Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Comet ISON: Much More Than a Memory

Episode Date: December 9, 2013

Maybe it wasn’t “the comet of the century,” but ISON has left a scientific legacy that is beyond compare. That’s according to Karl Battams of NASA’s Comet ISON Observing Campaign on this week’s show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Comet ISON, rest in pieces, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It really was the comet of the century, you know. Of course, the century is still young. But we'll hear today from Carl Adams that the science we'll get from ISON is likely to make it one of the greatest comets ever. Have you read or seen Bill Nye's letter to the president?

Three-quarters of a million people had watched the video by the time we finished creating this week's radio show. Bill will tell us about it in a moment. Emily Lakdawalla is at the vast annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. We've therefore given her the week off, but expect a nice report on the gathering next time. Bruce Betts will be joining me later for What's Up. It's nearly 2014. Time for us to begin giving away the terrific Year in Space wall calendar

in the Space Trivia Contest. Bill, where do we find you this week? Austin, Texas in the United States at the Texas Freedom Network event. The Texas Freedom Network is an organization that fights the good fight to keep science in science textbooks in the Texas school system. The Texas Freedom Network is generally religious people, church-going people who are concerned that science is getting short shrift, and so they fight the fight. Well, good for them, and I'm glad they're giving you an award. Other recognition that you're getting comes right off of the Planetary Society site and our YouTube channel, where last you and I checked, a much bigger number,

I'm sure, by the time people hear this, more than half a million people had seen your message to the President of the United States. Yeah, almost 570,000 people. And it's an open letter that I wrote with the help of the Board of Directors and our advocate analyst, Casey Dreyer. We've studied the problem, and we strongly believe that NASA's planetary science line item should be funded at $1.5 billion. Now, $1.5 billion is an enormous amount of money,

but compared to the federal budget, it's 0.04%. It's a very small fraction. And yet this is where the new things are happening. This is where the innovations are being made. This is what affects the economy directly. When you go to solve problems that have never been solved before, that's where you invent things, come up with new processes and new techniques, which leads to a robust economy. So even if you don't live in the United States, you want NASA's planetary science budget to be well funded so that the world will benefit.

I mean, of course, the whole thing, Matt, we're trying to answer those two deep questions. Where did we come from? Are we alone? The only way to answer those questions is to go farther and deeper into space and explore the planets. Yes. But the economic benefit is for everyone on Earth. And so we're fighting the fight. And I'm thrilled how to say half a million people watching this little thing.

Very gratifying. Half a million and counting. To say nothing of the value of the inspiration that missions like this provide. That's the thing. The value of the inspiration. When you have a space program, when you're going farther and deeper into space, that's what fills everybody with this optimism that any problem can be solved. We can put a mission in orbit around Jupiter.

We can fix the sewer system or the potholes or what have you. And this is, if you will, priceless. Bill, thank you. And we will put up a link directly to that video on the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye the Science Guy in Texas in his hotel room getting ready to receive an award.

I'll be right back with Carl Baddams to talk about Comet ISA. As Bruce Betts told us last week, no scientist called ISUN the comet of the century. We can thank the popular media for that. But we can also thank an armada of spacecraft and thousands of amateur and professional observers for making ISON a truly great event. One of those observers is Carl Battams. Carl is an astrophysicist and computational scientist based at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He has operated the NASA-funded Sun Grazing Comets Project since 2003. You may have been following his outstanding coverage of the encounter at planetary.org or through NASA's Comet ISON observing campaign. I caught him on Skype right after he had returned home from the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Carl, you have had quite a week. Are you starting to get a little bit of sleep? Yeah, you know what? Last night I actually got eight and a half hours sleep, which is honestly is the most sleep I have had in I don't know since when. It's a really long time. So I feel pretty good this morning. I'm glad. Can I guess no regrets? Oh, my goodness. No, absolutely none. This has been absolutely amazing. In terms of Comet ISON, I regret the outcome for the comet. But no, me personally, absolutely no regrets at all. We're going to provide a whole bunch of web addresses, URLs,

on this show's page that you can get to from planetary.org slash radio. But one that people really have to look at if they see nothing else is your in-memoriam page, which is a lovely tribute to this comet, which captured the imagination of almost everybody on this planet. You know, I was talking with my colleague Matthew Knight about the comet, and it was when he and I basically, between us, we realized, yeah, you know, the comet has fallen apart. There's still something left, a cloud of something left, but basically the comet has fallen apart. It's never going to get any brighter. It's not going to be a spectacular night sky object. And he said, we need to put some news out on the website.

We should put, and he kind of jokingly said, we need to sort of put out the obituary for the comet and and i i thought about that and i was like you know what that's exactly what we need to do because i've had so many comments from people on on like twitter for example through social media that they were they were emotionally invested in this thing. They genuinely were attached to the comet. And I thought, you know, I'm really going to put a human spin on this. And of course, it's tongue in cheek. I mean, you can't write an obituary like that for a comet and it not be tongue in cheek. I can't imagine anyone took it completely seriously. and it not be tongue in cheek.

I can't imagine anyone took it completely seriously. But it's also interesting to, I think, to consider the life of a comet from a human perspective. Sort of like it was created and then goes out into this distant oort cloud, stays out there forever, and suddenly embarks on this spectacular journey flying in towards the sun. And it gets there, but it sort of achieves its dream, but dies in the

process. It's poetically beautiful. It really was. I mean, tongue-in-cheek it may have been, or it may be, but you really did a lovely job of writing it. And I think that that shows up in the other writing that you've done in the blogs that we have borrowed with your permission, but all the other stuff that has been captured on this website that you've maintained. Is that going to continue? Yeah, it is. I can't continue at the pace that I was going, as probably a lot of bloggers will appreciate, certainly science bloggers.

It actually takes quite a considerable effort to write a blog in a way that's really approachable for everyone. That's a good level that everyone appreciates. Yeah. Tell us about it. Yeah. My colleague, Emily Laktawala is nodding her head vehemently someplace. Yeah, I'm sure she is. And she does an amazing job. She puts so much effort into her blogs and I truly feel her pain because it's wonderful. It feels amazing when you finally get one wrapped up and you hit kind of the publish button or whatever. It feels good because you know you've got this nice polished thing and people appreciate it and you're educating people and you're really conveying the excitement and all the wonder of science. but oh my goodness, they take a lot of work to do that.

So to get back to your question, yes, I do fully intend on continuing to write more, and I'm going to try and explore a couple of different venues for getting more writing out, but certainly the Ice Fong Campaign website, I will continue to put articles on there from time to time and certainly share them with you guys as well. Good. Thank you. And we'll put a link up to that as well. It's the NASA Comet ISON observing campaign since we won't probably be able to capture all of those. You know, one of the things that you did in your obit for this comet is that you mentioned it's several trillion next of kin.

that you mentioned it's several trillion next of kin. The real comet of the century, not that this was in a bust in any way, but the one that is going to capture us the way Halley's comet did once upon a time, it's out there someplace, right? Yeah, yeah, it truly is. There are some unquestionably out there floating in the Oort cloud or maybe heading on in right now. There are some truly spectacular objects. It takes them a couple of million years to get to us.

It could be that there is one that's only a year away from us now or maybe even less than a year away. Or it could be 10 years. I mean, we have no idea. years. I mean, we have no idea, but the point is it's such a vast reservoir of comets that we have out in space that, yes, it takes a long time for them to get here. They happen infrequently, but there is just no doubt at all that there's a spectacular one out there still. By my count, there were 20, at least 20 spacecraft that tried to image or in some other way capture some data about this comet. And that, of course, not even including the thousands probably of people trying to observe it here on Earth. Out there in space, I was surprised by some of these, even Swift, the spacecraft that is out there, to do something entirely different.

the spacecraft that is out there, to do something entirely different. Did it surprise you? And was this, in a sense, a good practice session for when that next big one comes down our way? It surprised me and it didn't. When we knew the comet was coming in, we were really lucky with this comet. It made a close pass by Mars, relatively close to Venus, to Mercury. Okay, the dust cloud was going to come close to the Earth. It's not now.

Well, I mean, the dust cloud will, but we won't see much. And it goes past the sun as well. We had this beautiful cosmic coincidence where it came relatively close to all these planets where we happen to have these fantastic missions. And plus, we've got a bunch of satellites floating around in space too, doing their sort of astrophysical observations like Hubble and Spitzer and we can't plan for a comet like this.

We can't just have comet spacecraft floating around hoping that something comes along. So we have to continue with business as usual but if an opportunity like this comes along, we've got to take advantage of it and we've got to use whatever we can in any way we can. So that is exactly what happened. I was delighted at just how many spacecraft were able to obtain images.

As you say, there were a bunch more that tried but were unable to. Unfortunately, that got some criticism from people. They perhaps don't understand what goes on with these missions, but when you have a satellite, that's a Mars that is designed for looking at the very bright Martian surface, it's a few hundred kilometers away. And you try and literally point that spacecraft in, in the opposite direction,

an image, a very faint, fuzzy, distant target. That's only, that's thousands of times fainter. It shouldn't be a surprise if the images aren't spectacular or if they aren't able to get much or anything at all. But the fact that we're even willing to try and able to try and able to do this, that's the most incredible thing here. That's Carl Badams. He'll tell us more about

the late great comet Ison in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org.

I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Comet ISIN is no more, but it will live on in beautiful images and terrific science. Carl Adams has been in the thick of it all, working and writing about the now vaporized dirty snowball from Kitt Peak National Observatory for NASA's Comet ISON observing campaign. We were talking before the break about the score of spacecraft that participated.

Most, but not all, were successful. I say that the teams behind every one of these spacecraft, and even those that are down on the surface of Mars that attempted this, deserve an A for effort and deserve our gratitude. And I learned from your blog that at least one instrument is not done. Is Hubble still going to be attempting to image whatever might be left of this in just, well, not many days at all? That is indeed the plan. It's going to be difficult for Hubble.

And here's the problem. I'm glad you asked this question, because I've had a lot of questions about this on Twitter, for example. People are like, you're telling us that the orbit of the comet didn't change when it went past the sun, but you're also telling us that Hubble don't know if they're looking in the right place for the comet or not. So you're contradicting yourself. And so I want to explain what's going on there. When a comet falls apart the way for example

it's clear that ison probably did it may be that there is literally nothing of any consequence left at all it could just be tiny like centimeter or micron sized pieces of dust but there might be some chunks floating around at a few meters across or a couple of tens of meters or whatever. But those won't be in the exact location that the nucleus was. Those will be kind of spread out now in a trail behind where the nucleus should be. Maybe some of them will be a little bit ahead. It'll be a broad, very broad field of debris. Hubble has an extremely fine, extremely narrow, sorry, field of view. It can't do a broad image of a whole region of sky and hope to see something small and faint.

They need to look in a very, very localized area and hope to see something. And this is the problem the Hubble team face, that they're going to have to kind of guess where some of these chunks might be within the orbit of the comet ISON. And they're going to have to take images, very probably, they're not going to see anything. And when they don't see anything, they have to decide, well, are we not seeing anything, because nothing is there? Or is there a chunk that's just outside of our field of view, it's going to be very difficult. But but certainly the first thing they're going to do is take an image exactly where the nucleus should be and if they don't see a nucleus there then we can certainly say for sure that yes there is no big nucleus there i mean honestly there really isn't we've seen so much evidence now that even before Perihelion, the comet,

was not outgassing, releasing much material at all. Then we are left with, other than the wonderful memories, beautiful, beautiful images. One of them is on that In Memoriam blog page that you put up. It is really stunningly beautiful. But before we run out of time here, we should also talk about the science that we are being left largest data set about a single comet in history, and also the broadest range of observations in terms of the number of spacecraft and the number of people, everything. I mean, this is just an absolutely massive data set that is going to take such a long time for us to go through. We are starting to get some of the science results sort of trickle out now but it's really just a very preliminary look at the data and as people start digging into things and taking measurements from this spacecraft and this person over here and another set of observations here and

combining them we'll begin to really build the picture of of what ISON was in terms of its composition and its size and its behavior, when it fell apart, that kind of thing. So we've got a long road ahead of us, and I'm sure that there's going to be some really amazing results that come from this. So comet ISON is hardly dead in the world of science. Would you, as we wrap up, just say a word about the contribution by amateur observers and image processors? We can't praise and thank the amateur community enough. They've been absolutely fantastic and truly instrumental in helping us with this campaign, keeping us advised on what the comet is doing. We've seen spectra from amateurs.

They're measuring sort of dust production, and they're taking some just extraordinary images for looking at the shape of the tail and seeing if there's new features near the comet's head. I was at a meeting yesterday, and there was a rocket launch called Fortis that went up to take some images of comet ISON and the PI of that rocket launch specifically said it is due to amateur

astronomers on social media that they launched that mission because they didn't know if it would be worth it they didn't know if the comet was active enough and they saw on social media that the amateur astronomers were saying wow it's doing's doing this, it's bright, whatever. And he decided then, okay, fine. They say it's good. Let's go ahead and launch this mission. And so they launched it. And sure enough, they were successful. I think that speaks wonderfully to the amazing contribution of the amateur astronomer here. It certainly does. Carl, somebody a couple of days ago asked me who I was going to have on the radio show this week. When I mentioned, first

of all, I said that we're going to talk about the comet, and I'm going to talk to a guy named Carl Badams. He said, oh yeah, he's the comet guy. I said, tell him thanks. So, Carl, on behalf of that friend of mine, and everybody else who has benefited from this observation campaign,

thank you for this long, long set of days and nights that you put in up there on Kitt Peak. And please pass that along to your colleague Matthew and everybody else who helped make this such an exciting time in the inner solar system. I will do. Thank you. I appreciate that. Carl Adams is an astrophysicist and computational scientist. He's based at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. But it's for NASA that he has been running the Sun Grazing Comets Project for more than 10 years now. In addition to his comet work, he performs data analysis and visualizations for various ongoing

solar physics projects within that lab, the space science division there. And you can follow him, you can follow him many times at planetary.org, but also at the NASA Comet ISON observing campaign site, which, as I said, we'll put up a link to. And you'll find him on Twitter at at sungrazercomets. And you'll find him on Twitter at at Sungrazer Comets. You'll find Bruce Batts joining us in just a moment to provide his closing thoughts on Comet ISON and tell us what else is up in the night sky that's just a few moments away.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here, director of projects for the Planetary Society. Take us to the sky. Take us to the sky, astro boy. Yes, sir. The Geminids, the traditionally best meteor shower of the year, peaking on the night of December 13th, but increased meteors for a few nights before and after that. on the night of December 13th, but increased meteors for a few nights

before and after that. But peak night of December 13th, it's going to be really good with very little moon interference this year. So if you don't have clouds and if you're living in the northern hemisphere, should be in pretty good shape. Seeing in a dark site, up to 60 to 100 meteors per hour, you'll probably see less than that, but still more than you will most of the rest of the year. Southern hemisphere is a bit challenged to see it very high up in the sky, but still we'll see an increased meteor rate. We've got Venus at right around its brightest that it gets and about as high up as it's going to get. It's going to actually, after being up for months and months and months, it's going to rapidly drop over the coming weeks and pretty much vanish in the next

month below the horizon. But right now, still up high, low west, or not even that low shortly after sunset. If you have a small telescope, you look at it, you'll actually see it in a phase, kind of a crescent-ish, half-ish, Venus quarter-ish, a lot of ish. We've got Mars coming up in the east in the middle of the night, looking reddish and kind of dim. Turn your head in the early evening by 7 or 8 p.m., we've got Jupiter looking really bright coming up in the east with Gemini stars Castor and Pollux to its left and to its right, Orion, the constellation. And even Saturn's getting into things, just jumping up into the pre-dawn east sky. So crazy planets, crazy everywhere, as well as meteors. Good time to be looking at the sky.

Let me ask you about Venus, because it does seem to me, I don't remember it ever having been so high and so bright for so long. It just worked out very nicely. I, too, have been impressed by how long it's been up and hanging out with us, but just the way those orbits work with each other, it's been particularly long. On to this week in space history. It was this week in 1972 that the last humans landed on, explored, and then left the surface of the moon on Apollo 17. Too long. And that leads us on to...

What? I'm a space vet. Okay, little squirrel. Go ahead. So Apollo 17 was the first night launch of a U.S. human spacecraft. And I saw it. You were there? I was there.

I wasn't at the Cape, but I was in Florida. I watched the launch on TV in the hotel room and then ran outside and watched the rockets streaking through the nighttime sky. Wow. Wow. And it must have really lit things up. A Saturn V at night? Holy moly. It was pretty cool. Well, I'm envious. As well you should be, my friend. have really lit things up. A Saturn V at night? Holy moly. It was pretty cool.

Well, I'm envious. As well you should be, my friend. As well you should be. We move on to the trivia contest. I ask you, how far away is the Orion Nebula? And that's something you can actually see with some binoculars, or even conceptually with the dark sky, looking up at the middle star in Orion's sword.

And what did people tell us, Matt? They told us it's pretty far, but not all that far comparatively. Yes. Paul DeHart, first-time winner, in Waterford, Mississippi, who came up with the number that you had, the Orion Nebula is about 1,344 light years from our home planet. And, Paul, that has gotten you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. So, congratulations.

We did get it in some other interesting units, as we sometimes do from our faithful and somewhat twisted listeners. I won't give you all of the ones we got from Claude Plymate, but here it is in Leagues, 2.65 times 10 to the 15th. But I like this one a lot. Bruce Cordell. Because it was a good way of telling us just how big the Orion

Nebula is. He said the Orion Nebula is approximately 56 Orion Nebulas away. That is a pretty cool random space fact. Just one more from Wojtek Navilac over there in the Czech Republic. He put it at 8,000 million million miles. He said if you had a car doing 60 miles an hour, it would take more time than the age of the universe. He did figure out that it would cost $140,000 million in gas money, which I think is almost as much as it cost me to get to San Diego last week. Probably. We don't recommend a car as the way to get to the Orion Nebula, just to be

clear. Finally, this one, Not the distance so much, but the fourth dimension from Chris Utzig, who pointed out that light that is now reaching us, reaching those telescopes and eyeballs you were talking about, left the nebula 1,344 years ago. It was actually emitted

in the year 669, so the early Middle Ages. Kind of puts things in perspective. And yet they so the early Middle Ages. Kind of puts things in perspective. And yet they call them the Dark Ages. That's a pretty cool way to look at it. We move on to the next trivia contest. We go back to Apollo 17.

Apollo 17 returned the most lunar materials, so regolith, rocks, dust, and the like, than any other mission ever from the moon. What mass of regolith did Apollo 17 return? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And, Matt, what are we giving away, and when do you need that by? Well, seeing as how this is near the end of the year, we are now authorized. We're going to be giving away the really spectacular Year in Space wall calendar from the good folks at yearinspace.com. Planetary Society contributes content to that. It is very, very impressive. Year in Space still making the desk calendar that

you're still writing for, right? I have a piece in there. Yeah, and I also was involved with the wall calendar, and there's some nice random space facts, and both of these calendars, the official source of This Week in Space History on Planetary Radio. So it's the ideal holiday gift, is it?

Anyway, you've got until the 16th, December 16th, at 2 p.m. on that Monday to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about pixels. Picture, element, pixels. Not pixies? Not even elves? No! All right. Well, pixels. We get the picture. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the watchful members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Music Music Music

Music