Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Countdown to LightSail: An Update

Episode Date: April 28, 2015

The road to space has been a rocky one for most spacecraft, and LightSail is no different. Challenges remain even with the May 20th launch of a test mission approaching. Embedded LightSail reporter Jason Davis checks in with the latest news.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A LightSail solar sailing update, 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, ready to talk with another one of my colleagues. Jason Davis is the embedded reporter with the LightSail project, now headed for its test launch from Cape Canaveral on May 20th. Bill Nye has had a big week, including a celebration of Earth Day with President Barack Obama. Like me, Bruce Betts has returned from the Planetary Defense Conference in Italy, and he's ready to take us on another What's Up tour of the night sky.

By the way, more great content from the PDC is coming in the weeks ahead. First, though, we head back to Comet 67P, where things are really heating up. That's according to senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we look back a few days to a blog that you posted on the 21st of April. All the latest from Rosetta, some pretty spectacular images, not surprisingly. Yeah, you know, it's been a long time since I've checked in on Rosetta, which I feel really terrible about. But there's just so much happening in space exploration right now.

It's kind of hard to pay attention to everything. So it was two months of activities that I had to summarize here. And it turns out that Rosetta has done two very close flybys of the comet. And the last one actually caused it some real problems where little dust particles that had been floating off the comet spoofed its star trackers and made it difficult to navigate. And so now they've backed off to a much greater distance. And so over the last two months, we've been treated to this huge variety of amazing images of the comet, some from very close up, seeing very fine details, and some from quite a distance away where you can see that the comet, as it approaches its August perihelion, is getting more and more active, with jets springing into life before Rosetta's eyes.

I was just mentioning to you before we started recording about this image that shows this slight little swivel of the comet, but it looks like a thruster on the bottom, turning on and off. It looks exactly like that, and you know, it's not a very massive object, so these jets probably are imparting a little bit of thrust to the comet as they as they turn on like that. But yeah, it's so fortunate that Rosetta captured this photo of that jet springing into life. And yet ESA planned for this kind of good fortune by going into orbit around the comet and planning to have their mission active for more than a year. So we're going to get, I hope, to see more instances like this of comet jets coming into action as Rosetta continues to orbit. All right, with your geologist hat on, talk a little bit more about some of these very detailed images.

I mean, with pixel sizes that are well under a meter, in one case just 11 centimeters per pixel. We're really getting details here. just 11 centimeters per pixel. We're really getting details here. You know, this comet is one of those things where I kind of wonder whether it's a handicap to be a trained geologist because there are so many landscapes that, you know, those look like cliffs

and this looks like sand dunes and that looks like folds, tectonic folds. And it can't be any of those things. Well, cliffs maybe, but a lot of the things that I'm trying to make them look like familiar features that I understand from Earth and Mars geology. And they can't be any of those things because the forces operating here are just not the same. They're much smaller amounts of gravity, much larger amounts of particle cohesion. And then you've got the jets doing all kinds of

strange things and snowing comet material down. So it's really hard to understand what's going on in these images. All right. As we said, it is an April 21st entry. Lots of gorgeous, spectacular images from the Rosetta spacecraft. And I guess we're still waiting to see if maybe Philae is going to wake up anytime soon. The earliest they hope for it is next month, but I think it's much more likely to happen later on in the summer, especially even close to perihelion in August. So keep hoping. Yeah, keep hoping and we'll keep watching, especially through you, Emily. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. She is, as you probably know, the senior editor for the Planetary Society,

our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, who's just back from a little visit with a friend. Air Force One, you got to ride with the president. Yes, the president got to sit with me for a half hour on the way to the Everglades on Earth Day. Now, Matt, I'm so old, I went to the very first Earth Day in Washington, D.C., the city in which I grew up. And it was quite gratifying to see the president of the United States taking it so seriously. As I've said for a long time, you know, if the United States were out in front on climate change issues, everybody in the world

would be following. It wouldn't be the diplomatic equivalent of whining about who's flaring natural gas and whose carbon offsets or this and that. If the United States were out in front, it would just get taken care of. So I sat with him for a half hour. Then we get to the Everglades, which is this astonishing national park. You know, I'm an ambassador to the national parks now in the United States. I did not know that. Congratulations. It's the thing they're going to rev up really next year, which is only the 100th anniversary of the national parks. Teddy Roosevelt, a conservative, established the national park. Yep. And then on the way back,

I sat on Marine One, the helicopter with the president, and just gave him an earful about the great value of planetary science and planetary exploration and the discoveries that we could make at a very reasonable price, that would change the world. And by the way, this is the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. Only maybe the most effective scientific instrument of all time, according to some people in the know. That's pretty reasonable. I mean, the thing is, we now take these images for granted. We now take these images for granted. Oh, sure, we'll put a spaceship in outer space that's got cameras that can point at Day last week during the same week as the anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope really speaks to worthy uses of our intellect and treasure. This is what brings out the best in humankind.

It was an exciting week and it's good to talk to you. Now, Matt, I hope you're feeling the tension. We're going to launch light sail. Is that Matt, I hope you're feeling the tension. We're going to launch LightSail. Is that the tension I hear in the background? Yes, on the 20th of May. It's a very exciting time. And in a moment, we're going to be talking to Jason Davis, our embedded reporter, about exactly that topic. He's the expert.

Carry on. Thank you very much, Bill. And congratulations. Nice week there. He is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. I bet we'll talk to him again next week. Space is hard, and it's never harder than when you've got a new and innovative spacecraft with a new and pathfinding mission. The development of the Planetary Society's little light-sail CubeSat has definitely been challenging, yet the clock is now ticking down toward its launch atop an Atlas V rocket with a primary payload that the Air Force doesn't like to talk about much. If all goes well, it will be just a few days or weeks after launch that this first light

sail, a testbed if there ever was one, will be commanded to spread its wings, going from a 10-centimeter-wide breadbox to a shiny 32 square meters in a matter of minutes. No one who isn't actually building the spacecraft knows more about this project than Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis. His ongoing chronicle can be found at sail.planetary.org. I'm especially impressed by his history of solar sailing that traces its origins back more than 400 years. Jason, great to talk to you again. Looking for another update on LightSail-A. What is the general status of this upcoming mission? Well, Matt, we are on track still for

May 20th after that first delay that was induced by our primary ride to orbit, or the primary launch vehicle, rather. So we're moving closer and closer, I guess, about three weeks now. So the team is right now going through this series of simulations called Operational Readiness Tests, or ORTs. And that's basically where they all get on the line, just like they're going to be following the mission when the spacecraft's in orbit. And they start basically pulling data down from the spacecraft and analyzing it in real time, just making sure that everybody is coordinated for the real show that's coming up soon.

Now, just last week, you filled in the rest of us on staff, along with the rest of the world, in a blog entry that you wrote just Friday, the 24th of April, which talked about this process. It's a fascinating read. And perhaps most fascinating is this interesting, I'll call it a problem that has cropped up. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, it is an interesting, and we can certainly call it a problem. But we'll clarify the severity of the problem and what's expected here. Yeah, during the ORT tests,

they were pulling down telemetry from the spacecraft, and they noticed that a few lines of code inside these telemetry files that just contain basic information about the sensors on the spacecraft, the magnetometers, the gyroscopes, the sun sensors, these are very just plain text readable files. They noticed that some of these values were not incrementing from packet to packet. In a lab setting, that is to be expected because the spacecraft is just sitting there. It's not doing anything. Yeah, this is, it's not, well, let's make very clear, this is not in space. This is really just sort of a, it's a breadboard version of the spacecraft, or is this the actual spacecraft in the Peapod?

No, this is a, they call it bench sat, and essentially, and we have pictures of it on our website there and on the blog entry, but they have a sheet of acrylic that they kind of deconstruct the spacecraft and lay all the components out, so it gives them easy access to each piece of it rather than having it all bundled up in a cube form. And they use this for testing. It has all the same functionality as the flight unit, but they can poke and prod it with multimeters and all of the geeky electronics that you would expect without having to work on the flight unit, which isn't possible anyway because that's in Cape Canaveral right now. Yeah, and it's not moving. It's just sitting on a bench, so you wouldn't expect these numbers to, as you call them,

increment. Exactly, yeah, you would not expect that. There's only one number, or a few numbers that do increment, and those are some of the clocks on the spacecraft. These are real-time clocks that start counting from zero once the spacecraft boots on after it comes off the launch vehicle. So yes, during these ORTs, they noticed that these numbers weren't incrementing. And just to verify that this was indeed the result of it just sitting on a bench in a lab, Barbara Plunt, one of our, well, the system engineer on the spacecraft, she suggested that they just simply turn bench sat on its side and see what happened. And they did that over the phone line on the call. And it sent out some

more telemetry, but unfortunately, the values still didn't change. And you would expect, especially the gyroscopes to change when you turned it on its side. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that told them that something wasn't quite right. This sent off a pretty quick sequence of troubleshooting events that are actually still going on to try to see how widespread the problem is or exactly what the effects are going to be. But the bottom line is, the sequence of code where this bug initiated also is the piece of code that affects the attitude control system. Long story short, it doesn't look like the attitude control system is going to function

on this particular flight. That means when the spacecraft gets tossed out of its peapod, the little spring-loaded deployer on the rocket, it's not going to have any way of orienting itself on its own. So this sounds pretty bad when you talk about it without context. However, as it drags through the edge of the atmosphere, the spacecraft is expected to sort of stabilize on its own to the point where we should still get fairly reliable communications from it. And then when the sail deploys, which is still scheduled for 28 days after launch, they may try to initiate that quicker at this point. That's something they're

still looking at. Once the sail comes out, that should stabilize as it drags through the atmosphere as well. We saw this behavior with NASA's NanoSail to where it actually didn't tumble as much as they had expected it to. It did stabilize pretty well. We still should get data back from it. We should still get some imagery back from it. The team's kind of looking at what kind of imagery. It may not be the full resolution images that we had expected, but at least some thumbnails. And at the same time, they've actually been working on a ground-based imaging campaign. And this predated the problem to have some Air Force resources and some other observatories kind of try to image the sail once it's out from the ground, which would still tell us that the sail deployed okay and give us some confirmation on that.

So it sounds bad, but it's something that they can work with. And obviously, this is a test flight. So they're going to apply all of these lessons learned for the second flight in 2016. And we'll come back to that flight in a couple of minutes here. But we also want to remind folks, this is in low Earth orbit, and nobody was really expecting this to do any solar sailing. We just want to, it's a proof of concept, right? It is. Yeah. Yeah. This first spacecraft will not go high enough to solar sail on its own. It won't overcome enough atmospheric drag to do any meaningful propulsion where we can

detect it because the atmosphere will be dragging it down pretty quickly. That's Jason Davis. He'll continue his light sail update in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc?

Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he?

I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community, and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. If all goes well, the first light-sail spacecraft will rocket into orbit on May 20th of this year. I hope to be at Cape Canaveral cheering the little CubeSat on. And I know Jason Davis will be there.

Jason is the Planetary Society's embedded reporter with the project. Before the break, he was telling us about the challenging software problem that engineers are now working on and possibly preparing to work around. Some of the other questions that I bet are running through our listeners' minds right now are, well, if it's a software bug, why don't we just fix the software? Why not, Jason? Yeah, that does seem like the easy answer. Many spacecraft have this capability. For instance, the Mars rovers, I believe this is something they can regularly do. They beam up new software, it flashes the memory, and they're good to go. We don't have that capability. This is a lower budget mission. It's just a CubeSat. Lower? To say the least, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Putting it mildly. It's pretty, if you looked at it on a bar graph, we would be but a blip on the radar compared to a full. Yeah, so this capability was not inherently built in. They can send commands to it, but not actually flash the entire software unit. What they can do, though, is develop that capability for the second light sail flight in 2016. And that is something that now they are very interested in doing, obviously, and are looking at right now. And we can't even get at the spacecraft now, right? I mean, it's basically been turned over to the people who are going to send it into space. Yeah, we haven't touched it since January, actually.

It's been on a long voyage. It got put into its deployer unit. That went off to the Naval Postgraduate School in California to meet up with the other CubeSats. That whole thing went to Cape Canaveral, and now that's bolted onto the side of the rocket. So I don't think we can, even if we asked very nicely, I don't think we can let us up on the rocket history of space exploration. There is so much to prove out here. I mean, we know space is hard, right? And there have already been a number of other problems solved. What are some of those? Yeah, so this is just but one in a long list of challenges that they've had to overcome to get this thing flying.

Ecliptic Enterprises, our main contractor now, has just really had their hands full taking care of these. We've had the radio problems that were kind of ongoing that delayed the day-in-the-life test. We had the results from the vibration test where they put it on a table and dial up the shake unit to match an Atlas V rocket. And that broke the wires that deployed the solar panels, so they had to redesign that. And then we had the bowing of the solar panels. After it sat in storage so long, the sail kind of pushed on them enough to permanently bend them, so they had to install stiffener brackets. So that's just the nature of the game when you have an experimental spacecraft like this,

and it goes on for this amount of time. So they're applying all of this to the second mission for sure. So let's talk now about that second mission. How is it looking for Light Sail B, the one that will be on that first Falcon heavy rocket from SpaceX and make it up to mid Earth orbit where it can actually do some sailing? Yeah, so that, as we said, that all the lessons learned from this first spacecraft are being applied to the second unit. From the hardware fixes, some of those have already been done. I know they've deintegrated part of the spacecraft already at Ecliptic Enterprises in Pasadena. And of course, all of these software issues. They're also developing a lot of test commands

to make sure that these bugs don't crop up on the second flight, kind of a more rigorous testing environment for it. The test flight was scheduled for, I believe the last date we had was April 2016. That, of course, is all dependent on the schedule of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. We are getting some indications that that may, as they say, move to the right a little bit. Exactly how far, we're not quite sure, but it's probably going to be at least a few months. We're just going to have to wait and see. Yeah, I heard some rumors about that as well. All right, well, we still have a much more immediate launch to look forward to. Tell us, how will people be able to follow this when it takes place, if it takes place, as planned on May 20th?

Sure. Well, our one-stop shop will still be our new light sail website, and that's sail.planetary.org. We will, once we start getting some data back from the spacecraft and seeing how it's going to behave, some data back from the spacecraft and seeing how it's going to behave. We still have plans to implement, or well, it's implemented to roll out a dashboard that displays some of those numbers. So people will be able to see what the spacecraft's doing in real time. And there will be a map as well that shows the ground track of the spacecraft. So you know when it's flying overhead. And when we deploy the sails, that'll give people an idea of where to look if they want to try to catch a glimpse of it in the night sky. I know for one that I certainly hope to do that. You and me and many, many others. And we have quite a crowd of people who are planning to head to the Cape to

try and catch a glimpse of this launch on May 20th, just a few weeks away as we speak. It's pretty exciting. This update has also been exciting and fascinating, Jason. Thank you once again. I'm sure we'll be talking to you in the next few days. Sounds good. Looking forward to it. Jason Davis, he's a digital editor for the Planetary Society, covering the Society's science and technology projects, including and especially the LightSail mission. We call him our embedded reporter with LightSail. He also reports on human and commercial spaceflight.

You can check out this blog that goes through a lot of the information that we've summarized during this conversation. It's on the website at planetary.org, and he posted it on the 24th of April. We spoke to him at his home in Tucson, Arizona. Coming up next is our regular visit with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, is here. Well, figuratively speaking, we spent a week together in Italy,

but actually now we're talking via Skype at opposite ends of Southern California. Welcome back. Hey, Matt. You went to Italy, too? Yeah, yeah, I was there. I was the one who was mooning you when you were doing the random space fact with Amy Meinzer. Awkward. Not really, I swear. Mooning?

No, it would only be real moons, solar system moons on this program. What's up? Nice save. Should I leave that in the show or not? If you're hearing this, folks, it's because I've made a bad decision. Go ahead. I've made a bad decision. Go ahead. So in the night sky, we've, in the evening sky, you can spin your head around and see three planets. Maybe more, but at least three. Well, go with four. You can check out Mercury if you've got a clear view to the western horizon shortly

after sunset. It's far below much brighter Venus, which is very easy to see for a couple hours after sunset. And then high in the south is bright Jupiter. And then all the way over on the eastern horizon is Saturn coming up. We move on to this week in space history. Appropriately after our announcement of the Shoemaker-Neo grant winners, we celebrate the birthday of Gene Shoemaker in 1928. Oh, that's great. I'm glad. I don't think we've marked that in the past. On to...

You're going to scare the dog. Yeah, she looks terrified. Fortunately, she's mostly deaf, so it'll be okay. The apparent brightness of the sun is 13 billion times brighter than the next brightest star in the sky, Sirius. Wow, that's really bright. And I just read that they just figured out why the corona is so hot. That'll be a future show, maybe. hot. That'll be a future show, maybe. Yeah. Someone's rubbing two sticks together? No, no. Surprisingly,

that turned out not to be why. Oh, that was always my favorite theory, but whatever. Moving on. All right, on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what is Neptune's moon Triton's orbital period? How'd we do? This was really fun. Big response, because everybody wanted that book by Jim Bell, The Interstellar Age, Inside the 40-Year Voyager Mission. The winner of that book this time around, if she got this right, is Chelsea Hands of Phoenix, Arizona. Chelsea

said that the orbital period is, and she got it pretty precisely, 5.8769 days. That thing is trucking. It is. It is revolving around Neptune in a bit of a hurry. So she got it right. Yes. Chelsea, you've won yourself that book, The Interstellar Age, and we'll get Jim Bell to sign it for you. We also got this from Austin Hinkle in California, Kentucky, that is.

Also got this from Austin Hinkle in California, Kentucky, that is. He got it right, but he also put it in terms of, he said it was 282 pre's, roughly. That's Planetary Radio episodes. You know, that's a very fine unit. Nick Hess, he's in Champaign, Illinois. He was one of many, many, many people who wondered at the fact that this orbital period is usually or very often stated as a negative number, roughly negative 5.87 days. He said he wonders if that's why the moon is looking so young, because it's getting younger as it goes backwards around the planet. It's kind of that Superman flying backwards effect, yeah. By the way, I note that it's a negative number because it orbits retrograde in the opposite direction that the planet rotates. There's a better explanation for you. Now, tell me if this one might be true. This came from April

Larkin in Vermont. She said Triton is also the coldest object in the solar system at minus 235 centigrade, which is minus 391 Fahrenheit. But what's she talking about there? What does she mean? Only out as far as Neptune, I assume. Yeah, certainly if you go out to Sedna or farther out comets, then you're going to get even colder. But you're getting awfully cold and weird ices are condensing out. It is a cold place, but there are lots of them out there. All right, a couple of comments off the topic, but I think you'll like these.

Doug Simpson, Yorktown, Virginia. He says, and he's referring to your random space fact video number 22, he loves Bruce's inner cat. It makes him want to look up in the sky and think of friskies. You got to check it out, folks, on Planetary TV. Bruce ends up with cat makeup, and that's all I'll tell you. It's RSF 22. Oh, and this one, finally, from Aldo Ruiz in Kansas City, who wants us to do a shout out to virtually everyone who lives in Kansas City, although mostly family members.

And he finishes with this. Bruce Betts, I like you no matter what people say. Thanks, I think. Indeed. Thank you, Aldo. And we're ready to go on to the next contest. What is the absolute magnitude of the sun? So absolute magnitude is a measure of brightness if you put an astronomical object at a uniform distance,

in this case 10 parsecs or about 32.6 light years. So for the sun, what is its absolute magnitude? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Very cool. Or very hot. This time you've got until Tuesday, May 5th, the 5th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. And we're going to give you, if you win that is, a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account worth a couple hundred bucks. Your access to that international nonprofit network of telescopes. There you go.

All right, everybody, go out there. Look up at the night sky and think about prancing dogs. Thank you, and good night. But Sophie's been so good. I barely heard her at all. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology 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 high-flying members of the Society. Daniel Gunn is our Associate Producer. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies and happy anniversary, Hubble. You don't need to wait for clear skies, do you?