Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Curiosity Finds a Martian Stream Bed and Endeavour Flies Home

Episode Date: October 1, 2012

Emily Lakdawalla reports on Curiosity's discovery of an ancient stream bed, and Endeavour flies over the California plant where it was built.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A stream bed on Mars and Endeavor comes home 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. Do we have a crowded show today? It includes two visits with Emily Lakdawalla. She'll tell us about the latest from Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, among other things. Bill and I will check in from Naples, Italy, with a special surprise guest. And I'll share my sound portrait of Space Shuttle Endeavour's final moments in the air as it arrived in Los Angeles.

All this and what's Up with Bruce Betts. Emily, let's get started with your regular report and it's obviously a good opportunity to do that since it's the beginning of the month, which means you have another What's Up report. What's Up for the month of October 2012 in the blog. What are the highlights as you see them? Well, on Mars, just a couple of days ago, we passed the southern vernal equinox, which means that the days are getting longer and warmer for both rovers, Curiosity and Opportunity, which means both of them are going to be quite active, and they're both exploring completely different yet fascinating kinds of rocks on two different sides of Mars. We're going to come back to Curiosity,

of course, so tell us a little bit about Opportunity. Well, Opportunity headed, drove for kilometers and kilometers across Meridiani Planum to head to the rim of this big crater called Endeavor. And it didn't quite make it to the rock targets it was seeking last year before it had to stop for the winter. But now that spring is here, it's driven down the inside rim of Endeavor and gotten to this point on Cape York where they are investigating and finding some really strange-looking spherules inside the rock. Now, Opportunity has seen a lot of spherules before, but these are different ones,

and they're working with like seven different hypotheses to try to figure out what these things are right now. So these are not blueberries? They are not blueberries. It's possible that they could have formed in a way similar to blueberries, but there's a host of other ways. For instance, impact glass. That's when you spray molten rock from the site of an impact into the air. It freezes into little drops, and those are called lapilli, and that's another possible way that these things could have formed. Still interesting to me that there are parallels to all this stuff on Earth. What's another major highlight in the small amount of time we have left? Well, this is actually kind

of a low light, which is that Saturn is now getting very close to passing on the opposite side of the sun from Earth, which makes radio communications with Cassini extremely difficult. So Cassini is going to be lying somewhat low for the month. It, of course, is not affected by the relative position of Earth and the sun. But what is affected is its ability to transmit data back to Earth. And if it can't transmit the data back to Earth, then its hard drive gets filled up and it has to wait in order to acquire more data. So it's going to be kind of a low period for Cassini this month.

All right. So we'll sit this one out with Cassini, but there's still so much going on all over the solar system. You can read all about it in the September 28 entry. It is Emily's regular monthly contribution. She calls What's Up in the Solar System.. It is Emily's regular monthly contribution. She calls What's Up in the Solar System. I do want to ask you very, very quickly about GRAIL, those two spacecraft with the great names Ebb and Flow, sounds like a comedy team, descending very low to the lunar surface.

Yeah, well, GRAIL is a gravity mission. And so depending on how high they orbit, they're sensitive to different sizes of features on the lunar surface. So on their primary mission, they were up at like a 50-kilometer orbit, and they got a really nice gravity map of the moon. So now on their extended mission, they've gotten even closer. The moon has fairly extreme topography. So if your orbit average is 25 kilometers, that means that sometimes you're getting within 8 kilometers of mountain peaks. So it's quite a death-defying mission, and it's not going to be able to defy death forever because this orbit will decay pretty quickly.

It's going to run out of maneuvering fuel not long after this extended mission. So Grail is not much longer for this world, but it's going to do a great work at the moon while it lasts. Speaking of running out of fuel, you have kudos for an active solar sail still out there amid the planets. Yeah, amazingly enough, Icaros woke up again, is communicating with Earth. I don't know how long that's going to last either.

They have no maneuvering fuel left, but they are a solar sail, so they can control their orientation with the sun. But the Japanese are to be congratulated for what they've managed to do with this mission. You bet. Emily, thanks so much. Don't go away, because we're going to be back right after we talk to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. So, Matt, Bill Nye here at the International Astronautical Congress in Naples, Italy. You walk around. Here's the head of NASA.

Here's the head of the European Space Agency. Here's the head of the Chinese space agency. Here's the head of the Russian Federation space agency. It's amazing. And here is Leland Melvin, whom you may know as an astronaut who flew on the space station. And he's also now the head of NASA's

Education and Public Outreach. He is a visionary. Leland, if you have a moment, can you talk to the listeners of Planetary Radio? Hello, listeners of Planetary Radio. We are at the IAC in Naples. It's a fantastic night. And I had a chance to talk to some of the future explorers and future astronauts. And it's an amazing time when I see people that I was up on the International Space Station with working

together as one civilization in harmony for the future of humankind. And I think these are the types of things we do with Bill and with other people that are involved with STEM education to ensure that our kids have exactly what they need to be that next generation of explorers. So thanks for listening. Fantastic. Fantastic is right. Thank you so much, Leland.

Bill, are you back? Yeah, that's just the kind of guy you run into at the astronautical. A lot of rocket people, basic sports. You're just headed into the opening ceremonies there, but I guess you've already been pretty busy hearing about what other countries have in mind. Oh, yes. We were at the forum with the heads of space agencies. And to paraphrase, NASA is very concerned about the budget, their budget. European Space Station is very concerned about the budget, trying to do a deal with the Russians to keep the ExoMars mission. How about the CuriositySense? Amazing.

And they want to send another mission in 2018, which would be a European-Russian joint mission. It turns out the European Space Agency's Ariane rocket cannot make the turn, doesn't have enough attitude control to get from orbit into deep space on the way to Mars. So that's going on. Meanwhile, the Chinese space agency, at least the space they're presenting to everyone, is not the least bit concerned about budgets. They're just looking at milestones for their space station coming up.

They welcome any astronauts from around the world onto their space station when it's flying. They've got plans to go to the moon and so on. It's a very interesting commentary or perspective on the world's economy and how it affects space exploration. It's just a fascinating thing, Matt. And so I'm here waving the flag of the Planetary Society, and we are doing a lot of outreach for, especially Jeff Propulsion Rock. It's a fantastic conference.

I will let you get back to waving, Bill. Enjoy the conference. It sounds absolutely fascinating, as you've said. And we'll welcome you back to Southern California next week. Yeah, thank you, sir. Let's change the world. I've got to fly. Go ride the Planetary Gun.

And he is the CEO of the Planetary Society. I'll be right back, as promised, with Emily Laktawalla for a little bit of talk about Curiosity swimming in a stream, an ancient stream on Mars, when we return. As promised, we rejoin the Planetary Society senior editor and planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla, to talk a little bit more deeply about Curiosity, which has gotten itself somewhat deep in what, apparently, Emily, which has gotten itself somewhat deep in what apparently, Emily, there is good indication that this was once upon a time a Martian stream. Yeah, Curiosity drove right by this really cool looking rock that they've now named Hata, H-O-T-T-A-H. And it looks exactly like a piece of broken sidewalk concrete that's been tilted up by tree roots or something.

But of course, there's no tree roots inside Gale Crater, but something tilted up this block of rock that looks like concrete because it's got gravel embedded in a much finer grained matrix. And when Curiosity looked closely at that gravel with its mass mounted cameras, that gravel and the cobbles, they're rounded. And there's really only one way to make rocks round, and that's to tumble them in a stream, in a relatively fast-flowing stream of water that contains other sand and other gravel, and it all knocks together, and it knocks off all the sharp edges, and you wind up with these rounded cobbles. So not only was this stuff transported in water, but it was transported for a long enough distance to make this gravel pretty round. It's pretty much smoking gun evidence that we're looking at a rushing stream on the surface of

Mars at some point in its history. Is this the first time we've seen something like this on Mars? Well, you know, I can't be absolutely positive that it's absolutely the first time, but I definitely have not seen a conglomerate of this type with this rounded gravel type rock. So yeah, I think this is pretty much a first for Curiosity. Now, what are we talking about here? Was this once, you know, a raging torrent millions and millions of years ago? Or might there have been a trickle of water in this? Oh, just yesterday, a few tens of thousands of years ago. Well, these rocks are definitely pretty old because they underlie a lot of other rocks. And as far as the depth of the stream, if you look at the size of the gravel,

you need a fair amount of water in order to move gravel of that size. So I heard the scientists on the press briefing talk about a stream that was on the order of a meter deep. Now, when a scientist says that something is on the order of, they're talking about orders of magnitude, you know, powers of 10. So if it was on the order of, they're talking about orders of magnitude, you know, powers of 10. So if it was on the order of a meter deep, that means it was closer to a meter than it was to 10 centimeters or to 10 meters, which is, you know, a pretty wide range. But we're still talking about a pretty good running stream here that came down off of those mountains. Must have been some good fishing. down off of those mountains.

Must have been some good fishing. When these come down out of the mountains, they form these things that are one of the reasons I love flying, or for that matter, driving to Las Vegas, because you see these big formations coming right down out of the hills called alluvial fans. What are these? These are actually very common features here in California and the western United States,

because the western United States is pulling apart, and that pops up these tall mountain ranges and they're rising pretty quickly geologically speaking. So when you get rain in these things, you have a lot of power in gravity and the rain to tear the mountains apart and to send lots and lots of sediment down the mountain valleys. Now when that sediment comes out of the valley and onto a plane, the stream suddenly slows down and it can't carry that sediment anymore. So it drops it right at the base of the mountain, right where it comes out of the mountain. And over time, you get these beautiful fan-shaped deposits built up. And they're a lot like river deltas where, you know, the stream will come out of the mountain and in some point in history it'll go left and another point in history it'll go right and over time it deposits a sediment where most of the

sediment is close to the mouth of the valley so that the top the the narrow part of the fan is very high topographically and then it fans out to make this broad deposit in the valley and that's what we're seeing here in gale crater curiosity is on very toe, the very end of an alluvial fan. And we're looking at one of those streamlets that in the past came down from the mountain and emptied out into the valley. This particular stream may not have run for all that long. It might have been hundreds or thousands of years. And it may only have run intermittently with water, as most of the streams in the western

United States do. And then at other times, the stream might have been somewhere else on the fan. So this particular little streamlet that I crossed might not represent very much history, but there probably are a lot of these things that Curiosity will be crossing as it drives. Spoken like a geologist, not very long, running maybe for thousands of years. There is a great video that you've embedded. It's a Curiosity report from one of the long-range planners, Sanjeev Gupta, and he actually has a graphic that shows

these different stream beds that Curiosity has found itself inside one of these. With just maybe a minute or so left, Emily, what's next for Curiosity? Well, Curiosity is almost all the way to Glenelg, which is this conjunction of three different rock types that was going to be its first science destination. But before it gets there to really investigate the rocks, it has one more commissioning activity to do. And that's that it has to sample its first soil, get the first sand stuff through its sampling system and into the two laboratory instruments inside its belly. And right now, the team is looking for a likely looking sand drift, a place where the materials are ready of the size that they need to get into the instruments so that they don't have to complicate things by trying to crush it or trying to drill it. That activity is actually going to take two or three weeks.

It's going to take a very long time. And people will probably get very impatient. I'm getting a lot of impatient email about why don't they have science results yet. And I have to remind them this mission is in it for the long haul. It's supposed to last two years. So we got to be patient. We got to let them commission their instruments the way they want to and get on with the science after they finish commissioning and they'll get to Glenelg and start looking at those three different kinds of rocks. Here, hear. Thanks very much, Emily. I'll talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. Everyone's planetary evangelist. Also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Stick around and

we will take you, I will take you, to my experience seeing Endeavor flying over the factory where it was built. This is Planetary Radio. Back in a minute. 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. It's the morning of September 21, 2012. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians are outdoors looking to the sky. The sun is already scorching, but they wait to pay their respects to a spaceship, to the astronauts that flew on it, and to the tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, machinists, office workers, and others who made it fly. I've gone to Downey, California to join them on this historic day. Here is my story of that day in sound, beginning with Christy Pierce,

manager of the Columbia Memorial Space Center. Christy, I looked at the L.A. Times, I checked the other media, knew all these places would be mobbed, but there was a very significant spot that was not listed, and I just had a hunch that you guys would be part of this flyover. Well, sure, it makes sense historically that the shuttle would fly over this area in Downey. The former Rockwell plant, NASA facility, Boeing until 1999. Every crew compartment of every shuttle was built here in Downey. So the Columbia Memorial Space Center was built on the grounds where that

facility was to help honor that history and inspire the kids of our next generation. And so we're thrilled. We have hundreds of people here that have come to see the shuttle fly over basically the home of the Apollo and also where many of the shuttle's parts were built. I think it's safe to say this is the home of the shuttle, at least the birthplace of the shuttle. Thank you. I would like to say that as well. Now, most of the hundreds and hundreds of people are still outside where it's even hot in the shade. You were smart. You're inside your building. Well I'm standing inside also looking at the news feed to see where we have some shuttle sightings but people are outside.

They're excited. They've got a shot. And we've got a shot. It's over Malibu so pretty soon here within the next hour we're hopeful that we're going to get our chance to cheer as well. We're looking at Larry Tate's ID card now, almost exactly 50 years ago. Yeah, I'm 73 years old. I got here, I was just a kid. I was about 20 years old when I got here. You don't look it. I got out of the Army in August 62, and I got here about a month later.

I got a job in the test lab, and I worked there for 33 years. Right through the shuttle construction period. Yeah, the Apollo, the end of the Apollo and the beginning of the shuttle. So I've got to ask you, of course, how did it feel to see that big bird flying over here one last time? It was sad to see it go, you know. Now the only place you'll be able to see it is go to the science center. But you must feel fortunate that you were one of the people behind the success of those crafts. I've got a bunch of souvenirs at home that I'm hanging on to.

I may donate to the museum. I haven't decided yet. What kind of stuff? I got some big posters that were in the hallways when they tore down the buildings. And I got some coins and some patches from the different ones. I even got a coin from the Challenger before we lost it. Pretty spectacular. Some of those may be of value, so I haven't decided whether I want to donate them or sell them.

How do you feel about having this facility right here, the Columbia? I like the idea that they even built one, because I was hoping they wouldn't just plow everything under and just chop down all the buildings like they do so much. Great talking to you. Thanks for coming out. Thank you very much. A few feet away from the Space Center is its newest attraction, the full-size space shuttle mock-up built by Rockwell to aid design efforts

is inside a cavernous shelter. You're looking at a vehicle that's designed to hit the atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound and survive. And the way it does that is it uses tiles, which on this side you can see that we have sort of a sample of what the tiles look like. Okay, everyone, let's look up to the west. Let's be nice and easy, everybody. Ha! I just shouted, there it is. Apparently I was the first to see it coming back this way approaching us from the southwest head over here onto the grass where the crowd is.

Gone behind the building now. Everybody is running to the other side of the building. It's definitely going to make a turn to make its final approach into LAX. And hopefully very close to here. Show us the wings, baby! The shuttle is banking.

Pretty soon it's going to fly over where it was built. There it comes. I know, I know! You see it? And once more, here it comes to the North! That's so cool! There it goes. And as it passes to the North, we say thank you. And we go to the California Science Center to inspire generations. That's amazing. Roger Bross from Mayor of the City of Downey. I'm Mario Guerra. I'm a council member here for the City of Downey.

Mario, I'm going to start with you because I think you got the prize for most enthusiastic person out here in front of the Memorial Space Center. It's just an exciting day. It's an exciting day for everybody, but especially for the City of Downey. The Endeavor came home where it belongs. It flew over us a couple of times over our Columbia Space Learning Center. It's just fun. It's a great thing for our city and our country. This really is the birthplace, right?

Without a doubt. We started with the entire space program, starting with Apollo all the way through. The Apollo capsules were made here and the shuttle. So we have a rich aerospace legacy heritage here. And so obviously the top point was the shuttle. You also have a lot of old-timers. We talked to a few who just obviously still feel so strongly, so emotional about this stuff. You know what? A lot of people, they put their life and soul into it,

and that's how we feel as a community too. So yes, not only with the old-timer, we honor them, we respect them. They made mankind history, and we're part of it. So yeah, we're in this together. It's a great facility that you have here too, which really, it does a lot, but it also honors this whole program. Yeah, the city of Downey invested $10 million in our learning center, and really, it's all about exciting the next generation. So it's not just a museum, it's a learning center center and our goal is to get thousands of youth through here every year to get them excited about becoming an astronaut or becoming an engineer. Nice work gentlemen. Thanks so much and congratulations.

Thank you very much. Thanks for coming out. Bruce, welcome back. Thank you. He is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, here with What's Up to tell us what's not just in our night sky, but the mercurial, mercurian night sky? I don't know. We're going to get to it a little bit later. What's up? mercurial, mercurian night sky? I don't know. We're going to get to it a little bit later.

What's up? Well, in our night sky, we've got in the evening sky over in the west, shortly after sunset. It's getting tough, but you might be able to pick up Saturn, Mars. What you really want to look for, though, that's easy to find is Jupiter rising the middle of the night, or early midnight of the night, hanging out near the moon, making for a lovely sight on October 5th. And then a week later, October 12th, Venus will be hanging out near the moon in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history. Big week, of course, had the founding of NASA in 1958. And about a year earlier, October 4th, the first spacecraft in orbit was Sputnik.

So 54 years now for NASA. It just seems like yesterday we were celebrating the 50th anniversary. I think I still have a sticker around here someplace. Well, and they found a new anniversary to celebrate later this month, the 50th anniversary of the first successful planetary flyby with Mariner 2. Yeah. We move on to random space fact. Good Mongo.

How? Was it worth the coughing fit? Yes. Yes, it was. So the aurora on Earth comes in those lovely pretty colors, and those pretty colors come from different atoms in the atmosphere. So oxygen emissions are either green or kind of a brownish-red, depending on the amount of energy absorbed from the solar wind

or other charged particles whipping through the magnetic field and slamming into them. And then when they relax, they give off a photon, and the color, the energy of that photon determines the color. Or nitrogen emissions. Nitrogen generates blue or red. Blue if the atom regains an electron after being ionized, or red if returning to a ground state from an excited one. You know how much I've always wanted to see these. Yes, we should send you there and leave you there. Even more so now that I know it's not just food coloring. Oh, I didn't mention that kind. Yeah, there's another one that's, if you see the one

that's like kind of a unnatural orange, that one's food color. Yeah, yeah, pink slime we won't get into. It's probably best that we don't. We move on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what is the South Pole star of Mercury? How'd we do? Very well. I was expecting, you know, the really huge response is still a week away when we give away the Celestron First Scope. But for some reason, I know people love that Voyager show a couple of weeks ago. We got a big, big response. Our winner, I believe a first-time winner, one of our fans in Poland, Karina Kowalek, who said it's Alpha Pictoris if you're on the southern hemisphere of Mercury and want to find

your way to the South Pole. That's the way to do it. Got some other very interesting answers. A couple of people couldn't resist telling us the northern pole star on Mercury, John Gallant and Tony Gray, which is Omicron Draconis. Back to Alpha Pictoris, apparently that's part of the Romulan Empire. That's according, it's in the Star Trek star charts, written, I guess, put together by Jeffrey Mandel, whoever that is. But this was sent to us by Teresa Bippert-Plimate. So you want to avoid that because it's probably well past the neutral zone.

You know, that's what we give out here is practical advice. Yeah, don't go there. Traveling the stars, thank you. Travel advisory. When we say don't go there, we mean don't go there. All right, let's move on to our next one. And we'll find out how this ties into Romulan space. Four out of five, Dennis.

No. Four out of five spacecraft with escape trajectories out of the solar system are on the same, and using the term loosely, side of the solar system. So if you look at a plot from above the solar system you have four of them of the off on one side and you got one lonely one off on the other side like 180 degrees going off in a different direction than everyone else not quite 180 but you know roughly which one is on the other side what's the one of the five spacecraft that's off on its own side of the solar system? Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter.

And you have until Monday, October 8th at 2 p.m. to follow that spacecraft that listened to the old Robert Frost poem, Two Trajectories Diverged in the Solar System. You know, I forgot that that's how it went. We paraphrase. Okay, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what makes ruffles. Thank you, and good night. What makes ruffles so crunchy?

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. I think it's the ridges. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.