of course. He would come frequently to our office. I can remember our very first meeting when Carl, when he called me into his office and described this idea that he and Carl had

about forming an organization. We didn't know what to call it. We didn't know what it would be. They thought they knew exactly what to do. I was a little unsure, but I valued so much to work with both of these people and to work so closely with them over the years and then the great joy of my life

and especially with Bruce with these, has been the great joy of my life, and especially with Bruce with ease. Through all of the phases of my career and much of his, it meant a great deal. Bruce not only found the Planetary Society, but founded many of the things that the Society did. The rover effort, our efforts and advocacy for search for extraterrestrial life, searching for planets around other stars, the look for asteroids, and even to create the planetary report. I remember Bruce originally said, we don't need a fancy magazine. We can do it on a Mimeo newsletter that's just very well written. Kind of ironic for them. It was Mr. Imaging, and they didn't have a whole idea of planetary images.

But we realized that planetary images were our stock in trade. The memorial wound through all the major facets of Bruce Murray's life, including his devotion to the Planetary Society. Planetary scientist Jim Bell of Arizona State University is president of the society. The triumvirate of Murray Sagan and Friedman that chose in the late 1970s to fight back proactively against the massive budget cuts to NASA's planetary science enterprise by forming a large and vocal public advocacy membership organization devoted to the exploration of planets

represented, to me, the perfect mix of needed skills, experience, expertise, and temperament to pull it off. Carl is a popular media figure with the advent of the Cosmos TV show, which fundamentally changed my life. Andy was a university academic. Lou, if you'll allow me to generalize, Lou was an engineer, technologist, and policy wonk. Still is. Leaving Bruce at the time the director of JPL

to fill the role of the liaison for our nascent society between NASA and the public. Of course, he was much more than that. As we've heard, he was an active and accomplished planetary scientist and educator in his own right, and one who was especially focused on grasping the big picture from the scientific questions that he chose to pursue. I went back and looked at some of Bruce's writings from early planetary reports in an article titled, exploration is it worth the cost

question mark and the very first issue of the planetary report back in December 1980 Bruce wrote quote it seems to be a characteristic of a forward-looking society that its vision is outward that is driven not by mere problem-solving but by the need to understand emphasized the processes that allow us to open new frontiers. Indeed, Bruce's decision to devote part of his time to forming a society and to helping it to succeed established a critical precedent for the society and the planetary science community that continues to this day. And that is that in addition to broad general public membership and involvement, a significant

number of society members have themselves been active and engaged planetary scientists, space-related engineers and technologists, and educators. And that's true of our board to this day. Starting at a time when it was far from fashionable to do so, and because of his standing as a leader in our field scientifically, Bruce consistently helped to legitimize the decisions of many of our colleagues to get personally and directly involved in public outreach and political advocacy. Like his strong advocacy for planetary imaging experiments that we've heard about and will hear more about, this turned out to be an extremely wise attitude,

and one that has paid dividends over the years. In fact, in that same article in 1980, he went on to point out more broadly that our work is worth the cost because, quote, what we do in space is a reflection of how society chooses to invest its resources. Creative space exploration reflects a positive commentary on our self-image. So he was a visionary. I recently came across another editorial that Bruce wrote in the May 1982 issue of Planetary Report on the occasion of his retirement from the directorship of JPL.

You saw that he went to Washington as an advocate and a representative of JPL, but apparently he was wistfully recollecting a vacation visit to Washington that he and Suzanne had recently taken, and he recounted having an emotional reaction to seeing the flight spares of Ranger, Surveyor, and especially his favorite Mariner 10 hanging up there in the Air and Space Museum as among the proudest trophies

of our nation's history. Despite lamenting the enormous budget cuts that were decimated in NASA's Planetary Science Program in the early 1980s, he found inspiration there among the icons of some of humanity's greatest accomplishments. And he reminded us that, quote, times of high achievement are often times of great challenge and some despair. Well, as Bruce knew, history repeats itself. Here we are once again in a time of massive budget cuts for planetary science and lack of vision in general from our nation's leaders. It's a time when we're in desperately need of the kind of strong, steadfast, competent, knowledgeable counsel that Bruce often provided

to many of us, as well as to our government officials in times of crisis. Bruce is no longer able to help us directly in this struggle, but he is still with us in spirit, having educated, inspired, and forever motivated us to carry this particular flag forward in his honor. We miss the wit, wisdom, and sometimes, as we've heard, alarming honesty of our friend, colleague, and mentor on the board, but we're all smarter, more savvy, and more sure of the vision and mission of our society because of his belief in the ideals that he helped to found. because of his belief in the ideals that he helped to found. Education, inspiration, and advocacy remain the keys to the future of the Planetary Society,

as well as, I believe, the overall enterprise of science and exploration in society as a whole. Thank you, Bruce, for showing us the way. Planetary scientist Jim Bell, president of the Planetary Society, co-founded over 30 years ago by Bruce Murray. After a break, we'll hear yet another speaker at Dr. Murray's memorial celebration, the Planetary Society's executive director, Bill Nye. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week.

Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're presenting just a few minutes from the November 10th celebration honoring the memory of Bruce Murray, teacher, pioneering explorer, jet propulsion lab director, and co-founder of the Planetary Society. The Society's executive director had a few things to say. Bill Nye also unveiled a fitting tribute to Dr. Murray. I first met Bruce in 1998. I admit to being a bit starstruck as he was the head of the lab during the missions that changed us from a one-world species to a species that had and has a presence everywhere in our home solar system.

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all photographed up close for the first time on his watch. It's quite a feat. And for those of you who may not know this about Dr. Murray, he was often a very serious man. He took his business very seriously. And early in my service on the board of directors, the group was discussing a colleague whom I had only met briefly and we were talking about the vision of space exploration I remarked well that guy's a geologist he'll want to see those pictures and Bruce interrupted me he slapped his head on the table as he was want to do he's not a geologist he's a geochemist geologist he's a geochemist excuse me dr. Murray in a few moments so we both realized that maybe that intensity wasn't appropriate for the guy who

hosted a kids show we had a good laugh but that day I came to realize that photographs were pretty much Bruce's idea. He was, as near as any of us can tell, the man who insisted that spacecraft carry cameras and that they have the means to send the images recorded aboard these remarkable machines back here for everyone on Earth to see. Can any of us even imagine a space program without pictures? I mean, what would really be the point? Who would care?

For crying out loud. In those days, Dr. Murray made the scientific argument. He had to. There's a good deal of science to be learned and carried out just by looking at other worlds. People in those days thought they should just carry instruments, something important like thermometers, Geiger counters, and spectrometers. But it was Bruce's idea. He insisted that we carry cameras and

the means to get the images back here. In the book he co-authored with Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan, Mars and the Mind of Man, Bruce expressed time and again the need for humankind to carry on with the exploration of space for the sake of satisfying this human need to explore. And in my many conversations with Bruce, he often expressed the need for all of us to seek what lay beyond what he often called the unknown horizon.

I mean, that is the essence of exploration. If you stop and think about the word image and the word imagine, they share a common root. They're almost the same word. To imagine is to create a picture in your mind. And indeed, that is what Bruce did. work. To imagine is to create a picture in your mind. And indeed, that is what Bruce did, not just for his colleagues in the scientific and engineering communities, but for all of us, for all humankind. That's quite a legacy. It's quite a legacy, Bruce. Thank you. Now, with images in mind, I'm very proud to announce today the Bruce Murray Space Image Library. It is a gallery of pictures that have changed the way people everywhere on Earth

view and come to terms with our place in the cosmos, what I like to call our place in space. Thanks to some wonderful support of a few organizations represented among us here today, we present the images that I strongly believe would absolutely not exist without Bruce Murray. Here's one taken by Viking 2. Bruce was especially proud of. You see some frost on the rocks. This was taken with a relatively low resolution camera.

But since then, we have enhanced it to this high resolution striking image. An image of another world. A place, it looks to me, you could walk around and have a picnic if you just had a means to keep warm and breathe. a spacecraft that launched well after his retirement. Here's an image of the Curiosity rover and its wheels. And for those of you who may not know this, the wheels leave the letters JPL imprinted in Morse code in the Martian soil as they roll along. A nice trick that I'm sure Dr. Murray would have been very pleased with. A nice trick that I'm sure Dr. Murray would have been very pleased with.

These images take us beyond the known horizon to the unknown horizon. The Bruce Murray Space Image Library is a permanent feature of the Society now. Through his vision, Bruce Murray brought other worlds down to Earth. Thank you, Dr. Murray. Thank you very much. Bill Nye the Science Guy, one of many speakers at the November 10th Memorial Service for Dr. Bruce Murray. We once again thank the California Institute of Technology and the Murray family for allowing us to present today's excerpts. The Bruce Murray Space Image Library is at planetary.org. Bruce Spatz has joined us once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio, and we've got lots to tell you about, so dig right in. Welcome.

Let's talk about what you won't be seeing, at least not easily, which is Comet ISON. Oh, you mean the comet of the century. Note that no scientists involved with this, to my knowledge, ever called it that. But the media did, yes. The comet of the century, really scientifically interesting and made for an exciting last few days for me and many others tracking it. But Comet ISON did not do well in going past the sun, although I do have to make sure we give it credit

for doing an undead kind of thing. A walking dead, a vampire, choose zombie, because people thought it was completely dead shortly before Perihelion. And then suddenly it appeared and started brightening again, and then it looks like someone put a wooden stake in its nucleus. There may be kind of a dust debris, but the general thought is the time we're recording this, not much of a nucleus, if any nucleus, made it through perihelion, closest point to the sun. And check out planetary.org for some groovy animations of what NASA spacecraft

saw put together by our own Emily Lakdawalla. Some wrap-ups from me and others. You can go to planetary.org slash comet and get all the recent blog posts related to this. Let's blaze into what you can see easily. Venus, not only can you see it, but it is at its highest and brightest for this apparition. Low in the west, actually not even that low, but kind of low in the west. Certainly you want to see it in the first hour or two after sunset, looking really, really bright. On December 5th, there's even a crescent moon thrown in to make for a lovely scene. It's just faboo. And we've got Jupiter coming up now at 7 or 8 p.m. in the east,

so balancing the other side of the sky with a really bright planet. Castor and Pollux, the stars of Gemini, are hanging out to its left. Mars coming up in the middle of the night in the east, much dimmer, but reddish, so always groovy. And Saturn now appearing low in the pre-dawn, much dimmer, but reddish, so always groovy. And Saturn, now appearing low in the pre-dawn, so we've got planets everywhere. Even Mercury, though really tough, you might be able to catch soon after this airs very low in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history appropriately. It was this week in space history, in 1995, that the SOHO spacecraft was launched, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, an ESA-NASA mission that is still working 18 years later and

actually provided some of the key data for observing comet ISON. We move on to Rondon Space Fact. Comet ISON was the largest ever observed sun grazing comet, at least before it went and was sun grazing. Had a nucleus about two kilometers in diameter-ish before its up-close-and-personal encounter closer than one solar diameter to the sun. You know, if there was ever a comet that should have been called Icarus, this one was it. Yeah, those pesky wings kind of melted off as it went flying by. All right, we move on to the trivia question. The first India-Mars mission, which now, as of a few days ago, is successfully on a trajectory to Mars, has been named MOM, Mars Orbiter Mission. I asked you if there were a mission with the acronym DAD. What would it stand for? We're looking for most humorous answers to win.

And I know we did great, Matt, but why don't you tell us about some of our answers? I'd love to. And we got a better response to this than we do for most of our sort of get creative contests. So thanks to everybody who entered. As usual, we won't have time to mention everybody. Here's an honorable mention. Mark Wilson, who says he studied numerous photos of the Andromeda Galaxy, was startled to find that none of the images showed evidence of donuts. Therefore, he calls for a mission to be called

Deliver Andromeda Donuts, Dad. So, thank you, Mark. I was entertained by that. Let's get on, though, to our top three winners, because, yes, we have a couple of people who tied for second place. I'm going to give you those first. From Kamil Stefaniak in Poland, the Dino-Avenging Asteroid Destroyer. So, Kamil, that was good enough to get you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And Kurt Lewis

outdid himself, as did a number of other people. He had a whole bunch of possible DAD acronyms for us. I'm just going to mention two. His primary one, the Defense Against Daleks Spacecraft, which is a whole network similar to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars, and we can't build that soon enough, if you ask me. But this one that really got to me, Deliver an Asteroid to Detroit,

Newest Government Support for U.S. auto industry, raw iron from space. I just don't know that it would be healthy for Detroit to send an asteroid at it. I see where you're going. Misplaced charity here, perhaps. You have the winner for us. I do indeed. Our winner is Stephen Porter from Piedmont, California. And he gave us, in dad-like protector style, the Dangerous Asteroid Deflector.

We had a lot of people who used that A for asteroid. But he also added some of the payload of that spacecraft, the Planetesimal Orbit Perturbation Systems, or POPS, and the Focused Ablation Targeter for Hindering Earth Rendezvous, that's right, FATHER. So dad with POPS and father on board. Congratulations to our winner, Stephen Porter. And what's Stephen get, Matt? Stephen in Piedmont, California, gets that Planetary Radio t-shirt,

but he also gets a MAVEN mission patch. So congratulations, Stephen. By the way, just one other honorable mention here, because he also came up with a father acronym, Dan Price, for altering the trajectory of high-mass Earth-approaching rocks. Dad really, apparently, is going to be designed to have something to do with asteroid deflection. Yes, I guess so, now. Well, unless it has to do with donuts and other galaxies. What do you got for next time?

All right. As we look back and reflect upon its four and a half billion year life, let us remember, what does ISON, as in Comet ISON, stand for? Just to be clear, I'm looking for what it actually stands for, not a humor contest. Though you're welcome to throw those things in. We're looking for the actual Comet ISON, more formally known as C2012S1. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get your entry into us there by when, Matt? By the 9th of December, Monday, December 9, at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about Comet ISON and all the good times we had together. Thank you, and good night. Hey, it was fun while it lasted, but, you know, when you're burning the comet at both ends... He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced

by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the brightly burning members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Music Music Music Music