Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan Leaves NASA

Episode Date: January 17, 2017

For well over three years, planetary scientist Ellen Stofan has worked directly with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to help coordinate and expand the myriad science efforts by the agency. We talk with her as she ends this remarkable tenure.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NASA's just-departed Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. What does it mean to be Chief Scientist for what is probably the world's most famous science agency? What is probably the world's most famous science agency? What is Ellen Stofan most proud of across her three and a half years with the agency? And what is she looking forward to? That and more is in our conversation coming up today. Bill Nye phones home from halfway around the world with admiring words for Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan, as well as for Ellen. Which is longer, a year on Jupiter or the lifetime of this show?

Bruce Betts will reveal the thrilling answer in this week's What's Up. Been to the movies lately? Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla has. Emily, you called your January 11 review of Hidden Figures, the movie that is doing extremely well at the box office, triumphant in the theater, Sobering After. You obviously like this movie a lot. Why? I liked it, and so did my kids. We have three very different protagonists,

all of them computers for NACA. Computers back in the 50s and 60s were actual people who performed mathematical calculations for engineers working on problems. And in this era, there was a whole group of 20 black woman computers working at Langley in order to do things like calculate the trajectories to send the first astronauts into space. They're all very different. They have different life stories, but they all face the same challenges and they all in their unique way overcome them. Every little victory was just celebrated in the theater. The audience was applauding many times by the end of the movie

and you walk out of there feeling uplifted that people through determination and skill and brains and talent can really get to places that have been denied to them for so long. My jet pilot brother also highly recommends the movie. He said that people were applauding in the theater where he saw this film as well. Why sobering afterward? Well, the more I think about this movie, the more sobered I get because, of course, you know, at the time that this movie took place, segregation was quite explicit. There were separate bathrooms for black and white people. It's actually a major plot point in the movie. And nowadays, of course, we don't have that, but there's an awful lot that hasn't changed.

If you look around, particularly in tech, particularly in scientific fields like geology and astronomy, there are hardly any non-white people anywhere you look. And you know it's not because of lack of talent. you look and you know it's not because of lack of talent. It's because of ongoing prejudice, whether intentional or unintentional, and only action will change that. Only concerted, thoughtful action. I think it's fitting that we're discussing this on Martin Luther King Day. Yes, it certainly is. I have not seen the movie yet, so I appreciate you're not delivering any spoilers to me or others who are still looking forward to seeing it. And I look forward to doing that this week. Do you want to say something as well, not about hidden figures, but this book for young people, especially young women,

Hidden Human Computers? Yes, this is a history book talking about many different women who played many different roles early on in the early development of the space program. And one of the two authors is actually the granddaughter of one of the computers. So she really tells a story of the variety of different ways that people found success. And the sidebars in the book provide a lot of cultural context. I think it's a really excellent nonfiction book for middle schoolers and upper schoolers. And hey, I learned a lot by reading it too. So I think it's an excellent book. It's a great book. Thank you for and upper schoolers. And hey, I learned a lot by reading it too. So I think it's an excellent book. It's a great book. Thank you for sending it to me. And we look forward to talking more about hidden human computers pretty soon on this show. In the meantime,

take a look at Emily's review, January 11 at planetary.org. Thanks a lot, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, tell us where we find you today and why you're there. I am in Kyoto, Japan for the International Solar Sailing Symposium, and I'm here representing the Planetary Society and our LightSail spacecraft. Today we'll talk about LightSail 1 and how excited people around the world got about it, and tomorrow we'll talk about the technical aspects of LightSail 2. But that's just our

presentation here from the Planetary Society. There's all the other couple dozen people from around the world who are into solar sails are here. We compare notes. We try to advance the technology, the state of the art. A promising technology, a promising way to explore. Oh man, there's nothing like it because there's no fuel. So once you get on orbit, you just go flying. So we have made a lot of improvements in LightSail 2 to get around the little problems we have with LightSail 1. And I hope we engage people around the world in the same way. I mean, Matt, people just love it. It's just such an exciting, such a romantic idea. Sailing the stars on light. It's great. It's cool. It's wonderful. It is. Speaking of romantic voyages,

we just lost the last man to walk on the moon. We found this out. I was recording Emily, got done, and she noticed on Twitter that Gene Cernan had passed away, and I had to give you the news a minute ago. Yeah, Gene Cernan walked on the moon. There's only 12 people in human history have done that. And he was a classic guy that knew what he was doing. That is to say, you could count on him in these very technical, complex situations where what he was doing was historic,

but it required concentration, fighter pilot. Those are the days, man. So no, it's really a wonderful thing. I'm sorry he died, but apparently that's the way of the world. So let's just honor his memory and exploration. As I say, those men and the women that supported him really paved the way for what we do. And every day I just dream that humankind will continue to explore the solar system and find life on other worlds. It's very exciting. Along that line, I understand our next guest is Ellen Stofan. You bet.

Give her my best. She just retired or stopped working at NASA to pursue other, I'm sure, academic, remarkable things. But when she was there, she advanced the state of the art. Our search for life is ever more sophisticated. Every week there's something, Matt. Every week there's something. And this week there's three things. So thank you very much for having me on the show. Thank you.

Have a great time there. Domo arigato. Domo arigato. Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye, the science guy. They're in Kyoto to talk about solar sailing. We will talk with Alan Stofan in moments. NASA has a science mission directorate headed by an associate administrator.

It's a big job with five busy divisions to oversee. But the agency also has a chief scientist who separately answers directly to the NASA administrator. For the last three and a half years, that job has been held by the very distinguished geologist and planetary scientist, Ellen Stofan. As you'll hear in our Skype conversation recorded a few days ago, Ellen is ending her tenure at NASA HQ. We've talked with her before, including her participation in the Planetary Society's 35th anniversary celebration back in 2015.

But now I wanted to conduct an exit interview, if you will, and she graciously agreed. Ellen, it is absolutely a delight to get you back on planetary radio. Now I wanted to conduct an exit interview, if you will, and she graciously agreed. Ellen, it is absolutely a delight to get you back on Planetary Radio. Thank you for joining us and congratulations on completing your tenure as chief scientist for NASA. Thank you. You know, it's been a fun three and a half years and it's time to move on, but I've really loved my time at NASA. Tell us about that job. What is the job of the chief scientist for that agency? The administrator of NASA generally has, they have four chiefs.

There's a chief health and medical officer, a chief engineer, a chief scientist, and a chief technologist. The chief scientist and the chief technologist positions are normally two-year positions because the administrator likes to have people come from the outside to provide sort of a broader community view of, you know, what's the latest in technology, what is the science community thinking, as sort of an outside NASA point of view to give him sort of a broader strategic look for the agency. But when Charlie Bolden, my boss, who's the most amazing guy on earth, when I reached my two year point, and a little while later, the chief technologist David Miller from MIT was reaching his two year point, Charlie said, Would you guys stay until I'm done? Would

you stay till the end of the administration? And so I, I stayed, I ended up being there three and a half years instead of the normal two. And David Miller actually was there through August. And then he had to go back to MIT. I'm intrigued now because of what you just said about your boss, Charlie Bolden. Why? Why did you find him so amazing? You know, NASA has, for the last five years, NASA has won the award of the best place to work in the federal government.

And I really put it down to Charlie. He's an incredibly inclusive guy. If you're the maintenance guy at NASA, if you're the elite engineer on a spacecraft, if you're the chief financial officer, he treats everybody the same. And you're all part of the NASA family. He's passionate about the agency. He always is looking to say what is the best thing to do for NASA? He is actually really passionate about science, which a lot of people don't realize. And it's his love

for the agency, his dedication, his devotion to the people of the agency that made him just an incredible pleasure to work with. I appreciate that. I'm still curious about your job, because there are so many science efforts underway at NASA. Do you spend your time sort of taking a look at all of those, or is it sort of above that level? Abdel-Adi, who's an earth scientist, talked to previous chief technologists. The idea is that you're really coming in and trying to take an agency point of view. So you're not just looking at the science that we do in the science mission directorate, you know, earth science or astrophysics. You're really looking at what are we doing in human spaceflight? What are we doing in science? What are we doing in technology? And how do those things knit together. So you're trying to take that cross agency view and really staying at the strategy and policy levels. For example, something like in the science mission directorate, that directorate really gets its strategy, as you well

know, from the National Academy. So it really looks to the Academy to say, where are we going? What are we going to do next? And NASA pretty much tries to implement what the Academy has recommended, given budgetary constraints. So I didn't spend a lot of time sort of focusing on, you know, what is the nitty gritty of decisions that are being made in the science mission directorate, first by John Grunsfeld and now by Thomas Zurbuchen. I was really looking at especially a little more tilted towards human spaceflight. What are we doing with the International Space Station? What's the future of it? This journey to Mars thing, how are we going to get humans to Mars in the early 2030s? So there were issues that I could look and say, cross-agency issues, where do they need science input? Where can I be additive? And Charlie gave me a lot of leeway to sort of find things that I thought were issues and go after them. And he

was extremely supportive of that. What are you most proud of over that roughly three and a half years that you you had the job, both your own accomplishments and what NASA accomplished? It's really in those the two areas plus one more that I just mentioned journey to Mars, I think we've come up with a good architecture. I think we can get humans to Mars orbit in the early 2030s, around 2032. We start with maximizing our use of the space station, then moving humans out to the vicinity of the moon, then getting them to Mars orbit while we continue to work on entry, descent, and landing technologies. You hear a lot of people saying, oh, sending humans to Mars, it's not possible. It's too much money.

I think we've actually come up with an affordable architecture. I worked really hard with the head of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, the head of technology, Steve Jurczyk, with John Grunsfeld and David Miller and now Thomas Zurbuchen in our brief overlap. And we feel like we've got a viable architecture that we can do this. And so I'm pretty proud of that. Obviously, what happens with that is anybody's guess at this point. The other thing I worked a lot on that I'm pretty proud of is really taking a hard look at the International Space Station.

Prior to me coming in, we'd really been through a phase of we've got this laboratory, this amazing microgravity research platform. Let's just fill it up with research. So I get there about a year into my tenure, all of a sudden we're actually oversubscribed. Crew time is one of the biggest limitations. So all of a sudden when you've got an asset and then the administration extended the ISS to 2024, we think it can last till about 2028. You say, OK, now that we're kind of full, where are we going with this? You know, where what's the scientific?

Where's the biggest scientific payoff? How do we start facilitating a move to the commercial, the private sector taking over low Earth orbit, NASA moving out beyond? Because frankly, we want to use those dollars to help move humans out beyond low Earth orbit. How is that transition going to happen? And it's not going to happen by magic. You've got to work. How do you work with the private sector?

How do you encourage low Earth orbit research? Where's the big payoff? So I worked a lot with the ISS folks at NASA on sort of that overall strategy, and that was a lot of fun because it certainly has not a lot to do with planetary geology. So it's fun. It's fun stuff. Amazing medical research that goes on really cool stuff. So that was a lot of fun to learn about. Then the final area that I'm pretty proud of, you know, Charlie, as I said, is passionate about everybody at the agency. I worked a lot with him, with Brenda Manuel, who's head of our Office of

Diversity and Equal Opportunity, on how do we make sure as an agency that we're the most inclusive that we can be, that we're really trying to, you know, we're normalizing NASA. We're trying to make NASA look like the population of the United States, you know, and we're less than a third women. You know, women make up slightly more than half the population. Why doesn't NASA look like that? We did a lot of efforts in terms of, we had a great summit last summer called the Mission STEM Summit, where we reached out to our grantee holding institutions and said, what are you doing on diversity and inclusion? What are you doing about sexual harassment? These big issues that have sort of rocked the science community over the last few years, but are reflective of society as a whole.

So we try to move the conversation forward on that issue. And finally, for me, it seems like a small thing, but I really pushed and got through with people in my office collecting demographic data on NASA grantees. So you can't demand people give you demographic information, but you can ask. And to me, you know, we've been learning a lot as a society over the last few years about implicit or unconscious bias. You know, we all carry these biases around. We don't know it. And it affects decisions. You know, there's been a ton of research done in this area about how you tend to pick people who look like you for a job. You tend to gravitate towards people who look like you. But then you're not building the best team because you're not getting that diversity of ideas that comes from a diversity of backgrounds. At NASA, we want to know, do we have some sort of unconscious or implicit bias when we put review panels together, when we pick grants?

And without data, you don't know. You know, I hope that we don't have a problem. But as a data-driven agency, we need data. And so we are now just starting to collect that data. This reminds me of a blog post that you wrote for the Planetary Society a couple of years ago after you made a trip to India. Talk about why that trip was so inspiring. You know, just shortly before I went to India, the Indian Space Agency had put their first Mars orbiter into orbit around Mars. Mom. Exactly, mom. When that happened, the picture that went around the world showing the celebrations that were taking place at the Indian Space Agency showed all these women in brightly colored, beautiful saris, all hugging each

other and celebrating. Now, we have a photo like that that we release at NASA, you know, whether it's New Horizons or whether it's the Curiosity landing. And frankly, those images that come out of NASA are usually at least 90% white guys. That image of these Indian women celebrating the spacecraft amongst the women in planetary science, everybody I knew on Twitter, on Facebook was reposting and reposting this image and saying how it had inspired them to see women celebrating their technical achievement. Obviously, it was a diverse team in India that it wasn't just women,

there was a diverse team that put this together, hugely inspiring. So when I was going over to India to visit with their space agency, I said, Can I meet some of these women that were in this picture that worked on mom. And so the Indian Space Agency very nicely put together, brought in a bunch of women, some of them from the photograph, some of them just other women that work at the at ISRO, the Indian Space Agency. And we just had a really fun conversation about why exploring Mars was important, how Mars was so scientifically interesting, the challenges getting humans to Mars, so a lot of technical conversations. And we talked about things like how difficult it is when you have a kid. I've got three kids, they're all grown up now, but that work-life balance. So we talked about a huge range of

issues from the technical to the personal, and it was really inspiring to me. They inspired me as again, I think when you think about people of color, when you think about women in science and technical fields, you're used to being isolated. You're used to looking around a room and not seeing anybody who looks like you. And those bits of seeing people who look like you are inspiring. And we could get into a huge conversation about hidden figures and why hidden figures are so important. But it goes back to that issue. You have to see people who look like you. And that image from ISRO really, I think, lifted up the women of planetary science around the world. And at least in planetary science, within the span of your own career, you've seen big changes. I

mean, I've seen it just in the conferences that I go to, where maybe this is one of the greatest success stories. I have seen it. Though, Matt, I think we still have a long way to go. Because, you know, when I started graduate school at Brown, you know, and this was, as my children would say, back in the days of the horse and buggy, but okay, it wasn't that long ago. I started graduate school in 83. And my class going into graduate school

was about half women and half men. But by the time we got our PhDs, a lot of the women had left. I would go to conferences then, and there'd be an awful lot of women. They don't stay. And that problem persists today. They drop out at the undergrad level. They drop out at the graduate school level. They drop out in the career. We see it at NASA. We have women in technical positions leave at a higher rate than men. Almost nobody leaves NASA. The rates are very low. People love working there. But still, it's statistically significant, more women that leave than men. Why? And I don't think it's a simple answer. I think it's still complicated. It's part of it is that inclusion part. Diversity

is great. And we're getting there. Again, like you said, you go to a conference and you're seeing about half women. Those women aren't staying in the technical workforce. They're leaving. And so that's the inclusion part. And that's a lot of what we focused on at this Mission STEM Summit. How do we not just open the door? We've done a good job with that.

But how once you've welcomed somebody in the room, how do you make them stay? How do you make them feel welcome? And it's not ability. You know, I don't want to hear that. It's not true. It's people being made not to feel welcome. And we've got a lot of work to do on that. Our most frequent guest on this show has been a woman, Cassini Project scientist Linda Spilker,

just a terrific spokesperson for planetary science and for her amazing mission. Are you still on that mission's radar team? I am, and Linda is such an amazing person. You know, she's really articulate. She's a great scientific communicator, which that was another thing I worked on at NASA was scientific communication. We actually put together a course that a woman had started, Sarah DeWitt, before I started at NASA was scientific communication. We actually put together a course that a woman had started, Sarah DeWitt, before I started at NASA, but I tried to sort of institutionalize it. We worked with the Alan Alda Center for Science Communication up at SUNY Stony Brook on how to get our scientists and engineers at NASA to communicate better. And we'll get back to Linda and Cassini in a minute,

but when I started in my job as chief scientist, I was going up on the hill meeting with congressional staff. And they said, you can't believe how many scientists come up here to talk to us. And after they leave, we all look at each other and say, we don't understand anything they just said. You're shaking your head. You know, that was my reaction. I thought those days were over, but okay. No, no, they're not over. And then, you know, we were sending some every, every week, the senior staff at NASA gets kind of a science highlights. And there were some of them that I was reading, and I didn't understand. It was an astrophysics one, you know, I had to call Paul Hertz, who's our amazing head of astrophysics at NASA, I had to call Paul and,

you know, he used finger puppets and explained it, explained it to me. But then you're like, okay, if I don't understand it, what was the chance that the non-scientists who this went to understood it? So how can we do a better job with science communication? One of the first talks I went and visited all the NASA centers. And one of the first places I went was JPL. I thought, all right, I'm going to step my foot in it. I gave sort of an overview, but then at the end, I, you know, I had this cartoon of a big head that just had blah, blah, blah, blah coming out of its mouth. And I said, JPL is known seven minutes of terror. They've done a great job in some areas of really getting complex things across in a really wonderful way. But I said, you know, this is what I'm hearing. We have a ways to go. And I thought,

boy, I'm going to get it, you know, here, they're going to come back at me. And at the end of my talk, all anybody in the audience wanted to talk about was how can we do a better job of communicating our science. And so the scientific community is, we understand from climate change to all these issues, we are not getting across to the public a lot of our science. We need help. We need to reach out beyond just talking to each other and talk to people who are experts in communication, who are sociologists. How can we get these complex science and sometimes negative things like climate change? How do we talk about this to the public? So Linda doesn't need to take that course. She already is a good communicator.

And yes, I'm still on Cassini. I had mostly worked on solid planets, Earth, Mars, Venus. So when I got involved with Cassini, I thought, you know, icy moons, you know, I'm not really an icy moons person. And I totally fell in love with Titan. It's the most amazing place in the solar system. Totally love it. And I've been really proud to work with the people on Cassini. It's the most amazing place in the solar system. Totally love it. And I've been really proud to work with the people on Cassini. It's an amazing team. Linda is a good example of how wonderful and strong the team is. I love the radar team. We have a lot of fun.

We've done some great science. And I am incredibly sad to see that mission coming to an end. As are we. And you won't find any disagreement from the Planetary Society about the importance of science communication. After all, look at who founded the place. Outgoing NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan will share more with us after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month.

We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team.

That's planetary.org slash STEAM team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ellen Stofan is about to leave her post at NASA headquarters.

No one will be surprised if she soon returns full-time to doing great planetary science. Not that she gave up hands-on science altogether when she became the agency's chief scientist three and a half years ago. You heard her say a few minutes ago that she never left the Cassini radar science team that has unveiled Saturn's cloud-shrouded moon Titan in exquisite detail. Let's talk more about Titan. You had a mission proposal in, didn't get funded sadly, but it's still one that is talked about, a very exciting concept. I hope you'll talk about that and why we need to learn more about that strange, strange world that in some ways looks so familiar. So I think it was around 2007, Cassini did its first pass with the radar across the North Pole of Titan. And we found all these dark, dark radar, dark blotches on the surface.

As a radar team, we wanted to be really careful. Could we demonstrate that these were liquid or just very, very smooth surfaces? So we had a lot of debate as a radar team came up and put out this Nature article saying, yes, these are lakes, they're lakes and seas and such an amazing thing. You know, here you are so far away from the earth. It rains, there's methane clouds in the atmosphere, a complete hydrologic cycle like the one here on earth. But the working fluid is basically methane and ethane instead of water because of the extremely cold temperatures on Titan. But who would have thought the only place in the solar system that we can go besides Earth

to understand that kind of a cycle, evaporation, precipitation, the only place we can go in the solar system to look at how do rivers erode a surface when the surface and the liquid are now slightly different. So let's go back to physics and say, I've now changed slightly the parameters. The liquid has different characteristics. The surface has different characteristics. All of a sudden, when you get to go to a new planet and change slightly the basic physical parameters, you go back to your models and say, wow, this model that we developed based only on the Earth and water and rocks here on Earth and our atmosphere, is the model really telling us everything? Or are there things we just didn't know because we only had the Earth to study? And so to me, Titan is this amazing place where you can do this comparative planetology because it has systems that we just don't find anywhere else in the solar system. How important is it that we go back to that little world and, you know, maybe set sail?

Well, you know, and that was the fun thing because at some point I had the folks from, you know, JPL had done some studies. They did this study called a billion dollar box study, and they said, what could you do at Titan for a billion dollars? And they came away and said, oh, there's nothing you can do. It's just too expensive. Missions to Titan are going to cost a huge amount of money. So when Lockheed Martin came to me and said, oh, we want you to be the PI on a concept, we're thinking of putting a floating lander on a sea on Titan. And I said, no, no, no, can't do it. Can't do it. In the Discovery mission class at that point, $425 million. So that's the mid range of missions that NASA funds.

Exactly. And I was skeptical, but I said, OK, let's look at this. So I got a couple of really close colleagues, Ralph Lorenz from APL, Jonathan Leneen, now at Cornell University. We started working with the folks at Lockheed Martin, Ben Clark in particular, Beau Beerhouse. And then we started working with the folks at APL. And we pushed and sure enough, this thing that went from looking like not possible, by really being innovative, by really pushing the technology, by really limiting the science and saying, what do we have to do? Not what do we want to do? What do we have to do? We have to

understand what these C's are made of. We have to be able to have a good enough mass spectrometer that if there's a deficit of something and an abundance of something that tells you there's a chemical reaction going on, if there are really complex molecules, then we can start asking those questions. All right, those C's, could you get life in those C's? So not a definitive answer, but it would lead you down the path of saying in this weird prebiotic environment, what are we looking at? Really looking at the air-sea interfaces. Again, nowhere have we been besides Earth where we can study gas exchange between the surface of a sea and its atmosphere. Nowhere else can we go to study wave generation. So all these really fundamental questions we could answer in a pretty tightly crafted package.

So we put the Titan-Mari concept together. We were part of the down select against two other missions, a comet mission and the Mars InSight mission, which ultimately got selected. So I spent about five and a half years working on it. It was fun. It was my passion. I adored it. And when we ultimately didn't get selected, it was devastating. It was my passion. I adored it. And when we ultimately

didn't get selected, it was devastating. You know, I'll be honest with you. It was really disheartening because it gets dark at Titans North Pole in sort of the late 2020s. And at that point, we hadn't fully mapped Kraken Mari. We were going to Lygia, which is the more northern sea. Kraken's a little further south. And so this was kind of a one-shot deal until basically the mid-2030s when it gets light again at the North Pole. So you have this long period of northern winter. And so for me, in my career, this was kind of a one-shot deal. It was, you know, either my boat was going to go or it was going to, I was going to miss that boat. And, you know, we ended up missing it.

But in the long run, I think we pushed people to realize you could do the outer planets in a much lower cost. Innovation and really pushing the envelope is a good thing. You can really look at planetary exploration in a different way and try to get the cost down. And I think we opened the door to people thinking, yeah, you can do outer planets potentially in discovery. I will bet you that someday, hopefully before too long, we'll see that ship set sail on that screen C. It will. You have used radar to explore many worlds around the solar system, including our own, including Earth. Why is it such a useful tool? I think for people who don't realize, you know, they're so used to seeing planetary images that are taken with cameras so that, you know, everything looks sort

of like it does as an image here on Earth. A lot of the images of Mars, for example, you know, look, in fact, some of the images from the Curiosity rover, I love to put them up in talks and start talking and then tell people, you know, this is Mars behind me. And you can see the people in the audience are just like, you're kidding me, because it looks so much like the Earth. But when you have worlds that are covered in clouds and hazes, Venus, Titan, even, for example, parts of the Earth that spend a lot of time under cloud cover. Radar can penetrate through clouds and return an image of the surface. What you're seeing is a combination of what the surface is made of, how rough it is, how sloped it is. All that affects what you're seeing in the radar image. But it gives you this ability to see planetary surfaces that would otherwise be obscured.

And so it's an amazing tool. And plus all those things I just said, you know, composition, slope, roughness, you're getting information that you just don't get out of a visible image. So when you can combine it with visible image data, like we do for the Earth, you learn a lot more. You can really discover a lot more about what's going on. My favorite thing out of the shuttle mission that I worked on where we, the space radar lab that we flew during the mission, when we were down at, in Johnson, you know, and I got to have the headset on and say,

you know, Roger and all those kinds of things when we were operating the radar, um, we got a call from the Diane Fossey gorilla fund. And they said, you know, we have a lot of trouble trying to understand the extent, the range of the gorilla habitat, because that area is actually largely perpetually cloud covered. The famous movie Gorillas in the Mist. It's really cloudy in that area. And so they wanted to know, is there any way you can point your radar towards that border between the Congo and Rwanda where the gorillas largely, the mountain gorillas largely live, so that we can do better vegetation mapping to understand what the potential extent of the range of

the gorillas is. That area is also oftentimes, there's a lot of conflict in that area. So to have humans on the ground doing mapping is not the safest thing in the world. And so we were actually able to image that whole gorilla habitat with the Space Radar Lab. And it's one of my it's my favorite image from the mission, because it really says, you know, here's this tool that we explore Titan with, we explore Venus with. And here we are using that same tool for a very practical, important thing right here on this planet. You already talked a little bit about the importance of comparative planetology. You wrote a book with that title with another friend of this show, the great astronaut Tom Jones,

a few years back. Still available from Amazon, by the way, though you have to pay quite a bit for it now. Is there more you can say about the importance of studying other worlds to learn about our own? Yeah, in fact, I will say, I don't know if I'm totally authorized to say this, but Tom and I are actually doing kind of a magazine update for National Geographic on kind of a combination between a book and a magazine update for National Geographic. Again, that'll be out later this year. A lot of the times when I talk to audiences, I say a large part,

because a lot of people think, you know, planetary exploration, what does it have to do with me? My favorite ever when I was giving a talk to a kindergarten class and this little boy raises his hand and I'm talking about volcanoes and eruptions and, you know, the volcano erupted with the baking soda with this class

and the whole thing. And this little kid raises his hand and he says but what do volcanoes do for me and i was flabbergasted you know i was like you know now i can come up with lots of and finally i said um they make nice islands where you can go on vacation and he went okay apparently that was a good enough answer um but i think you you know, when people say, why do you explore the planets? And what I think people really don't understand is we have so far to go on understanding this planet. Incredibly complicated atmosphere. But when we're trying to understand how does a greenhouse atmosphere, what is the role of greenhouse gases and atmospheres? It's so powerful that we can go to Mars with its thin atmosphere,

a lot of CO2. We can go to Venus, very dense atmosphere, runaway greenhouse effect, CO2 dominated atmosphere. We can go to Titan, which has methane, a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So the reason we understand things like climate change so well is not just because we have the earth, but it's because we have this ability to go across the solar system and say, how does a volcano work? And we can go to Mars, we can go to Venus, we can go to the icy satellites out of the outer solar system where the volcanoes are made of ice. And you can get at the physics of the process. So then you understand better. And so when you start saying, when is a volcano going to erupt? How far is that lava flow going to go? How does our atmosphere work? Why do earthquakes occur? How

can we understand how the top layers of this planet operate? We can go to different places in the solar system, depending on what question we're trying to understand and gain so much more insight about how this planet works. To me, it's always about turning back to the Earth and saying, how does an Earth-like world operate? And now that we're on the verge, you know, the Kepler Space Telescope has found over 3,000 planets in the last couple years. So now we're not just going to have our own solar system. We're going to have multiple solar systems,

and we're looking for that Earth 2.0, that Earth-like planet around another star. And again, it's all coming back to Earth. How do you make a habitable planet? And certainly now with climate change, how do you maintain a habitable planet? It also, I think, comes back to what our boss, the science guy, likes to call the passion, beauty and joy of science. And by the way, he had very nice things to say about you. passion, beauty and joy of science. And by the way, he had very nice things to say about you. Do you think you have NASA space exploration science? Are they in your blood? I'm thinking of your heritage from your father. Yeah, for people who don't know, my dad worked for NASA. I went to my first launch when I was four. I decided to become a planetary geologist when I was at the Viking mission launches. I knew I'd gotten interested in geology, but I was a little aiming towards Earth geology.

And then when I was at the Viking launches, I got to go hear people like Carl Sagan and Jerry Soften talking about why we were exploring Mars. And I thought, wow, you can combine geology with NASA, which I've grown up with. This is great. And so at age like 14, I said, I'm going to be a planetary geologist. And that's what I did. It is in my blood. I'm passionate about the agency, what the agency is capable of. And I tell you, in my last three and a half years of as being chief scientist, what really humbled me to no end was to travel around the world. Whenever I traveled, the State Department would

always be really great about getting me into local schools, especially if they were girls schools, that was even more of a benefit, but schools in general. So I've spoken at schools in the Philippines and in Thailand, in South Africa, all over Europe, Chile. Those kids, when you come in the door, they are vibrating with excitement in every single one of those countries. And it's not, you know, it's not me, Ellen Stofan. It's NASA has come to their school. It's that blue meatball. It's this agency that has accomplished amazing and great things. And when you realize the impact internationally of this NASA brand, you know, it's a big responsibility, I think, for the U.S., for NASA,

partnering now increasingly with our international space agency partners, we inspire kids around this planet. And when you're inspiring those kids, they might end up being a civil engineer who's going to help their country cope with the effects of climate change. They might end up being a doctor. You know, they're not necessarily going to go work for a space agency, but we inspire kids to get interested in STEM and that broadens their horizons. It makes them, you know, it's going to enrich any country's economy to have a strong STEM workforce. This is why Bill likes to say that NASA is the United States' best ambassador. What's next for you? You know, I'm taking a couple months to take it easy, spend some time with my youngest daughter,

who's home from university, do a little writing. I'm on the World Economic Space Council, so I'm off to Davos to talk about space and the fun-changing landscape that we're seeing in space in terms of public-private partnerships. What is the world going to look like in 2030? The importance of Earth observations, especially for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And so I've got a few things on my plate, given a bunch of talks,

and then I'll figure out what I want to do next. Thank you, Ellen. Don't be a stranger. We look forward to having you visit out our way again. Always happy to chat. That's Ellen Stofan. Just finished her tenure, about three and a half years, as the chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. We'll go on now to take a look at the night sky, as we always do at the end of the show, with Bruce Betts.

do at the end of the show with Bruce Betts. It's time once again to talk to Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. It was only, what, a week or two ago that the answer to your space trivia question had to do with Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. And we learned, just as this show was being prepared, that we lost Gene Cernan. Yeah, it's very sad. Gene Cernan, of course, Apollo astronaut, last human to set foot on the moon. And a real gentleman, tremendous guy, who made himself available and remained someone who cared passionately about space and shared that passion. So the passing of another American hero. With that, let's go on to what's up in the night sky.

Pre-dawn, low down in the east, Mercury and Saturn. Mercury is the lower left, and the separation between those two will be increasing. Also in the pre-dawn, you can check out super bright Jupiter over in the south. The moon will be near Jupiter on January 19th. And then in the early evening, still our beautiful pair of super bright Venus and much dimmer reddish Mars, and they will be growing closer together over the coming weeks. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2006, 11 years ago that the New Horizons mission launched. Gosh, and it's not over yet.

Nope. January 1st of 2019, we'll be doing a flyby of a Kuiper Belt object after its stunning Pluto flyby. Yeah. Speaking of great explorers. All right, we move on to random spaceflight. You need a megaphone sometimes when you do that, you know? A Bodio Doe.

I'll try to get one. You know, I used to have one once upon a time, but I don't. The Mars volcano, of course, Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. From edge to edge, it would stretch across the country of France. Wow. That's one big, tall mountain. It is one big, wide, and big, tall mountain. It's an impressive structure.

Kind of megaphone-shaped. Kind of a flattened megaphone. Really flat. Really more of a shield. Hence the term shield volcano. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. All right, on the trivia question, we asked you, which is longer, a Jupiter year or how long planetary radio has been airing?

How'd we do, Matt? We got a terrific response to this. I think it was a combination of the terrific prize we're giving away. More about that in a moment. But also just the people had such fun determining that apparently Planetary Radio has been around for longer than one Jupiter

year. It has indeed. That's what we heard from this week's winner, Helm de Rennes. And there's no pronunciation guide here, so you get what you get, Helm. It's Elm de Regne or de Rennie. Hard to say.

But I can tell you he's in San Diego. And he said one Jupiter year is 11.86 Earth years. Planetary radio has been on for more than 12 years since November 25, 2002. He says Matt and Bruce win. Yay. Yay! Yay! We're working on our Saturn year. That'll be a while.

Yeah, in fact, we had a whole bunch of people talk about that next big planetary anniversary, I guess. Hosea Escobedo was one of them. Adam Betts in Connecticut. Ilya Schwartz, he said, come on, guys, that's just 15.35342 more years until we get to a Saturnian year. Awesome. Also this from Wesley Haynes in Gainesville, Georgia. Jovian celebrated one year of Planetary Radio on October 5th, 2014.

Year two will conclude in August 2026. Hang in there. He's got the champagne on ice. Jeff Sosby. He says, as a note, the first broadcast, therefore, of planetary radio are just now reaching the stars Wolf 424 A and B in Virgo. He says he's sure the occupants of any planets around those stars are very much enjoying them. I'm expecting to hear from them. I want them to become members of the society.

Could be a while. Yeah. As we're approaching our Saturnian year, we should be hearing from them. Yeah, it's going to take, what, you know, 14 years for us to get the message and another 14 for us to send their Planetary Radio t-shirts back if we can do so at the speed of light. We should work on that.

Jenny King, she said she tried to find some other fascinating event that occurred on November 25, 2002. The only thing she could find, Nicolas Cage got a divorce. We're in such good company. We are. Let me tell you about the prize that Helm is going to get.

It is gorgeous. I'm looking at an image of it right now. It's from our friend Rick Sternbach, the space artist extraordinaire. You can read and see much more about Rick at his website, ricksternback.com. It's Molten Earth, this really gorgeous print that is, you know, our Earth a few billion years before the premiere of Planetary Radio. Yeah, I guess that's older. At least his impression of it. And we're going to be sending that out to Helm. Thank you very much, Rick. And thank you, Helm. And we're ready for next time. Speaking of Olympus Mons,

approximately how wide is the combined complex caldera? So the collapsed craters at the top of the volcano. How wide is the combination of all those calderas for Olympus Mons at its widest point? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. This time you've got until the 24th, January 24th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And we'll go back to our golden classic prize combo, the Planetary Radio T-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account, the international nonprofit network of telescopes that you can use to do astronomy from anywhere on this planet. Anyway, they have a telescope anyway. And there's one more very important announcement.

I am once again teaching an Introduction planetary science and astronomy class at California State University, Dominguez Hills. It will be available online. You can even watch it live if you're available and submit questions, or you can watch the archive. That will be starting Tuesday, January 24th, so about a week, and will air live Pacific time, 3 o'clock p.m. to 4.30 once a week. And you can get more information, including how to watch it at planetary.org slash Betts class. We're just updating that site. So if it's not current, check back in a couple of days and it'll be, it'll be fun. It'll be glorious. It'll be 14, 14 classes. And, and Matt will join me for the second. I always, I always love to drop in.

We have a good time. And we actually do this segment. We do What's Up with video, which is kind of frightening. And it's terrific. We get so many great reports. I hear from a lot of listeners who very much enjoy the class,

get a big kick out of it, as I know you do. I do. I enjoy it. It's basically lots of pretty pictures, and gee whiz, wow, cool, just like planetary science is. What could be better? It's the cosmos. And now I think we're done. All right, everybody.

Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about if you were stepping off a foreign extraterrestrial world, what words would you speak? Thank you, and good night. By the way, remember we talked about chocolate at the end of a segment a week or two ago? Yeah. Mel Powell says, Bruce prefers dark chocolate, eh? But does he prefer dark matter? And which is easier to detect? Mmm, dark matter. Tasty. Less filling.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he joins us each and every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its chiefly scientific members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.