Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Claudia Alexander, the Final Galileo Project Manager

Episode Date: September 15, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Last week, it was Galileo the man. This week, it's Galileo, the incredibly successful spacecraft, and the woman who serves as its last boss. Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan. Planetary scientist Claudia Alexander joins us for a visit to Jupiter. Later, Bruce Betts will have a space trivia contest that will make a deep impact on you and something else.

Here's a brief visit with Emily to get us started. Or maybe I should say a fast visit. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, if we were to design a robotic interstellar mission to travel to the nearest star system, what's the shortest time in which such a mission could be accomplished using current propulsion technology? The nearest star system is Alpha Centauri, about 4.5 light-years or 4 trillion kilometers away. Engineers have estimated that currently available electrical thrusters, powered by large nuclear electric power plants,

might be able to get robotic spacecraft up to a speed of 150 kilometers per second, or only one-two-thousandth of the speed of light. At that speed, it would take almost 9,000 years to reach the nearest star system. The fastest speed that any spacecraft has actually achieved is much slower. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, the fastest man-made object ever, travels at only 30 kilometers per second. At that rate, a spacecraft would take over 40,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri. So we can't currently launch a mission

to another star that would arrive in a reasonable amount of time. Is there any hope for interstellar missions? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. It's a good thing we call them planetary scientists. They all seem to have interests and expertise as wide as a planet. Dr. Claudia Alexander is a good example.

Her doctorate from the University of Michigan is in space plasma physics, but she seems quite comfortable with many other disciplines. The list now includes the art of project management, as you're about to hear. We talked as she and her team prepare for what may be the most exciting finish for any successful space exploration mission in a long time. Dr. Alexander, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's good to be here. So you are the last of the project managers for Project Galileo, this amazing spacecraft. That's correct.

I'm the one who gets to turn out the lights. Yes. That must be quite an honor. It is actually very much an honor, I have to tell you. Now, you've been involved with Galileo, though, for a long time, and we should say this is a mission that has been going for, what is it, 14 years? Well, it's been 14 years since it was launched, but I tend to think of a mission as, you know, because there's the concept phase, the planning, the building of it.

You know, from cradle to grave, Galileo is approximately 26 years in duration, and I only showed up in the middle of it. And when you say 26 years, I mean, there's that whole incredible drama behind this story of how, of course, it was originally intended for a shuttle launch. And then when that became impossible, somebody had to figure out how to do this and still get to Jupiter in a reasonable amount of time. That's correct. I mean, essentially, originally the project was going to be flown direct to Jupiter on a straight line. We were next after the Challenger tragedy. So obviously our mission was postponed for a long time while NASA figured out what to do with the shuttle program.

And then when we did finally resume operations, it was clear that we were not going to be able to get the lift out of the shuttle that we were expecting. And so they had to devise a new trajectory that ended up being sort of this big spiral pattern, going by Venus and Earth and Earth again in order to get out to Jupiter. And that just lengthened the mission to make it seem like we would never get there. And yet it turned out to be kind of a valuable path in some ways because, I mean, there was this great mission to Earth that Carl Sagan, one of the founders of the Planetary Society, decided to call it,

where Galileo was treated as if it was coming from somewhere beyond the solar system out to look at this little blue planet and see if it could figure out whether anybody lived there. Yeah, that's right. I do believe that there was a paper that was published on could Galileo detect intelligent life. I think the answer was yes. And I think you had responsibility or maybe still have responsibility for a couple of instruments on the spacecraft. I originally started representing the infrared instrument, the NIMS instrument,

as what they call an instrument rep, somebody who works for the instrument and works for the project at the same time. And then I decided to go back to school, took some time off, went back to school, came back, and got my old job back, basically, and got a chance to work on,. They switched me over to two plasma instruments. And the joke was that they needed all that time to reprogram me, you know. And then as the staff, as the mission got extended and the staff shrank, I ended up having to take on two other instruments.

So at one point in time, I was representing four instruments. Wow. You, according to your bio, turned down a Fulbright so that you could work on Galileo. And I, for a long time, wondered if that wasn't the biggest mistake of my life. How do you feel now? No, now I feel like that was the right move. It certainly has been a wonderful thing to be part of both the Rosetta Project and the Galileo Project.

And I think the turning point in my understanding of what a great move it was when we started getting the first data back from Galileo. And that data, which there are reams and reams of, to say nothing of hundreds of incredible photographs, images, really assured this mission's place as one of the most successful of all time. That's correct. I was at headquarters recently, and even somebody at headquarters remarked to me that they felt that in the past decade, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo mission

were the biggest things that NASA had going. So you've seen a lot of amazing things come back from the spacecraft. Is there anything that really stands out in everything that it has added to our wealth of knowledge? Yeah, I could say a couple of things. Obviously, discovering that an icy moon, namely the moon Europa, has a presently active young surface, and then the potential for the ocean under the icy surface is one of the biggest surprises and unexpectedly wonderful things to have found in an extraterrestrial environment.

I believe somebody said, how often do you discover an ocean? The last one was the Pacific, and that was by Balboa. What, 500 years ago? 500 years ago, exactly. Now, I think as fascinating as Europa and the other Galilean moons are to everybody, you took particular interest in Ganymede. I have been particularly interested in the moon Ganymede since I started working over at Ames Research, the NASA center up near San Francisco, right out of

high school, I got a job there and I started working on Ganymede. And I have to tell you that I had some pretty firmly established preconceived notions that were completely blown out of the water by Galileo. Well, you and a lot of other people, right? Yes. I am thankful that I'm not alone. But yeah, I think that's been one of the things, just like Galileo the man, kind of really shook people up and changed their fundamental notions. I really think that Galileo the spacecraft was aptly named because it ended up doing that kind of thing, collecting the kind of data that showed us just how wrong we were. How much more is there, this is a silly question to ask a scientist, of course, a leading question,

how much more is there to learn? I mean, certainly as successful as Galileo was, has it left us with more questions than answers? I would certainly say so. And I think it's a fitting tribute to the success of the spacecraft, that now you know the answer to that, but now you've got so much more that you'd like to know. It's compelling us to have some follow-on missions to answer some of these questions. But I think that in general, your question of how much, you know, how do we know when we've learned everything, you know, I really think that sometimes in our egotism, I'm recollecting

that at the end of the 19th century, there was a lot of discussion about how we learned everything, except for that little bit about the atom. There's a few details there that we don't quite understand. And of course, those few details turn out to be, you know, quantum mechanics and opening up a whole new way of thinking about the universe. And likewise, at the close of the 20th century, there were books written about the end of science. The end of science, yes. So I really think that it's only human egotism to think that, well, of course,

a single mission is going to give us all the answers. There's a lot more that we will need to talk about when we come back from a break. You mentioned the Rosetta mission, which you are the project scientist for, but there is also, quite immediately, as this program is heard, less than a week away, I think, this rather spectacular finish to the Galileo mission, and I hope, if you're willing, we can talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. Our guest on Planetary Radio is Dr. Claudia Alexander. She is the project manager for Galileo, the spacecraft that is at the moment still orbiting Jupiter, but not for much longer. Stay with us. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of

humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, Transcription by CastingWords and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Matt Kaplan back on Planetary Radio with Dr. Claudia Alexander,

and she is the project manager for Galileo, the spacecraft at Jupiter right now. And as we said when we started out, she is the last project manager. She knows that for a fact because of how that mission is going to end in something under a week as this program begins to be heard. Talk about that rather spectacular finish that's coming up. We are scheduled for approximately 24 hours of continuous monitoring of the spacecraft as it makes its final plunge into the atmosphere of Jupiter. And we actually have instruments on collecting data, and we hope to, with fingers crossed, be able to collect some new science

information in that final hour as we're transitioning into the atmosphere. I, again, think that is among the cool things that the Galileo mission has ever done, namely to continue to give us valuable science data, even as it's preparing to make its demise. Now, regular listeners to this program know that this end, this crash into the great planet itself, is fully intentional. Do you have mixed feelings about that? I actually think it's very fitting and a flattery almost to the mission that the very discoveries that it was able to make have made it impossible for the mission to continue,

that we must dispose of the spacecraft in order to protect something that we learned from it. I think that's a fitting epitaph, actually, to the powerful and compelling success of this mission. I couldn't agree more, and it certainly makes for a very dramatic finish. We should mention that it's a finish that is going to be marked in part by the Planetary Society with an event, I believe, the next day, which we talked quite a bit about last week on this show with Robert Picardo, the actor who's going to be directing our program

An Evening with Galileo and His Daughter, which I'm told you'll be attending. That's right. I'll be one of the guests of honor there. And I know that because I saw your name in the mock-up of the program. Okay. You better be spelled right. honor there. And I know that because I saw your name in the mock-up of the program. Okay, better be spelled right. I think it was, but you'll be able to yell at us in person if it wasn't. Okay. And that's going to be kind of a fun thing to do, I think, with this combination of art and science dedicated to all of you, really, who have explored this planet going back to the man himself, Galileo.

Yeah, I think, I don't know why, but for some reason over the mission, the years that I've worked on the mission, I've often thought about Galileo the man and the similarities with this mission and how aptly named it has been. I certainly think that it is absolutely fair for all of you who've been involved in this mission to draw a direct line back to that man. And so I think it makes for, in another way, a very great way for this mission to come to an end. You said that it's going to happen, of course, because we want to protect the possibilities out there, primarily thinking of Europa.

And we talked a little bit about Ganymede. How about the other moons out there that Galileo told us so much about, like Io? Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's been all this talk about Europa. And we know from studying life on Earth that there are sulfur-loving microorganisms. At one point, I actually proposed a research topic to someone of what would happen if you could transport some of those sulfur loving bugs into the environment at Europa, you know, what would happen? One of the major

contributions of the Galileo's studies of the moon Io to our understanding of the solar system is that Io, which used to be thought to have a sort of geyser-like volcanic process that was driven mostly by sulfur, turns out to have a real iron silicate volcanic process, which was very hot magmas, very reminiscent of what the early Earth was once like. How could life, you know, the earliest life, the anaerobic, in this environment without water and without continents, how did that earliest life, what was it like? And so now we can see, we can actually look at this volcanic moon Io and we get a picture of perhaps what the earliest Earth was like, and we ought to use that picture to think about how life may have evolved.

and we ought to use that picture to think about how life may have evolved. So it sounds like you're not even discounting the possibilities, however small they may be, on this wild and crazy moon, Io. Well, I certainly think there's food for thought. Before we leave this discussion of Galileo, anything else that you might want to mention out of the mission? I did want to touch just briefly on the probe results. This is the first time that we've ever dropped a sensor into a giant planet's atmosphere. And from my perspective, the great thing that we learned out of it was that indeed, Jupiter as

a planet has evolved from the original solar nebula composition. As is sometimes the case, the evolution that the probe or the measurements that the probe provided didn't fit into any previous model of how planetary evolution is supposed to work. And so it's causing scientists to rethink some of their preconceived ideas. But the probe showed us that Jupiter has evolved. and I also think that this was a first-time opportunity to actually dwell in a giant magnetosphere, a magnetosphere that's so different from the Earth, driven by completely different processes and we had an opportunity to learn

in a different sort of plasma laboratory how the energy transfers work, how the flow of the plasma works and some of the way Jupiter interacts with the sun. All in all, a very fascinating time of growth for planetary scientists. And speaking of that magnetosphere and the intense radiation around Jupiter, your little spacecraft did pretty well, didn't it?

Oh, again, you know, you just feel like it's like a comfortable old car, that you can almost do anything to it and still start it up, you know, in the morning. We, back in November last year, when we passed by the moon Amalthea, we asked it for a lot. Okay, we flew it into the most intense radiation environment there is, and it came out with damage and with a lot of data stuck on that tape recorder. And with a little ingenuity, okay, with a lot of ingenuity, the engineers were able to do a thing which has never been done before, which is to anneal some parts in space and re-enable the tape recorder to return to its original functionality.

And then we returned all that data. Yet another one of the miracles that occurred on the Galileo project. Yeah, another one of those JPL fix-it-at-a-distance miracles, too. With only a couple minutes left, we've got a couple of the things we've got to talk about. We have to give you at least a minute to tell us about Rosetta, for which you are a project scientist. Yes, we are scheduled to launch in February of 2004, February 26th. And you may or may not know that Rosetta was, the launch was delayed from last year

because the Ariane rocket was not deemed to be ready. So we are changed targets from Comet Virtanen, which is a very small target, to Comet Churyuva-Gerasimenko, or CG for short, which is a very big comet. We're looking forward to that. And when is it supposed to arrive at CG? Well, somewhat like Galileo, the launch delay has resulted in a mission delay of several years. We don't arrive until the year 2014. Oh, well.

Oh, well. Getting there is half the fun, right? That's right. I want to give you a chance to go back to how you got started with all this and how that's continuing. You said that you ended up at Ames right out of high school. Obviously, a tremendous opportunity for you as a young woman. You've stayed very much involved in this kind of work, encouraging and providing opportunities to other young people. Yes, I think that I started doing that at a very early age.

And my view is that any ordinary person can be a scientist. It's not really mysterious. But some of our teachers tend to make it seem harder than it is. So I think I've always been dedicated towards trying to make it understandable for any person and fun. And a particular program that you're working on, what is this Windows to the Universe? Yes, I'm a co-author of this program. It's been a delight. My friend Roberta, who is the PI, the principal investigator, and I started this back when I had first graduated from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D.,

and the Internet was just being invented. And we had an idea. You know, you could take NASA's data and you could make it go online, and you wouldn't believe how many people laughed in our faces. And so the final triumph, you know, of that is that when your idea is now cutting edge, right, oh, yeah, you know, and we is that when your idea is now cutting edge, right? Oh, yeah, you know, and we've been there for practically 10 years now. It's a wonderful site. It is very popular. It's very ambitious. We try to talk about every single science topic in astronomy and

planetary science, including the Earth. You know, it's written basically at the third grade, sixth grade and ninth grade reading levels. And we are trying to put a graphic on there for the end of the Galileo mission. So hopefully it will be ready, fingers crossed, by the time of the end of mission event. We hope that that will help people understand a little bit more about what the spacecraft experience was. I'll put you on the spot. Do you know the URL, the address on the web? As a matter of fact, I do. It's www.windows.ucar.edu. And we will also put that where we always put the links to websites that are relevant to the week's show

on the Planetary Radio page for the current program at planetary.org, where we will also put some other information about you, Dr. Claudia Alexander, and the Galileo Project. Great. We are out of time. I look forward to having you back on to talk about Rosetta and lots of other things. I sure look forward to seeing you at the Pasadena Playhouse on the 22nd. Very good. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Dr. Claudia Alexander, JPL's project manager

for the Galileo spacecraft. And I'll be back right after this. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Can we even dream of interstellar space missions? Yes, there is hope. Experiments are now being performed that could lead to the first feasible mechanism

for visiting other stars on reasonable timescales. High-powered lasers could be used to push tiny robotic spacecraft equipped with light sails. The reflection of the light off the mirror-like light sails would impart momentum to the spacecraft and could accelerate it to speeds of 1 to 5 percent of the speed of light. That doesn't sound very fast, but it's fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri within the lifetime of the humans who launched it. The light sail technology is currently under development.

Later this year, the Planetary Society plans to launch the very first solar sail. The laser technology required to power a spacecraft to interstellar traveling speeds is not yet in place, but it's conceivable that a laser-generating spacecraft could be put in orbit close to the sun to generate the laser power required. The biggest technology challenge remaining is to develop a probe that would weigh only a few grams, yet have instruments and communication systems capable of capturing images of the distant star and returning those images back to the waiting eyes on Earth. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now, here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts. What would it be without Bruce? It wouldn't be What's Up. Bruce, welcome back. Thank you very much. Glad to make it What's Up. Well, what do you have for us this week? Well, speaking of What's Up, what's up in the night sky? Mars, as it has been for many weeks, look in the southeast at sunset, and look in the south as the evening goes along. Brightest object up there, still brighter than any other planet in the sky, anything except the moon. Looks reddish-orange. Have fun with it. You can see Saturn if you're up late or early.

It rises in the east shortly after midnight, and it's very high in the east-southeast by dawn. Jupiter and Mercury are both very challenging to see low in the east during dawn. How about we go on to this week in space history? Please do. On September 19, 1961, Houston was announced as the selection for the location of the new Manned Spacecraft Center. On to Random Space Facts! We've heard all about Galileo spacecraft, but let me tell you a little bit more.

Launched in 1989 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, it has been exploring Jupiter and its moon since December 1995, and it will slam into Jupiter, ending its mission around noonish Pacific time, September 21, 2003. And if you want to watch coverage of the final slam into Jupiter, you can do it on the JPL website at www.jpl.nasa.gov slash webcast slash Galileo. You can also find reports on our website, planetary.org. You also, through planetary.org or by calling the Planetary Society, can find out about Galileo's Daughter, a theatrical presentation occurring on September 22nd

in honor of the Galileo plunge into Jupiter. This is based upon the best-selling book, Galileo's Daughter, and will be performed at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. Let us know if you're nearby, or even if you're not, if you're interested in coming.

And, of course, that's the performance that Claudia Alexander told us that she will be a guest of honor at, very appropriate for the project manager, the last one for the Galileo mission. On to our trivia contest? Please. Well, last week we asked you what spacecraft is going to slam a giant copper ball into a comet, and we asked you for its real name and ideally hoped you'd give us a little something funny of what perhaps it should have been called.

What did we get, Matt? We got some great answers. We got our regulars, a lot of straight answers, a lot of funny ones, and sometimes both from the same person. I think if we go quick, I can read you this little entry from Kyle Tinsley. Kyle did not win this week, but you've got to hear this, folks. And Bruce, if you'll help out. I'll try. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's World Wrestling Smackdown.

In the left corner, traveling all the way from its home in the Oort Cloud to defend its title, the reigning champion, the five-billion-year-old giant dirty snowball you love to hate, Temple One. Bruce. And in the right corner, the challenger, a two-year-old Walter Waite, newcomer from the backwoods of Maryland planet Earth, with an iron fist and a famous kinetic shockwave signature punch, the home crowd's favorite, Deep Impact.

Our judges with the electromagnetic spectrometers are here, so let's get ready to rumble. Nice. So, Kyle, A for effort. Nice work. so let's get ready to rumble! Nice! So, Kyle, A for effort. Nice work. But he didn't win. Here's the winner. Scott Borgsmiller, who I don't think we've heard from before, had the correct answer, which is deep impact.

He also had these humorous answers, which were pretty good, too. Cannonball 1, Kablooie Express, and Bruce's favorite, and he'll explain why in a moment, The Temple of Boom. I do enjoy that. That is because Deep Impact will be slamming its impactor into Comet Temple 1. Get it? Temple of Boom, Comet Temple 1. That will occur on July 4th, 2005.

Don't miss it. Deep Impact versus Comet Temple 1. One night only. Be there. So Scott will be getting our poster for the week, that Mars 3D poster. It'll be coming in the mail. Thanks for entering, Scott, and congratulations. I want to make sure people understand.

They may be out there going, huh, why isn't the show over? But they almost so might be out there thinking, why slam a giant copper ball into a comet? And the reason is comets are highly modified on the outside. That's why it puts off all that gunk in their tail. So if you blast a hole in it, you can see down into the inside, which may look very different. And that's what gives us a clue into the past history of the solar system, since these are basically leftover dirty snowballs from the original

formation of the solar system. Now that my education lesson is done, we move on to next week's trivia contest. Now, here it is. Listen carefully, we've got multiple parts. Where is Zah Mama?

Where is Z mama? Where is the mama? Where is the mama? The mama. Anyway, however you pronounce it, where is it? What is it? Why is it called that? And what should it be? Now, this is the new trivia contest, but we are not going to have a new show again until the 29th,

our show that begins on September 29th, in a couple of weeks, because next week we'll be repeating that great birthday party for Ray Bradbury and Ray's own comments. So this time you have until the 25th of September, Thursday the 25th, to get your entry in. And Bruce will tell you how. Go to planetary.org, follow the links to Planetary Radio, and you'll find out how and also be able to reread all those subparts of the Zomama question. Bruce, I guess we're done. All righty.

Well, everyone go outside, look up in the night skies, see Mars and everything else up there, and think about puppies. Thank you and good night. Puppies. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society who joins us each week here on Planetary Radio. We're out of

time for this edition of Planetary Radio. Next week we'll feature a special encore broadcast of our birthday party for author Ray Bradbury, just for all of you who missed the recent festivities and the lovely message Ray had for his well-wishers.

On September 29, Planetary Radio will return with a new show recorded at the special benefit performance of An Evening with Galileo and His Daughter. We'll see you then.