Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - David Morrison of NASA's Lunar Science Institute and Jack Gregg on the Lunar Regolith Challenge

Episode Date: August 11, 2008

Distinguished scientist David Morrison of NASA's Lunar Science Institute, while Jack Gregg heads speaks about the 2nd Lunar Regolith Challenge.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David Morrison of NASA's Lunar Science Institute, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Yes, we're going a bit loony this week, and not just with David Morrison. Jack Gregg heads the sponsor of the second Lunar Regolith Challenge, which tried to give away $750,000 just over a week ago. We'll get his post-challenge analysis later in the show. We'll also learn in Emily Lakdawalla's Q&A why some solar eclipses are nice and long,

while others not so much. And you'll have a chance to win a car when Bruce Betts joins me for this week's What's Up segment. A small car, a really small car, like two inches, but Bruce's report is as big as the night sky. Bill Nye will return next week. Remember how we teased you last week with the possibility that the Phoenix Mars lander had found something very significant that Peter Smith and his team weren't ready to announce? Well, sorry to let the carbon dioxide out of that rumor. Phoenix's MECA instrument has found evidence of perchlorate in the Martian soil. That's chlorine with oxygen, and it's not nice. But Peter emphasizes that this does not preclude life on the red planet.

Besides, other instruments saw nothing. The details are at planetary.org, where you can also read about another Cassini flyby of Enceladus just as this show becomes available. With a long and distinguished history in space science, including his founding of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, David Morrison now finds himself the interim director of the space agency's new Lunar Science Institute. He spoke to me a few days ago from the Institute's headquarters

at the Ames Research Center near San Jose, California. David Morrison, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's my pleasure to be here. Please tell us a little bit about the NASA Lunar Science Institute. I'd ask for your history, but I don't think you've had time to build up much of a history. That's true. This is a new organization founded by NASA just this year to provide a science space for lunar exploration, and in fact to do some of the same kind of things for lunar science that the NASA Astrobiology Institute did for astrobiology, namely help create a new multidisciplinary science field,

train future lunar scientists, deal with public outreach and education, wrap this all together in a way to provide a clear stimulus for scientists to go into lunar science. As I understand it, you're not exactly speaking from some huge new 10-story headquarters up there at Ames. I'm speaking from a delightful headquarters at Ames, namely one of the oldest buildings here, the former Admiral's Quarters in the old Moffett Airfield

Base, facing out on a big parade ground of grass. I used to love driving past there when I was a kid because periodically you could see the pregnant guppy sitting out on the tarmac, and we'll let people look that up if they're not familiar with it. But really what I was getting at is that you're looking to partners that you will be hooking up with to actually conduct the research, which is central to the mission. That's right. Again, we are following the model of the Astrobiology Institute, which was founded 10 years ago and is perceived to be very successful in bringing together scientists from all over the country and international partners in a virtual institute, what's sometimes called a co-laboratory, which means that they

won't all be sitting here in one big or small building, but will be working in their own laboratories and their own universities and linked together so we can talk to each other and try to pursue a common purpose while mostly concentrating on the individual science done in those organizations. How are you going about selecting these partners? We have a solicitation out right now calling for proposals. We expect to select something between six and eight teams. Each of those is multi-institutional, covering the broad range of lunar science,

which for us is perhaps broader than most of your listeners normally think of, because in addition to studying the moon itself as a planetary object, studies of the moon, we're also interested in supporting studies on the moon, the kind of thing that will lead to human exploration. This could be life sciences. It could be exploring the lunar atmosphere, the lunar dust. And finally, studies from the moon, meaning to use the moon as an observatory platform to study the Earth, the sun, astronomical objects. So we have a broad definition of lunar science, and we're looking forward to getting lots and lots of proposals that will explore different aspects of that mission.

I have a NASA press release in front of me that is only about a week old that appears to announce your selection of your first partner. That's right. We are having a rather formalized, competitive selection, like other NASA grants, for the U.S. teams because we send them money. But meanwhile, we're also interested in teaming with international partners, affiliated groups from other countries, and since there's no exchange of funds there, it turns out to actually be easier. out to actually be easier. Thus, we're very proud to have announced last week that Canada has become the first international partner of the NASA Lunar Science Institute. And this is, I guess it's Canada's University of Western Ontario. Do they have a particular direction for the lunar research that they conduct? They are primarily interested in what I think of as traditional lunar research, studies of the moon.

And they also are very interested in using the analog environments, such as Houghton Crater and Devon Island. But I would add also that it isn't just the University of Western Ontario. They are the node, the center, but they bring to the table other researchers at other universities and also have the support of the Canadian Space Agency. Okay. So really, if I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for conducting research of, on, or from the moon, and hopefully some qualifications to back that up, there'd be nothing to prevent me from responding to your request for proposals. That's right. You still have about three weeks to do it. But I would emphasize that what you really described was a PI type activity, a single principal investigator or a single small group.

And those are funded through the more traditional programs at NASA. We are looking for teams. We're looking for teams that We're looking for teams that bring together a variety of people, a variety of institutions, multiple approaches so that we can pull together this total institution and, incidentally, also have a large group of scientists that can be called upon to help advise NASA about its lunar programs. What role do education and public outreach play at the Institute? It's very important to us because, you know, this is the direction NASA's going, and one of the things that sort of intrigues me is that, unlike most areas in astronomy and planetary science,

you can look up there and see the moon. It's real. It's our neighbor in space. It's cohabited with the Earth since the two were formed 4.5 billion years ago. So we think there's a big potential for public interest. Certainly, there was tremendous public interest in the Apollo era. And we're simply looking at ways to stimulate that. The individual teams will have their own public outreach or educational people and propose their own ideas, and we'll link those together. But I would think the Planetary Society also would be very interested in the moon, and you are. It's just one of the planetary objects in our system, but it's close,

and we are going to be sending a lot of spacecraft there in the next decade. Yeah, in fact, my colleague at the Society, Bruce Betts, participated in a conference that you folks sponsored just a few weeks ago. In fact, it got underway on a pretty auspicious anniversary of lunar science. That's right. And that anniversary, which was the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, is not a coincidence. Part of our charter is to hold an international lunar science conference every summer at the time of that anniversary. This allows us to celebrate Apollo and get some

publicity out of that, and at the same time to bring together a large number of scientists who are doing lunar research and who are planning for future exploration. Well, you certainly hit the ground running for an institute that just got underway late last year. What else is in store for the near-term future of the institute? We have a tremendous task ahead of us, as you might imagine, to go through all of these proposals that will be coming in at the end of August and try to select the teams because I'm sure we'll be way oversubscribed. There are lots of really interested groups there,

and one of the things that pleases me very much is the number of young people. The lunar science conference that we had two weeks ago, the audience was full of young faces, and some of the students and postdoctoral students are already forming their own lunar science student group. So all these things will be happening, but if you ask me what I'm going to be doing, it's mostly worrying about evaluating those proposals and selecting the initial teams. I wish you luck with that job. And what might you look forward to a little bit farther down the line for the Institute as humans return to our satellite moon.

I haven't thought too much about the humans because I see so much interesting happening in the next decade before humans will get there. Well, you've got Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just about to make the trip. That's right. And LCROSS, the mission that will piggyback with it and will shepherd the upper stage into a crash landing into one of the permanently shadowed craters near the lunar pole that might contain water. And then there are all these international missions. The Chinese and Japanese and Europeans have had lunar missions since the U.S. did. India will be launching this next year. There's a lot of interest out there, first in lunar orbiters,

and then later in this decade a number of lunar landers, which will be linked together to form what we are calling an international lunar network, too. It certainly seems that whether it's ever declared officially by a lot of agencies, that what the Planetary Society has been calling the International Lunar Decade is really upon us. That's right. You folks have been out in front on this, and I think we all appreciate it. David, I want to thank you very much for joining us, and wish you the best of luck, especially as you wade through all of those proposals in just a few weeks' time, and we'll look forward to hearing about the lucky winners,

if I can call them that. Thanks, and keep looking up. The moon is up there, and it's looking down on us, and we're going to be going there. I wouldn't miss it. David Morrison is the interim director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute. As you heard, he founded the NASA Astrobiology Institute, upon which the Lunar Institute structure is based. He remains a senior scientist at the Astrobiology Institute, which we have spoken of in the past on this program.

He has a very distinguished career elsewhere in planetary and space science and is the author of many books. I'll be back in a minute with Jack Gregg, the executive director of SISUI, sponsor of the Lunar Regolith Challenge. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects.

I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's vice president. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails,

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The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Jack Gregg is Executive Director of the California Space Education and Workforce Institute, or SASUI. If you think that's a loony acronym, you're right, because SASUI runs the Lunar Regolith Challenge in partnership with NASA. You may remember that I reported from the first challenge about a year ago, when none of the four autonomous machines in competition came close to digging enough simulated lunar soil to win a prize. Even more teams came to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this week to try their luck in the big sandbox.

Sadly, the results were much the same as last time. Jack, I think we learned again a few days ago that it's not just rocket science that is really hard to do. No, it's a whole variety of different technical expertise that's really important about space exploration generally, but specifically up on the moon. You think, gee, if you want to dig dirt, for example, you just take out your Tonka toy and you scratch away and you've got dirt. But it's not that simple. Those were some complicated looking Tonka toys that those teams brought this year. You know what? I thought this was going to be the year. I thought

one of those, maybe one of the returning teams, knowing now how to deal with this nasty regolith stuff, was going to come back and just hit it dead on, get the formula teams, knowing now how to deal with this nasty Regulus stuff, was going to come back and just hit it dead on, get the formula right, and walk away with three-quarters of a million. Well, you're right. First of all, it did increase to three-quarters of a million. I think it was 500 for first place. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you're right. You're right. But it's a big incentive. And so you'd think that that's exactly what would happen. And frankly, coming into it, as I did, this is the first time that I was involved. I wasn't involved last year because I wasn't with Sasui last year.

But I thought where we'd find contention was that we'd have a couple of people tie it for first, and how are we going to figure out the tie? But no. And just to let you know, one of the things that was so complicated about it was that people made it really complicated, which is kind of a design issue. A lot of the engineering was adding this and adding that to the engineering process instead of getting down to some kind of simplistic core, elegant approach.

There were those approaches, but then they had all kinds of bells and whistles. I'm not saying that there were any regolith excavators that had CDs and heaters and radios and stuff like that. But if you step back about 15 feet, you'd think that they did have all that stuff attached to it. You know, I had the same impression last year, and I'm going to date myself here, that there was a bit of a Rube Goldberg-esque quality to some of those machines. And I don't know, I'm not an engineer, I'm not trying to dig regolith,

but some of them did look a little over the top. Yeah, and I think that that was part of the problem. And one of the requirements of the competition was that they do the whole excavation autonomously. That is to say, you stick it in the sandbox, and you plug it in because we provided power for them, and then that's it. You don't have a joystick. You don't do anything. It has to figure out where it is, who it is, why it is,

what's going on all by itself, and then it's got to figure out where to dump it and then to go through that whole kind of drill. And I think that where we saw actually some real excavation was the second day, after the competition was over. There were demonstrations, right? Exactly right. A number of them wanted to come back and demonstrate their technology,

and in demonstrating that, where they did use a joystick and they didn't do it autonomously, we had some very interesting things going on. In fact, what was kind of neat was to also watch the expressions on the NASA folks as they were there taking notes and kind of watching the different technological approaches. Remember, it's a mixture between the application of technology and that dirt because their regolith isn't like anything else. And so it has its own characteristics, its own density issues. It's very dense. It's very powdery. And they really wanted to see how that played out.

And I got experience with that because I was standing at the edge of the, if you will, sandbox last time. And it is not like it's from someplace else. It's from another world. It really is, yeah. My strong impression last year was that a lot of those people were going to come back. They did. I bet many of them would love to have another shot a year from now. What does it look like? Do you think they're going to have a chance? Well, you know, as I'm looking at it, as I understand, last year there were four people in the sandbox,

four competitors. This year we had 25 people sign up. After we went through the qualification round at the beginning of the competition, we had 16 who looked like they were going to qualify. We actually had eight that met all the qualifications, and nobody was able to excavate the regolith to fulfill the prize requirements. But just kind of given that growth factor and the fact that there were people there from the press and from all over who really wanted to see this take place, my guess is that there's going to be more and more folks. So just playing a numbers game, as more folks enter into the competition and as more people then have an opportunity to return one or, in some cases, two years, that we should be able to get to a winner, I'm hoping.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. We're almost out of time. How does an event like this and supporting this fit into the mission of SASUI? Well, SASUI's main mission is space education and workforce. That's what the letters stand for. And so how this fits in is in a variety of different ways. First of all, it engages people who are themselves learning about science, technology, engineering, and math. You've heard of STEM, and STEM stands for science,

technology, engineering, math, and that's a hot issue, not only in education circles, but very much so in industry circles, and NASA is very keyed into this as well. So if we don't develop the right STEM pipeline, that is to say the future workforce, we're not going to be able to fulfill this whole space exploration thing as well as other technological areas. So one of the ways that the Regolith competition feeds into that is it gives people an opportunity to learn about this sort of the very practical hands-on, more than just a lab, but something as close as you can get to actually building something and doing something on the moon without having to get yourself shot up there to do it. Jack, we're out of time. I hope to see you next year on the moon. Cool. That would be great.

Thanks, Matt. Jack Gregg is the Executive Director of SASUI, the California Space Education and Workforce Institute. I think I got it right. Affiliated with the California Space Education and Workforce Institute, I think I got it right, affiliated with the California Space Authority. And we are at SUSUI headquarters right here in Pasadena, just maybe a mile down the street from Planetary Society headquarters, which is where we're going next to visit with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That'll be right after a visit with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

How come total eclipses are sometimes just a couple minutes and other times seven minutes long? A wide variety of geometric factors influences how long an eclipse can be. The theoretical maximum length for a total solar eclipse is 7 minutes and 31 seconds. The August 2008 eclipse was short, only two and a half minutes long at its maximum. By contrast, the July 2009 eclipse will be the longest of the century, at more than 6.5 minutes long. An eclipse happens, of course, when the moon passes between your spot on the Earth and the sun. You see an eclipse when you are standing in the moon's shadow, which is shaped like a cone with a narrower apex pointed at Earth. The larger the moon's shadow, the longer your eclipse will last. Because the moon's orbit

is elliptical, the size of the shadow it casts on the Earth during an eclipse varies. Most of the time, the moon is too far from Earth for its disk to completely cover the sun. In that situation, you would see an annular eclipse where the sun peeks around all edges of the Moon. So total eclipses are maximum length if they occur with the Moon closest to Earth on its elliptical orbit, and when Earth is farthest from the Sun. Another factor is where you are on Earth during the eclipse. The maximum duration eclipse occurs at the spot that lies under the center of the eclipse's track. It is shortest at the ends of the track,

where the spherical surface of the Earth curves away from the shadow cone, and the eclipse occurs at local sunrise or sunset. Also, the farther you are from the ground track of the eclipse, the shorter totality will last. 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 Dr. Bruce Batts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

We're going to talk about the night sky and space trivia and random space fact. And we have a really fun, it's not a trivia contest this time, but that's just a tease. Okay. I won't say anything more about it. Say no more. Say no more. I will say no more. Say no more in general or just. No, no, no.

Say lots about the night sky. Okay. I got lots to say. Jupiter is the easy thing to see in the night sky. Brightest star-like object. Look over in the east anytime in the evening, headed to the south or north, depending on where you are. But high overhead, brightest star-like object there. Now, if you want a challenge, try to find a whole bevy of planets hanging out low in the west.

But you have to look like a half hour after sunset, really low to the horizon. You may even need binoculars. But over there, there's a cluster of planets. We've got Venus, the brightest one. We've got Mercury, and we've got Saturn. And they're all doing a little dance, but they're doing a dance awfully close to the sun. And then Mars is to the upper left. It's a little bit higher up.

This is all over in the west, but it's even dimmer. Hey, here's something you can see. The Perseid meteor shower with our nice dark skies here. Yeah. You can go out and see up to 60 per hour. Well, if we had nice dark skies, that's what you could see. But here you still can see the bright ones, and that's peaking on August 12th.

Some of you are probably listening after this, but it's a very broad peak, so you still might get increased meteor activity. Stare up, look for those bright little flashes of sky. Flashes of sky going across the path. No, flashes. You know what I mean. Flashes of path going across.

Yeah, okay. Yes, streaks of light. Speaking of streaks of light. Well, this has nothing to do with it. But partial lunar eclipse. You're referring to that we can't see August 16th. But any continent but North America, you probably can see the partial lunar eclipse on August 16th, so check that out. And so a lot of good stuff in the night

sky. This week in space history, I can't believe it has been three years since Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched. That happened in 2005, giving us great, fabulous data in orbit at Mars, as are so many things right now. You know, I forgot that MRO hasn't been at Mars

as long as the rovers have been on the ground. And that's just freaky. I know. Yeah, we've got a lot of spacecraft. Keep working and working. Keep going and going and going. On to Random Space Fact! Ricola!

And now a word from our sponsor. Steins! Not the things you drink out of, but something named after a Latvian and Soviet astronomer. Steins, an asteroid that Rosetta will be flying by on September 5th at just over 1,700 kilometers away. And Steins is a relatively small asteroid. A weird spectral classification when they look at what it looks like.

It is a so-called E-class asteroid. Does that mean it's habitable? That's exactly not what it means. No, it means it is rich in enstatite. Are you serious? Yeah. Enstatite? Yeah. Instatite? Yeah.

There's only like six of these. A very small number of these E-class. They're thought to possibly have come from a broken up differentiated larger asteroid. Ooh, differentiated. Cool. On to cool trivia contests. We asked you about the Kaguya spacecraft in orbit around the moon. Actually, we asked you about its little friends.

So what are the small so-called subspacecraft that are flying also with Kaguya as part of the Japanese mission to explore the moon? How did we do? I'm going to give you the winner right up front. It was Thomas Yanuka. Thomas Yanuka. I i'm sorry yanukta they go to the trouble of giving us this phonetically and then i ignore it thomas yanukta but please keep trying because it allows me to mock matt more in warsaw poland thomas congratulations you got it right he said kaguya's little friends who are actually her guardians

they're not her little friends. They're her adoptive parents, Okina and Una. We probably aren't pronouncing those correctly either. But congratulations, Thomas. We're going to send you an explorer's guide to Mars poster. Well, hey, let's go on to another trivia contest. And would you like to explain this? Well, it's not a trivia contest. Well, okay. We've never had... No, it's important.

not a trivia contest. Well, okay. No, it's important. It's not trivial. We've never had a contest suggested by a listener till now. Kirby Runyon, regular listener to the show, he's going to buy a new car. And that car happens to be a Saturn. And he wants to name his Saturn after one of Saturn's moons. And so he said, I don't know which one to use. I mean, there are plenty to choose from. He goes through a few here, you know, Mimas, because it looks like the Death Star, which is cool. It'd be cool to drive the Death Star. But he wants help. He can't decide which one. He said, why don't you guys help, or at least get the listeners to help? So here's the contest. I'm thinking maybe 50 words or less. What do you think? At most, yeah. Okay, 50 words or fewer. Tell us which moon Kirby should name his car after

and why. And he says whoever gives the best rationale, he will name the car after them. And of course, we'll give them a poster. And I think we got to give them if we can find one, a little Saturn Hot Wheels or a Matchbox toy or something like that. Okay. I'll find one. I'll find something. All right. So when do they need to get their extensive essays into us after thorough research? They got to do it. They got to be quick. They got to do it as usual by Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific on the 18th of August. Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific, on the 18th of August, Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific, August 18. All right, everybody.

Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about flecks of dust floating in a beam of light. Thank you, and good night. You did dust last week. I have been doing a lot of cleaning lately. I'm sorry, it's on my mind. I added the ray of light? Yes, you're right.

You're right. Well, he's Bruce Betts, a ray of sunshine in our lives, every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.