Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Citizen Science: Join the search for Martian clouds

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientists Armin Kleinboehl and Marek Slipski lead a new project that is recruiting thousands of citizen explorers. They explain to host Mat Kaplan how this massive effort may help us finally understand how the once plentiful Martian surface water disappeared. Then we look back to the dawn of science as Bruce Betts closes out our latest What’s Up space trivia contest. And there’s a meteor shower around the corner! There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-cloudspotting-on-marsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's a nice day for cloud spotting on Mars, 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. Mars used to be so wet. We've learned it still has lots of water below the surface, but nothing like it had a few billion years ago. Where did it go? Scientists are still trying to solve that mystery. A new piece of the puzzle is being provided by a project that needs you. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientists Armin Kleinbol and Marek Slipski will tell us about their new citizen science project called Cloud Spotting on Mars. Later on this somewhat abbreviated show, we'll check in with the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

Bruce Betts has good news and bad news about this year's Perseid meteor shower, but the new space trivia contest will keep us in the plus column. Mars is also at the top of the July 20 edition of the Downlink, the Planetary Society's free weekly newsletter. It's a false-color image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, the same spacecraft that supports the Cloud Spotting Project. This pretty picture uses color to help us understand how wind has sculpted the Martian

surface. It's very pretty. Here's a story I'm sure Casey and I will talk about in the August Space Policy Edition show. The United States Senate has passed a bill that formally endorses full funding of the NEO Surveyor mission, that infrared telescope that is so badly needed to help us find near-Earth objects. We've also learned that Russia may not be in a hurry to leave the International Space Station. Casey is on this story, too. Also in the downlink is mention of a great new article by my colleague Jason Davis. It has the latest chapter in the effort to confirm phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. We'll have to get researcher Jane Greaves back on the show soon. There's much more at planetary.org slash downlink. Research scientist Armin Kleinbowl is the deputy principal investigator

for the instrument on the venerable MRO called the Mars Climate Sounder. His JPL colleague, Merrick Slipsky, is a NASA postdoctoral program fellow. They both study Mars' thin but dynamic atmosphere. I invited them to join me when I read about their new project that has already attracted thousands of citizen scientists. Armin and Merrick, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thank you for doing this today. Look forward to hearing about this great project,

Citizen Science Project. If it wouldn't get the Planetary Society sued, I think I'd have opened this segment with Joni Mitchell saying she has looked at clouds from both sides now. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. So I still run into people who

are surprised and charmed to hear and even to see that Mars has clouds. How is this even possible with just 1% of the atmospheric pressure that we have here on Earth? Armin, you want to tackle that first? Sure. Yeah. I mean, Mars has clouds and they're actually quite interesting and they're quite ubiquitous actually too. So we find waterized clouds on Mars pretty much in the same shape or what that we would expect from cirrus clouds here on Earth. But we also find clouds made of CO2 on Mars. CO2 is the main constituent of the atmosphere. So condensing out the main constituents of the atmosphere is something that's pretty weird. And that's something that we don't experience here on Earth.

They appear in different regions at different seasons. And what we're interested in with the cloud spotting projects is particularly the clouds on Mars that are high up in the atmosphere, typically between like 50 and 80 kilometers in the middle atmosphere, as we call it, because they can tell us something about the structure and also about the ability of water vapor in that region of the atmosphere. Merrick, before we go on talking about the science, I've seen a lot of pictures of these clouds. I bet a lot of our audience has too. They can be quite beautiful, can't they? Indeed, yeah. I know you had Mark Lemon on at one point to talk about the mother of pearl clouds, and we see some of those same clouds.

And like Armin was saying, these middle atmosphere clouds that we're interested in are sort of like these noctilucent clouds that are seen on Earth. So what is the idea here? Are we still trying to learn where that much thicker ancient Martian atmosphere has gone? Is that one of the reasons at least you've started this project? Yeah, this is one of the drivers. This is a big question and it's a question that's got quite a bit of attention over the last couple of years because we found that when water vapor is in the in the middle atmosphere of mars it can easily fertilize it can be broken down by by incoming solar light sunlight it's split up into its its constituents like hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen

in turn can can be transported farther upward in the atmosphere and escape. And that way you have water loss, you know, you can lose water from the Martian system to space. Waterized clouds are a proxy for water vapor. If we have waterized clouds, then there also has to be water vapor around. So by looking where these clouds are located in the middle atmosphere, we get an idea how high the water vapor can reach at a given season. And that gives us an idea about how important that process of splitting up water in the middle atmosphere with subsequent hydrogen escape, how important this process really would be. What are some of the specific questions that you're hoping to answer as we examine these clouds? Yeah, just to maybe hit on a slightly different point.

Just like we talk about global climate models for Earth and climate change, we work on these same sort of models for Mars in the present day and Mars in the past. Clouds can be a big source of uncertainty in these models. Yeah, there's a lot of questions about how they form at sort of the very small scales, and they can impact the atmosphere in different ways. So to map these clouds out, to determine their compositions, and to be able to kind of iterate with the modelers on where we do see them and where we sort of have trouble forming them in models is important for understanding the whole climate of the planet, whether it be today or in

the past. Armin, we talk about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on this show all the time, but it's usually related to that amazing high-rise camera that, you know, it gets most of the attention because it makes such undeniably gorgeous images. Tell us, though, about this instrument that you're working with, which is the basis of the data that's coming into this citizen science project. Yeah. So we work with the Mars Climate Sounder Instrument, MCS for short. It's an infrared radiometer. It has nine channels, so nine wavelength ranges where it can look at the surface or the atmosphere of Mars. And it predominantly looks at the Mars limb. That means it looks across the horizon.

This is a way of looking at the atmosphere in much detail. And if we have vertically resolved profiles of radiance that we can observe in the atmosphere, we can derive vertically resolved geophysical information from it, like temperature profiles or the profiles of dust or clouds in our case. So the MCS is really like the primary atmospheric instrument on the MRO mission. It's been a fantastic investigation because we've been able to operate this instrument and the spacecraft since September 2006. So we have about 16 years worth of data that corresponds to about eight Mars years. As we're climate scientists, these long time series are really valuable because we can find features and structures that might be repetitive in the atmosphere

that you'd not be able to find if you just had a year or two of data. Infrared observations have sure been in the news a lot lately, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, of course. What is the particular advantage of having this instrument work in the infrared range as it scans the atmosphere of Mars? The infrared range, we work particularly in the thermal infrared, so everything essentially radiates in the thermal infrared. So everything essentially radiates in the thermal infrared, you, me, the Martian surface and the Martian atmosphere. So by picking up that radiation, we can basically do atmospheric measurements independent of the time of day.

So the instrument can do observations during daytime as well as during nighttime. during daytime as well as during nighttime. And the intensity of the infrared radiation is converted pretty easily to a temperature because that connection is fairly direct. So an infrared instrument is really like the primary technique for doing these kinds of observations of atmospheric temperature in the atmosphere of Mars or in any planetary atmosphere. We've got so many spacecraft now orbiting Mars,

others that are also examining the atmosphere. I'm thinking of MAVEN and the UAE's HOPE mission. I mean, do you coordinate with the teams for these other orbiters and possibly for some of the spacecraft down on the ground, the rovers and landers? We do actually, yeah. So we are in communication with the teams of the spacecraft that you mentioned. I actually did attend a team meeting of the Emirates Hope mission a couple of

weeks ago. We do data in comparisons and try to find synergies between these different kinds of measurements. They all have different measurement geometries and they have, you know, different strengths and weaknesses. So by combining some of these measurements, we hope we'll be able to describe the atmosphere more comprehensively that any individual mission might be able to do. Merrick, let me turn back now specifically to the cloud spotting on Mars project. And, you know, something that I think maybe you've been asked because it's actually addressed on the project website. And by the way, we'll put up links, the link to the project website where I took your nice tutorial, gentlemen, and it looks like it would not only be fairly easy but kind of fun to participate in this project. We'll put up that link and some other relevant stuff on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio.

But here's a question that occurred to me even before I saw a reference to it in some of the material I read. Why do you need human eyes for this work? I mean, isn't this kind of thing well suited for some dedicated AI with a nice algorithm running inside it? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's sort of how this started. I was working to build an algorithm to pick these out, especially these high altitude clouds. And we can do this. Once you sort of get going with it, and you look at, say, one channel, Armin described, we have these sort of nine different spectral channels that we look in, You start to see these clouds all over the place at all different seasons, different latitudes, longitudes, day and night. And then you want to apply that to each channel. And you want to do

this in different Mars years, where we know that Mars can be very different. The atmosphere can be very different year to year with dust and dust storms. That affects how these show up. So as I was sort of looking at the results of the output of this automated algorithm, you still have to go back and verify that it's spitting something out that's meaningful. And so I started to build up my own database of looking at these and put together a at these and put together a tool where I could visualize these arches and zoom in and out and change the color contrast to pick up the faint ones and then be able to pull the exact location out and save that to a file. And as I started to do this, I realized that sampling all the different channels and all the different locations and different seasons and years was going to be quite a time sink for one person. So that was kind of the basis for reaching out to some citizen scientists and saying, you know, we sort of need help to

track all these and make sure we're doing this correctly. You mentioned the arches, which now I've been to the site, I did the tutorial, as I said, so I kind of know what you're talking about. But other people must be wondering, I mean, because you're presented with an image. And in some of these, at least in the samples that were displayed, there is this thing, which, you know, reminded me a little bit of the great St. Louis arch, you know, that big architectural structure that is next to the river in St. Louis, Missouri. I hope that's a decent comparison. It looks like a parabola. Yeah, I think that's a great comparison. Yeah, they can be quite striking in some of the images. In some, there'll be several right next to each

other. Or yeah, in some images, there might be 20 of these scattered throughout. You get those arches because of sort of the observing geometry that Armin was talking about. So we look at the horizon and the spacecraft is going to move through its orbit. So it's going to be looking at sort of a different slice of horizon at each point. And so originally there might be a cloud behind the slice of atmosphere you're looking through, but as that spacecraft moves, as MRO moves, and we look at a slightly different view, it seems like the cloud is at a higher altitude, and it kind of keeps moving up until we actually see it at its true altitude. And then that kind of comes back down. So if you're looking at these measurements as a function of time and altitude,

yeah, you see these nice arches pop up. If I was doing the cloud spotting project, I'd be looking for what the very peak of those arches, and I just drop a little marker there, right? That's right. It's a fairly simple project on Zooniverse. Some Zooniverse projects will have all sorts of questions about the image you're looking at. But here we're just trying to pick out the peak of those arches, which is the altitude of the cloud. I'm glad you mentioned Zooniverse. We have talked about that citizen science platform before, which is so powerful and so popular. What led you to choosing Zooniverse? Was it a particularly well-suited for what you had in mind? Yeah.

So before, so like I was describing this tool, we tried to hand that off to some citizen scientists that Armin was working with at the time. And we got it working for a couple of people, but we also ran into some technical difficulties. But that was about the same time that we were realizing that citizen scientists might be interested in this and that it might make for a good project. So we thought about extending this. And Zooniverse is sort of the central hub for these projects where they have a huge user base. You were describing the tool that you use to find these. They have those ready out of the box and they have this nice infrastructure set that we can format our data a certain way, upload it, and they're going to sort of take care of the rest in terms of

recording all of the user input and handing it to us on the backside to look at that output. Great platform. So what has the response been? I didn't get the announcement of this project very long ago. How long has it been open for people to work on? A little over two weeks at this point. Yeah, so it hasn't been long. We have over 2,000 registered users who have interacted with the project, which is fantastic. It's definitely exceeded our expectations. They've classified over 100,000 images. We haven't uploaded that many, but we've had at least 20 people look at every image that we've uploaded.

Yeah, it's been fantastic. And we're thrilled with the engagement we've had. Man, the power of citizen science and putting that kind of motivated team to work. I hope that one of you can say something about the NASA effort that has funded this project. I had not heard of the citizen science seed funding program before, which I guess enabled you to pull this off. Yeah, I think that was kind of lucky that this is a fairly new program. I think we were the first year when we applied for funding from this program. It was the first year when this program was actually established.

And it's a program that tries to fund citizen science projects, or at least the initial development of citizen science projects in the fields of planetary science, heliophysics, and astrophysics. In earth science, there is a longer tradition with citizen science activities, but I believe NASA wanted to have a dedicated vehicle to foster citizen science in these three other branches of NASA research. So I guess that the timing was just about right that this announcement was made that there might be funding available. And Merrick and I wrote a proposal, and it was actually selected as the only planetary

science proposal at the time. The timing was just right. And I'm really glad that we wrote a reading proposal and had the opportunity to do this project and develop a tool that now can be used by citizen scientists all over the planet. I was on the website for the citizen science program at NASA, which we will put up the link to also on this week's show page. I counted nearly 30 NASA-sponsored projects. Apparently, they just funded the second round of these. I will say, don't tell anybody that I said this, but I think you guys have the best project logo. I might be biased.

Thank you. Yeah, we really appreciate that. And shout out to the JPL people who put that together for us. I think we may have already answered this question, but if people want to get involved, they just go to the website, right? And really it's kind of self-explanatory once you're there. That's right. We have a couple of pages that describe the science and the motivation, some of the things we've been talking about here. The main page itself will walk you through sort of what you need to know to pick these out and what's going on and how to use it. This is another thing that Zooniverse has set up super well to make these nice tutorials and get people introduced quickly so that they can start exploring and interacting with the data. I hesitate to call them rewards for your participants, but don't you have some

gatherings, some webinars that you offer people who work on the project? Yeah. So just about to have our first webinar where we've invited all the citizen scientists to come hear more about the science and the research and about MRO and Mars. We want to meet them and hear if they got involved and what they're interested in. We've had talks with people from other NASA citizen science projects in the past, and they really encouraged us to do this, to not just keep everything on the website. There's lots of room for discussion on the talk boards of Zooniverse, but it's also good to see faces

and hear voices and really try to build a community out of this. Yeah, and there is actually also an opportunity for participation past the website. The data set that will be created through this project will be publicly available. So anybody essentially who's interested in this kind of science can download data and look at some of these cloud distributions that we find through the project themselves. And also we're always open for ideas and suggestions and in ways on how to analyze the data or how to look for certain features. There's a broad community out there with people with very different skills and very different interests. So we would like to hear about these people and talk to those people.

And maybe new ways of doing analysis and new ways of looking at the data will emerge. analysis and new ways of looking at the data will emerge. Well, I have to tell you that as pioneers in the field of citizen science, all of us at the Planetary Society love these projects. I like to tell people that we provided some of the startup funding for SETI at Home to the folks up at UC Berkeley. And look what that has turned into over the years. You guys have certainly provided a terrific example of what can be done by we citizen scientists who don't have letters after our names that would immediately qualify us for this kind of work. I wonder, as you talk about how people

are coming to this, how the two of you got into this kind of this line of work, Armin? I've been interested in space my whole life. And maybe part of it was an excursion that I did as maybe an elementary school to a private observatory not too far away from where I grew up in Germany. They always would have an open house over Easter. And my parents took me there once. And I was so fascinated. I insisted on going there every Easter for several years. You know, I'm still very interested in this. And I studied physics and did a PhD in Earth atmospheric science originally, actually. But after a couple

of years of postdoc at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there was the opportunity to join the Mars program and work on Mars Climate Sounder and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So I took that, and I think it was a very good decision. It's been a great mission, and it's been a great experience to work on this topic. Sounds like it. And I have said before on this show that I kind of grew up, I'm an LA kid, I kind of grew up at the Griffithatory doing observing nights and learning how to use the CCD camera mounted to the telescope. And I decided to go after a PhD. And sort of around that point, I realized that planetary, the solar system planets is what I wanted to focus on and got lucky enough to get involved with the MAVEN mission

in the University of Colorado Boulder. And that really got me hooked on planetary missions as a way to answer these questions. They're designed to answer specific big picture questions, and they have a variety of instruments where you get a diverse group of people who are interested in really different physics associated with the different instruments, but they all have to come together to answer these big questions. And it's just awesome to see this continue. One of the best things about planetary science

makes my job more fun too, is how multidisciplinary it is, how it has to be to be able to get this work done. Gentlemen, thank you so much. This is fascinating. I hope that this conversation leads you to picking up a few more cloud spotters out there. And, you know, if you were just straight astronomers, I would wish you clear skies, but I guess that would be counterproductive in this case.

That's correct. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks so much for having us. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you very much. JPL researchers Armin Kleinbowl and Marek Slipski manage the Cloud Spotting on Mars Citizen Science Project.

I'll be back with Bruce and what's up in about a minute. Hello, I'm George Takei. And as you know, I'm very proud of my association with Star Trek. Star Trek. Star Trek was a show that looked to the future with optimism, boldly going where no one had gone before. I want you to know about a very special organization called the Planetary Society. They are working to make the future that Star Trek represents a reality. When you become a member of the Planetary Society,

you join their mission to increase discoveries in our solar system, to elevate the search for light outside our planet, and decrease the risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid. Co-founded by Carl Sagan and led today by CEO Bill Nye, the Planetary Society exists for those who believe in space exploration to take action together. So join the Planetary Society and boldly go together

to build our future. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So here's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. It's Bruce Betts. Welcome once again. Thank you, Matt. Always great to be with you here in this formal setting. If this is a formal setting, I'd like to join you in an informal one someday. You can't handle the truth. I can barely handle the formality. What's up? We got all sorts

of good stuff. We're going to clip through this. We got four planets. You got Saturn coming up in the early evening, in the east of course, and then Jupiter looking bright a couple hours later. Mars, kind of middle of the night and venus low in the east in the pre-dawn but wait don't know her yet we'll also throw in uranus

if you have some binoculars which we'll also be happy to sell you you plan to know uranus uh if you're catching picking this up right after we come out on the 3rd or 4th of August, you can check out Uranus through binoculars. There's a blue dot near the much brighter Mars coming up in the middle of the night. What do we got? We got so much coming up after that. We've got the moon near Saturn on August, the 9th of August, 11th into the 12th. By the way, there's a meteor shower. Hey, Matt, I've got good news and bad news for you.

Which do I want first? You want the good news first. No, you want the bad news first. No, you want the good news. Good news. Definitely good news. Perseid meteor shower, traditionally the second best of the year. 160 to 100 meteors from a dark site. An hour. Yeah. And now you ask me. Oh, so Perseids, that's all good news. You have another side of the coin? I do. At least if you're looking at meteors, there's a full moon that night of the

peak, August 12th to 13th. We'll wash out many of the fainter meteors, but you still can go and check them out and check out like the part of the sky that's not right at the full moon and look after midnight and you'll get more meteors. And the peak is several days in existence. It's a broad peak. And so you can look a few days before, a few days after. Should still get some meteors. Those streaks like go outside, stare at the sky and chill until you fall asleep

and then imagine meteors without a full moon. That's terrible planning. That's terrible planning. Why'd they do this during a full moon? Yeah, I don't know. I'll talk to the powers that be. Thank you. On to this week in space history.

It was this week in 2004 that Messenger launched to Mercury and would become the first Mercury orbiter. And 2007 that Phoenix launched to Mars and gave us the first successful near-polar region lander on Mars. And you may have heard of it, Curiosity rover landed 10 years ago this week and it's still going strong. That is a heck of a week for planetary science. It really is. You know what also is a heck of a thing? No. What?

Random space fact. Random space fact! The moon, our moon, the moon, has a surface gravity more than two and a half times the surface gravity of Pluto. Wow. You'd have the same mass, of course, but your weight would be two and a half times on the moon, and we already think of the moon as not having a whole lot of gravity. It's 16% of Earth.

We should go on to the trivia contest. What was the first published scientific work to include telescopic observations of the moon, including drawings. And we'll see if anyone can rhyme with the Latin name of the work. You know where people are going to accuse you of being tricky here.

It's that word published. And here is why. And it comes directly from this week's winner, Jerry Robinette, who has been listening for a very long time, and I believe this is his first win. Congratulations, Jerry, in the great state of Ohio. Here's his answer. The winner is Sedarius Nuncius, usually translated as Starry Messenger by Galileo Galilei in 1610, only because Thomas Harriot never published Rhines from observations a few months earlier.

The moral of the story, publish or perish. This was like 400 years ago. I'm pretty sure everyone perished. That's kind of a bummer. They're all gone. This time, I wasn't trying to be tricky, but I was trying to be very specific. And that is why I went with published. So we've got Sidereus Nuncius, which means sidereal nonsense.

No. Wait, no. You said it. In fact, here it is from Edwin King in the UK. Galileo called the book Aftermath, Starry Messenger. Oh, I didn't know that. Can we get everyone on the payroll too? No.

Right. Hey, Jerry, you're going to get, oh my goodness, a Planetary Society kick asteroid rubber asteroid. Congratulations. I got other good stuff. Or is there more you wanted to add? Oh, no, please share. Well, from Dave Fairchild, the poet laureate in kansas in march

of 1610 we know that galileo thought i'll publish me a treatise that is more than just a shot these people say i do not know what's in the brilliant skies that everything i talk about is nothing more than lies i'll write a book and show them clear that i know what i'm doing and fill it with astronomy and other things i'm viewing with telescope discoveries and also with my sketching and call it Starry Messenger. So stop with the kvetching. Hey, Dave, you get the Dr. Seuss Award of the Year, I think, for that one. That's well done. Mel Powell in California. The e-book version that came out in 1611 really helped it take off in popularity. He then added in parentheses,

you actually can get a Kindle version of Starry Messenger. Mel says Bruce's new book is better, though. Wow. I'm on the one hand extremely honored, except that I worry it's only because Starry Messenger was written in a form of Latin. Pavel Kamesha in Belarus. He looks back to when we had that conversation with Jim Green. And Jim talked about that first UNIVAC computer he used that used paper tape for input and output, I think. Progress is moving so fast that both Galileo's drawings and UNivac's paper tape seem to be on the same technological level. Such will is in the past. It's too true.

Gene Lewin, finally, in the state of Washington. Predating Selenography, Quintessence, it was thought to be, though sketches penned by Galilei, directly challenged Ptolemy. Not smooth at all, in fact, diverse. These published drawings were the first to treat us detailing what he'd seen viewed by telescopic means. His starry message did contradict, helping label him a heretic. Sedarius Nuncius, its Latin name,

now resides in astronomic fame. Wow. It's pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. There are some big words in there. I got a few more words to add from Jerry Robinette because once again, I want to thank all the people who have been sending me lovely, lovely notes about my moving out of the host chair for this show come late November.

I can go back to our winner because this is what he said, Matt, say it ain't so. Okay, you've definitely earned the chance to pursue other adventures, but your combination of professionalism and sincere enthusiasm will be very hard to replace. Thank you, Jerry. We'll see about that because we're going to find the perfect host. So don't worry. No worries. Don't worry, Bruce. You know what? You need a distraction. Tell us what's happening next time. All right. Here's a question to distract yourselves with.

What solar system moon has the highest surface gravity? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 10th of August. That would be Wednesday, August 10 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this one. Bruce, do you remember when we gave away a book called Carbon, this beautifully illustrated book that sort of traces the life story of a carbon molecule? Yes, the surprise ending was shocking. Well, it wasn't shocking, but it did, what's the word I want? Combined with a lot of stuff, you know, carbon. Amalgamated. Oh, that's perfect. That might be it. This is from

John Barnett. We've given it away before. It's been a while. We found an extra copy. You will love this book. It is just gorgeously illustrated. Each page reveals another chapter in the life of this very busy little carbon molecule. I don't remember. Does it have a name? Carbon. Oh, you mean the molecule? I don't know. I guess we could name it. Why don't we do that? Maybe as part of the contest, give us the best name for this carbon molecule. That won't necessarily help you win, but it might help get you mentioned on the show in two weeks. Nice. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about this. You can record, and then you can re-record. You can do, you can redo. But what do you do first when you repeat? Do you peep? Thank you and good night.

Oh, for Pete's sake. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. And he repeats it every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. And is made possible by its cloud-spotting members. Cloudy or clear, you can always find your way to planetary.org slash join. Marco Verda and Ray Pauletta are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

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