Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrating Yuri’s Night 2016 with Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti

Episode Date: April 12, 2016

Happy Yuri’s Night! We’re partying under Space Shuttle Endeavour in the first of two shows featuring interviews from the worldwide celebration of space. Star Trek’s Robert Picardo will talk about his new video newsletter, the Planetary Post, and we’ll visit with Samantha Cristoforetti, who returned last June from 200 days aboard the International Space Station.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Yuri's Night on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with the first of two shows from the Yuri's Night Los Angeles celebration, one that came three days early this year. We'll talk with two of the so-called ambassadors at that amazing party under Space Shuttle Endeavor, Star Trek's Robert Picardo, who is now one of my colleagues at the Society, and a very special conversation with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who returned from the International Space Station last June.

Bill Nye has the week off while he's at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado. I'll be joining him there right after I finish assembling this week's show, but Bruce Betts is here, and so is the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're a little bit late, but not too late, to talk about your latest What's Up Around the solar system. More than 20 spacecraft from nations all over this world exploring other worlds in our solar neighborhood. And I marvel at the fact that seven of those, seven active spacecraft just at Mars. Mars is a very busy place right now with five orbiters and two rovers,

both rovers exploring Mars' most ancient rocks, clay-rich rocks. Curiosity is just about to finish crossing the Knocklift Plateau on its way to the Murray Buttes. That mission is having lots of adventures, as is Opportunity, which did some really scary hill climbing last month and unfortunately didn't quite manage to get to the peak of the hill where it was trying to reach some really tasty-looking rocks, but they have other options. They've backed down the hill and are turning around to find another spot. Good old opportunity. And I forgot to mention that there's an eighth on its way, of course, out at Saturn. On the very day that you released this

blog post, April 4th, there was another flyby by Cassini. Cassini flew past Titan for the 119th time, which is just amazing. And of course, it's doing amazing science at Titan. But the other reason that it flies by Titan is to adjust its orbit. And this particular flyby of Titan kicked its orbit up another 10 degrees in inclination. So the views onto Saturn's rings are going to be a little bit more top down than we've been seeing in the last month or two. All right, let's go even further out. There is news from New Horizons. Yes, New Horizons has been working very hard to downlink data, doing that by spinning the spacecraft and pointing at Earth,

which allows it to use two radio transmitters instead of just one to downlink data at the hugely high rate of four kilobits per second. But it can't keep that up if it wants to be able to point and shoot its camera. So it stopped spinning just today and is now getting ready to do some observations of a very distant Kuiper belt object, 1994 JR1. Wow. Now there are a couple of Japanese missions that I think you wanted to mention. Yes, that's right. Akatsuki, which is in orbit at Venus, has just fired a 15-second thrust from its reaction control thrusters, the only one it has left after its main engine blew up on its first attempt to enter Venus orbit. And that has modified its orbit. It's really getting ready to finally start doing

Venus science. Meanwhile, Hayabusa 2 has begun a very long period of ion engine thrusting, about 800 hours of thrusting planned, in order to match its orbit with near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, which it will rendezvous with in the summer of 2018. Say something about this diagram that you include pretty much every month. This diagram is made by a space fan named Olaf Frohn, who keeps track of where all the active spacecraft are in the solar system, as well as where all their destinations are, where all the planets and asteroids being studied and the comets are in their particular orbits. It's really fun to flip backwards, actually, through these diagrams over time and just see the constant motion of all these spacecraft all over the solar system. So I was slightly off. This was actually posted April 5th.

That's Emily's latest What's Up in the Solar System, the April 2016 edition. It includes this contribution from our colleague Jason Davis about Earth launches and landings. Emily, more to come next week. Look forward to talking to you again. Looking forward to it, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to the great Sky and Telescope magazine. What would Yuri Gagarin thought of that driving dance beat? Especially if he knew it was the soundtrack for a celebration of his achievement on that April 12th, 55 years ago.

I like to think he'd have joined the Worldwide Party once he learned it wasn't just for him, but for the efforts by all of humankind to explore and occupy our solar system and beyond. This year there were about 180 parties on our pale blue dot, including two in Antarctica, five in Africa, three in both Iran and Israel, 21 in Yuri's mother Russia, and 76 across North America. We set up the planetary radio microphones in a corner of the Los Angeles gathering, once more directly under magnificent space shuttle Endeavour at the California Science Center. It was a bit early, Saturday, April 9th,

and the big room was packed to capacity with space fans of every description. There are a few people wandering this year at Yuri's Night who have been convinced to wear blue sashes that say Yuri's Night Ambassador. And, sir, you are? I am Robert Picardo, Matt, and stop pretending you don't know who I am. I'm here as one of the space ambassadors. I am delighted to have been asked. I guess I represent the inspiration of the science fiction industry

to real space achievers like Yuri Gagarin. Although, this was 1961. It was pre-Star Trek, so I don't know what inspired him. I guess it was plain old bravery and the desire to step out into a new world. Might have been. You know, art, science, they follow each other, of course. You have, I'm sure, seen all of the Star Trek outfits, all of the costumes here. Yes. People come dressed up.

Some of them come dressed as real astronauts. Some of them are real astronauts, so there's a good reason for them to be dressed that way. But there's a lot of science fiction here. I've seen some stormtroopers. I've seen, I think, Darth Vader's successor, Offspring. There's a lot of people from the wrong franchise, as far as I'm concerned.

But there's a lot of people dressed up in miscellaneous, futuristic outfits, some very attractive outfits. The great thing about science fiction outfits, especially on females, is they tend to be very well tailored. And that's all I'll say on that subject. I like that sophisticated description. What is your job as an ambassador? Well, we just mingle around. My particular purpose tonight is my new feature for the Planetary Society, the video newsletter called the Planetary Post, which comes out mid-month, every month, starting this past February, is I'm going to do a little featurette about it.

So we are doing some video, we're interviewing some people, and we're just taking in the scene here because it's a world party, Yuri's Night. It's not just in Southern California, here in the shadow of the Endeavor, which is, by the way, I think the Endeavor needs a paint job. Is that just me? It looks a little beaten up. I know it's old, but you'd think they would have, I don't know, buffed it out, I guess, before they put it on display here. I'll talk to you about that after we're done. There's more to that story. But anyway, everybody is here celebrating the incredible event of the first human being to venture into space.

Everybody has that excitement and enthusiasm and passion for human adventure. And everyone you talk to, if I've asked them for my own program for the Planetary Society, and I consider you a friendly competitor, Matt. You should know that at Planetary Radio. We support each other. Of course, you've been around and doing this for quite some time and inspired a lot of wannabes like me

to try to capture some of your audience. Oh, my God, something exciting is happening right now. Do we know what that is? I don't know, but I know that you're due up on that stage shortly, so I'm going to let you go, Mr. Ambassador, Your Excellency. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for sharing this event as I'm trying with the greater world. You, before I go,

you were there at the first Yuri's Night. Isn't that true? I was indeed. That's where this t-shirt came from. Oh my god, well you've laundered it since then, I hope, right? Not often. Well, I admire you for having been there from the get-go. I've been before, but I certainly wasn't there back in 2001 when it started. But that's what's great about it. At the time Yuri went into space, being the first human in space in 1961, it fueled this incredible competition in the heat of the Cold War. That sounds kind of funny, the heat of the Cold War. In the peak of the Cold War.

And now we can all celebrate it as one planet, that it's a human achievement and not an achievement of a particular government or a particular country's space program. It is a great achievement of mankind. Hear him, hear him. All right. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, my pleasure. It's a pleasure always to talk with you.

Live long and party. Actor and Planetary Society board member Robert Picardo at the Yuri's Night Los Angeles party on April 9th, 2016. We'll rejoin the celebration in one minute with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio.

Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration?

Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary dot org slash election 2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with the first of two episodes largely recorded at Yuri's Night LA, the Los Angeles celebration of the first voyage of a human being into Earth orbit. Yuri Gagarin was that human, and he made his flight 55 years ago. And in those 55 years, barely half a thousand other men and women

have slipped the surly bonds of Earth. One of them is Samantha Cristoforetti. You've probably seen her picture. You may have read her tweets from the International Space Station, which she called home for a few hours short of 200 days. Samantha returned to Earth on June 11, 2015, with a huge grin on her face. Since then, she has continued to share the wonder and joy of her mission. At 18, the future astronaut and captain in the Italian Air Force visited the

United States to attend Space Camp. She's the second alum of that program to make it off our planet. Like Robert Picardo, Samantha was a Yuri's Night ambassador, but she wasn't wearing a sash. I suppose her blue flight suit eliminated the need for that. She joined me early in the evening at the Planetary Radio Microphone's Under Space Shuttle Endeavour. May I call you Samantha? Absolutely. Thank you. Samantha, welcome to Planetary Radio. It's an honor to have you on the program. Oh, it's my pleasure and my honor to be on the program. And I'm glad you're so close to the microphone because we are in this crazily loud hall underneath Space Shuttle Endeavour, which you did not get to fly on, but you did have an awfully nice experience in space, didn't you?

Absolutely. Yeah, it wasn't the shuttle. I rode a Soyuz rocket and a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station not that long ago. I launched in November 2014 and got back last year in June 2015. So 200 days on this amazing place, which is the International Space Station. And now have the record for the longest stay on a single mission by a woman in space. And in fact, I think you're 74th out of 500-something human beings who've been to lower Earth orbit or the moon. Well, I wouldn't know that, to be honest.

Well, you are up there. You're way ahead of most of the men, I think, as well. The photo, of course, that I think is the most famous of you is that one of you in the Star Trek uniform in the cupola. That cupola is there because of Italy. True. Cupola was built in Italy, in Torino. Actually, like most of the pressurized modules in the USOS segment of the space station,

so the US orbital segment, most of them have been built by Telesalernia in Italy, so that's something we're very proud of. I want to come back to that, the Italian Space Agency and Italy's role in space exploration, because it is much more substantial than many people in this nation, the United States, realize. I mentioned that photo of you in the cupola in your Star Trek uniform, but I actually, there's another one that I like just as much, if not better, and it's from outside the cupola. Do you know what the one I'm talking about? When I'm waving in the cupola? Yes, yes. Who took that? Who was on EVA? Oh, it wasn't actually an EVA. It was, I think, Terry or Butch.

One of my crewmates set up a camera in one of the Russian modules, and there is one window that if you set up the camera just right, you're going to be able to face the cupola. And so they set up the camera, and then they had it running on, you know, continuous mode. So it was just taking pictures all the time, and we would just take turns in the cupola, waving through the window. How aware were you of the fact, when you were looking through those beautiful, rather sizable windows, that just on the other side of that window was space, was a vacuum? It's not something we think about consciously that much, I think. It just becomes your home, and you live a wonderful life on the space station.

It's a very pleasant place to be at. True, you have to adjust to a few inconveniences that are linked to being in space, but overall it's very pleasant to be up there. And it's not like you think all the time that, hey, there's just a thin piece of metal or of glass separating me from space or from a horrible death. You just don't think about that too much. Mostly you enjoy the view, I guess, when you get to go into the cupola. You enjoy the view, which is magnificent, but you just enjoy the fact of being up there and living this extraterrestrial life and being able to float and just the feeling that you are, for people on the ground,

you are this dot of light, you know, when you happen to be visible, that flies through the sky very fast and, you know, they glance at you and you're one of the six human beings who are off the planet at that very moment. And at the same time, you look out and you can actually embrace so many of them with just one look. And that's just the fact that it's just special to be up there because everything you do has so much meaning. Even if you're doing a little thing like, I don't know, I'm grabbing a sample and putting it in a freezer or something like that.

It's just a trivial task, but for somebody on the ground it has enormous meaning because that's their experiment and they have worked on it maybe for years. So every little thing that you do has such a big meaning. And I know some of those principal investigators and I know how grateful they are to you and the other people like you who actually get to run their experiments while they're up there. What was your favorite activity on the ISS? Was it the science that you did? Well, I enjoyed, you know, some experiments you like more than others, of course, especially the ones where you're more involved to the human physiology ones when, you know, you're kind of like the subject of the experiment. And so you have to maybe make a complex setup and,

you know, the training really needs to kick in because, you know, you really have to make it right. So those are the ones that I guess I enjoyed the most because they were more challenging. But then I also enjoyed doing robotics, like grappling the dragon. I enjoyed supporting the spacewalks of my crewmates. I really felt like I had their lives in my hands, like building that suit piece by piece around them and making sure they got out there safely and safely back. Pretty important job. Pretty important, stressful job, yes.

But then so is grappling the Dragon. For the few people in our sophisticated audience for this show who don't know, would you explain what that meant? Yes, so Dragon, just like Cygnus and HTV, they are cargo vehicles that come and bring supplies to the space station, but they are unable to actually dock to the space station automatically. This is something that the Russian Progress does, and the European Automated Transfer Vehicle was able to do. But Dragon, Cygnus, and HTV, they come up and they park themselves in some kind of formation flying with the space station

at about 10 meters. And they're pretty stable out there. And then from inside we fly, we operate the robotic arm, and we basically go out there and catch them. And then with the robotic arm we birth them through the space station, and then they basically become an additional room to our orbital house. So that would make me very anxious because, yes, you're working in microgravity, but you still have this huge mass that you have to gently mate with the space station. You must have trained endlessly for this in Houston. Well, the most critical task is actually the grapple because it has to happen pretty fast.

And the vehicle is stabilized, of course course but it still has some residual rates so it's still a little bit moving and so that's the main task for the astronauts because that's something that they can't do from the ground. Once you actually have captured the vehicle so it's safely attached to the robotic arm the ground controllers they take over because it's something that's going to take quite some time to birth it very slowly very carefully to the ISS and so they do that from the ground. Another activity up there that you became very well known for is your social media activity, Twitter especially, I think.

You had a lot of opportunities to communicate with millions of people all over this planet. It must have been fun. It was incredible. You know, I love that opportunity that is granted by social media. When I became an astronaut, it wasn't that long ago. It was in 2009. I remember still very vividly being on the other side, you know, being somebody who is fascinated and passionate about space

and craving for information, craving from that perspective from people who were in orbit. And so when I became an astronaut, it became sort of my mission to share as much as possible. And I wasn't on social media back then. Maybe I had a private Facebook account, but I wasn't particularly active on it. But then a few years later, then I discovered Twitter, and it seemed like the right platform to really reach out to people and share as much as possible the experience

did that fit into your i know you have a very strong interest in stem or maybe steam activities particularly for young women girls yeah you know i believe in in sharing what you do and then letting people take home whatever is useful for them so i do think that having a female in a science and technology job can be inspiring and that I could serve as a role model, but I don't like to force that onto people. I just like to share what I do and then hope that it's going to be something useful for folks. I said we'd come back to the Italian Space Agency

and Italy's participation in space exploration. In almost all of the robotic missions, the planetary science missions, including the Curiosity rover, and certainly on ISS, Italy is a major player. Yes, definitely. Italy is definitely one of the leading space powers in the world. You know, observation of the universe, Earth observation, and of course human space flight. In the European Space Agency right now we have the greatest number of astronauts, for example, and we've flown quite a number of missions,

myself and my colleagues, in the last few years. And that is something which is very visible, of course, also back home in Italy. But as you rightly say, it's not only the astronauts. There's a lot of commitment in science, technology, the science community and the industry. So yeah, definitely, we're very much present in the space business. So if NASA called and the Italian Space Agency said, yes, Samantha, we want you again, would you make a second trip?

Of course. I think they all know that I'm ready to go anytime. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. It's been my pleasure, my honor. I think you need to go make a presentation. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who returned to Earth last June after 200 days on the International Space Station. That's it for this week's portion of the interviews I recorded at the 2016 Yuri's Night celebration in Los Angeles, California. I'll have more great stuff from the party next week, including the president and CEO of Planetary Resources, Chris Lewicki, who helped create Yuri's Night back in 2001. Chris will give us an update on his company's progress toward its goal

of mining asteroids, and he'll share one of the coolest 3D printed objects ever created. Also on the show will be JPL's Bob Pappalardo and Bobak Mohawk Guy-Ferdowsky, now building the orbiter that will explore Jupiter's moon Europa in the next decade. And we'll meet someone who has given Virgin Galactic $200,000 for a ticket to ride into space. Bruce Betts is here, ready for another edition of What's Up on Planetary Radio. Tell us about the night sky and give some stuff away. Go ahead, what's up with the night sky? Well, we got that groovy triangle of Saturn, Mars, and the reddish star Antares coming up around 11 p.m. or midnight over in the east.

around 11 p.m. or midnight over in the East. You can see Saturn looking yellowish and Mars and Antares looking reddish with Mars being the brighter of the two. And then in the evening sky, earlier evening, you can see Jupiter over in the East and then the South as the night progresses and Mercury also coming up low in the West shortly after the sunset. So a whole bunch of planets in the evening and night sky.

On to this week in space history. Matt, this is horrifying, but I think I may have made my first mistake in all the years of planetary radio. Oh, no. Stop the presses. Or at least it's the only one I remember. I kind of gave this week's space history last week. So I'm just going to repeat those. Sorry, folks. 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. 1970, Apollo 13 was launched. Well, those are both worth repeating regardless. And it wasn't an error, a factual error, at least. It was just... No, no.

I was just so excited that I got ahead of myself. Well, and a happy Yuri's Night to you, by the way. And happy stuff to you. On to... Random Space Facts. That's good. That's good. Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens, who discovered Saturn's moon Titan,

also invented pendulum clocks, which were a huge leap forward in the accuracy of timekeeping. I thought I knew about this stuff, especially after studying up for my visit to the Greenwich Observatory, but I did not know that. Well, I'm always glad when I can expand your horizons and add to your knowledge. My time horizons as well. Thank you. You're welcome. On to the trivia contest. Speaking of learning, what was the first spacecraft to orbit the moon? How'd we do, Matt? Wow, huge response for this. I don't know what generated it, but nearly a record in terms of the number of entries received. Nearly all of them correct. A few people said Apollo 8,

nice try, but that of course was the first human mission to orbit that little satellite. Not so little, really. Here's our winner, Michael Unger of Vancouver, British Columbia, where I happen to know, because of other correspondence, he works at the Macmillan Space Center. But he is a first time winner who said it was Luna 10, correct? That is correct. The Soviet Luna 10 first to orbit the moon. In 1966. That is correct. A lot of people pointed this out. It also broadcasts direct from the moon, the Internationale,

that sort of socialist, communist theme song. Michael said that, but we had a couple of other people, including Norman Kassoon, who pointed out that it was actually recorded the night before, because the Soviet scientists and engineers running it were

a little too afraid to try and do that live. They had hoped to time it out so they could do it live to the big meeting of the Communist Party Congress, which was taking place that day. Pure coincidence, of course. In honor of this little musical performance, Dave Fairchild, our poet in Shawnee, Kansas, Luna 10 and 66 Around the Moon did go to play the Internationale for Soviets Below

until they found a missing note. Roscosmos went berserk. They had to play a backup tape. It wasn't their best work. We also heard from Ben Brown of Arab, Alabama. Who knew? It's about 30 miles south of Huntsville. I looked it up. He says, honorable mention, Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 went around the moon even further back, October 1959, but it just looped it and made a figure eight and came back to Earth. Finally, this from Bob Lee in Brewster, New York. He says, for him, the first ship to orbit the moon will always be the projectile

in Jules Verne's Around the Moon, the 1870 sequel to From the Earth to the Moon. Anyway, it's Michael Unger, though, who is going to pick up the prize for this week, a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, the non-profit worldwide network of telescopes that anybody can get access to, and a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. And I think we're going to repeat that prize package again. All right. What moon in our solar system has a massive equatorial ridge running three quarters of the way around the moon?

Around that moon? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. The dust star is approaching. You need to get this one to us by Tuesday, April 19th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And again, somebody's going to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. We're done.

All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up on night sky. Think about who you would like to throw a rubber asteroid at. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Batts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and he joins us each week here for What's Up?

And he's thrown a lot of those asteroids. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its party animal members. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies and a very happy Yuri's Night.