Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Debra Fischer, Discoverer of Worlds

Episode Date: April 11, 2011

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Searching for exoplanets with Debra Fisher, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Astronomer Debra Fisher has moved to Yale University since we last talked with her, but her search for other worlds goes on. She'll tell us about a new effort that will rely on one of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Emily Lakdawalla will recount our up-close and personal visit with Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, now almost ready for its trip to Cape

Canaveral from JPL. Keep an eye out for the video of our time with Curiosity. We'll post it soon. Bill Nye says these are exciting times for commercial space development, and Bruce Betts knows it just takes a clear night sky for exciting times under the stars. We'll celebrate the 50th anniversary of humans in space and the 30th of the first space shuttle launch. Speaking of the space shuttle, looks like I spoke too soon last week. The 10-day delay of Endeavor's launch to April 29th may keep both Bill Nye and me at home. You see, our roast and toast of the Planetary Society's

founding executive director, Lou Friedman, is the next day. We'll still bring you special coverage of the Shuttle Life experiment. You can read about Shuttle Life and the roast and toast at planetary.org. Here's another event you can be part of. It's Plan Rad Live, our live taping of a special edition of this show. My special guests will be Mike Pluto Pluto Killer Brown of Caltech, and Bill Nye, the science guy. Mike will sign copies of his book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.

That's Planetary Radio Live, Saturday, May 28, at KPCC Southern California Public Radio's Moan Broadcast Center in Pasadena, California. Southern California Public Radio's Moan Broadcast Center in Pasadena, California. You'll need a ticket, but you can get them free from brownpapertickets at brownpapertickets.com. We've got a link at planetary.org slash radio. Time for Emily. She's the science and technology coordinator at the Planetary Society, where she also edits the very popular blog.

Emily, I know you've got several missions to talk about this time around, updates on those. But first, you've got to tell people about that wonderful experience we had about a week ago. Yeah, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually get inside a clean room and see a spacecraft that's going to be going to Mars before it gets sent to Mars. Got to suit up in what they call the bunny suits. before it gets sent to Mars. Got to suit up in what they call the bunny suits. Those are these white coveralls that engineers have to wear as they do all their work inside the clean room to prevent things like skin cells and hair from hitching a ride on the rover to Mars. Covered our hair, our feet, our whole bodies with these white coveralls, and then walked into the room, and there it was. And gosh, you know, I've seen Curiosity before, but never from this close. And it's just amazing how big this rover is. I was very excited, not just to see this thing,

but to be there with the people who are putting it together. I mean, I called them all heroes, and it's absolutely true. And to stand across from this emissary of humanity that is going to be on Mars before too long, one way or another. It was just unspeakably thrilling. Yeah, I felt the same way. And it was really enjoyable to talk to those engineers because they feel so much pride in this machine. Those of us who love the Mars exploration rovers, we feel like this is trying to be a bigger, better replacement. We don't want it to replace spirit and opportunity in our hearts. And so it doesn't really have a personality yet. And I asked one of the engineers whether they called this machine it or her, because traditionally most spacecraft are she

or they're female. The engineer told me it was probably about two thirds called it it and one third called it she. And he said that that was probably going to change over time because now that the rover is all assembled and they're beginning to test it that was probably going to change over time because now that the rover is all assembled and they're beginning to test it curiosity is going to start displaying whatever quirk she has that makes her different from previous spacecraft and he said that's when she's going to start to develop a soul and speaking of developing a soul you had a great piece it's still there on the blog of some folks who got creative with that image of the face, quote unquote, of Curiosity. Yeah, Curiosity's face is really going to contribute to whatever personality it is that she develops.

She's got this head that's different from the rover's in that it has an electronics box that's perched on top of the two different sized eyes. So she's got this cerebral look. And then there's those rectangular eyes that are two very different sizes. It makes it look like she's winking at you or something. And people just loved this face and did all kinds of crazy Photoshop stuff to it to put her in different kinds of artworks and movies.

It was pretty cool. My favorite is the version of American Gothic, but you got to go to the website to see it, planetary.org slash blog. Very briefly now, update us on, I think you've got three other missions to talk about. That's right. Well, very briefly, I finally have information on the Chinese lunar orbiter Chang'e 2. It has actually finished its primary six-month mission to map part of the moon and find landing sites for the next lunar mission. And then there's

also Juno, which is the next Jupiter orbiter, has been completed, totally built, and has now been shipped to Cape Canaveral to get ready for its August launch. And then Dawn, we've got a lengthy update on Dawn and how they're calibrating all their instruments, getting ready for approach to Vesta. That being one of those regular updates provided by the engineer on that mission, Mark Raymond. I think people also have to take a look at the Juno entry so they can see just how gigantic one of these Juno solar wings is since it won't be running on nuclear power. That's right. It's going to be the first spacecraft sent as far away as Jupiter

that runs on solar power. The sun's not very strong there, so it has three gargantuan solar panels. Great report, Emily. Thanks so much, and I had a great time with you at JPL. It was fun. Emily Lachtwal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, and she's a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, which is another reason she was at JPL about a week ago. I'll be back with Deborah Fisher talking about exoplanets and the ongoing search for those after we hear from Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. This week, your intrepid crew of Emily Lakdawalla, Matt Kaplan, and I

went to the Jet Propulsion Lab to JPL in Pasadena, California in the United States to see the MSL, the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, which is the next rover that's going to go to Mars. Now, you can only go to Mars economically every 22 months. So the next opportunity is in November. And we were all hoping that we would be able to get this 3D zoom camera on there. And James Cameron, the guy who created the movie Titanic and the movie Avatar, he was on the crew.

He was one of the investigators trying to get this camera on there. And it would have been exciting. We would have had movies in 3D for everyone on this world to see of that other world of Mars. Well, people decided, I'm not sure they agreed, but they decided that there wasn't enough time to test it and get it on the spacecraft in a reliable fashion by November. But notice, this is including people from outside of NASA or European Space Agency, Japanese exploration. This is James Cameron, who makes movies. He was on the team, and he was going to make this 3D capability come to pass, but couldn't quite do it. Maybe 22 months from November, he will.

And in the meantime, our own Elon Musk of SpaceX, Space Exploration Company Corporation, has gotten the Falcon 9 Heavy rocket in development. The second biggest rocket since the Saturn V took people to the moon. And that's only if you don't count the Energia, the Russian space agency rocket that got off the ground but wasn't really a success. This Falcon 9 Heavy could take people way out into space. It can certainly take a lot, let's say 50 metric tons, into low Earth orbit. This could change the world of space exploration. And these two efforts, the 3D zoom camera and the heavy lift capability rocket, are not coming from within governmental

space agencies. They're coming from the outside. This is an exciting time. Space exploration is changing. Maybe exploration or travel into low Earth orbit will become routine the way people dreamed of it decades ago. And we're living through it right now in the early 21st century. I got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Yale astronomy professor Deborah Fisher discovers worlds. She has been at it pretty much from the first successful unearthing, if you'll pardon the expression, of extrasolar planets or exoplanets. Of course, her team of researchers is not the only one in this game, and these Earth-bound explorers have now been joined by the Kepler telescope in space that has revealed evidence of hundreds of new worlds.

Yet it's up to Deborah and her colleagues to confirm this Kepler data and ultimately to find not just another world, but another Earth, one with liquid water and lots of oxygen in its atmosphere. This can only be done with new and better instruments, and it's the creation of one of those instruments that Deborah has devoted much of her current attention to. She talked with me via Skype from her Connecticut home just hours before this week's show was put together. Deborah, it is great to get you back on Planetary Radio, especially as you've just

finished a trip to Switzerland. I think you just got out of the car. That's right. Well, thank you for having me again. It's great to join you. And yes, I just literally walked in the door back from Switzerland where I was in the Swiss Alps at an astrobiology conference that was fascinating. Debra's already given me some names of some of the speakers there,

and there'll be people we'll try and look up for this show. But let's talk about exoplanets, the work that you've been at for a long time, though you're now doing it at Yale. I guess you're still working with Jeff Marcy at Berkeley, right? Yes, definitely. We're longtime collaborators, something like 20 years now. That's been fabulous. And I love being able to say that the two of you have discovered more planets circling other stars than any other scientists, any other astronomers on Earth, at least on the surface, because we now

have to deal with these incredible results from Kepler. Exactly. The Kepler team is really swamping us with an amazing number of discoveries. So that's very exciting too. It's especially cool to see how the two results compare, the radial velocity measurements and the results from Kepler. I think the most astonishing thing to me is that Kepler's finding very few hot Jupiters. We're not finding so many either. They're relatively rare. But what Kepler is finding that we're missing is a huge population of what we would call hot Neptunes. So planets that are something like 10 to 20 times the mass of the Earth and in relatively short orbits from a few days out to almost a year. And we've been missing those planets and they're just below our detection threshold. So we know that if we could push down

just a little bit further on our precision, that we would be able to tap into those exciting planets. We are so close. It's such a fascinating time for the study of these other worlds. And as Bill Barucki told us on this show, Bill, of course, the principal investigator for Kepler, he turns over this data to folks like you to follow up on. That's right. Well, of course, Jeff Marcy is the one who's leading the Kepler-Doppler follow-up at the Keck Observatory. The transit detections are planet candidates for a while until they're actually confirmed with radial velocity measurements. And that's tough because there are so many of them. First of all, there are so many planet candidates and so little time.

But also, again, the types of measurements, you know, the objects that Kepler is finding are small enough that it's actually quite challenging, I think, for our technique. So that's why we're trying to really improve things. You've mentioned radial velocity, and we're talking about basically the good old Doppler effect. Exactly, just like the Doppler effect that gets you when you're driving your car too fast down the freeway. What we're doing is measuring the velocity of the star along our line of sight, and we're measuring it to a precision right now that's approaching one meter per second, And that's pretty astonishing when you think of this giant ball of gas, you know, a blazing sun-like star with outflows that

are 100 meters per second on its surface. And we're trying to measure the movement of the whole body with a precision of one meter per second. So I'm still amazed that we can do that well. So the Planetary Society provided some assistance a couple of years ago. Not a huge grant, but something I guess that you were able to leverage. We should talk about that. That was the FINES project, Fiber Optic Improved Next Generation Doppler Search. And it's really FINES XO Earths because that's part of the title. That was a pretty pioneering effort, I think. It was fabulous. To be honest, there are European rivals, the team in Geneva, who I just had

wonderful discussions with at this astrobiology meeting. They've been doing a little better than we have in this regard. And so we're trying to not just catch up, but actually surpass their precision. And I think this is one important component of the whole picture. My postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Julian Spronk is amazing. He has a PhD in optics and he designed this fiber scrambler, which we simply inserted into the light path. So it's lights coming from the telescope into the spectrograph. Dr. Spronk's instrument picks off the light, sends it through a fiber where the light is scrambled around, and then it comes back into the spectrograph. And the reason that this is important

is that without the fiber, the starlight is dancing around on the entrance aperture to the spectrograph. And that means that the optics are illuminated differently. By the time they go through the fiber scrambler, the light comes out in a nice smooth cone of light that hits the optics in the same way almost every single time. We'll hear more from Yale astronomer and exoplanet finder Deborah Fisher in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride.

After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us.

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Deborah Fisher has returned to our show. The Yale University astronomy professor has been on the exoplanet hunt for two decades. She and her longtime research partner, Jeff Marcy, have discovered more of these planets circling other stars than anyone else conducting Earth-based searches. She wants to refine this effort with a new version of FINS ExoEarths. FINS stands for Fiber Optic Improved Next Generation Doppler Search. The first version of FINS ExoEarths did an amazing job working with a three-meter telescope at the Lick Observatory in Northern

California. Would it be accurate to say that this is sort of a practical way of averaging out that light coming from so far away? Absolutely. It smooths it out and it takes away a lot of the problems that we're having in the spectrograph. We've seen an improvement of about a meter per second at the Lick telescope, and we know that the fiber is only one part of the problem, and we have to be able to tackle every single point in the spectrograph and make sure that the instrument is incredibly stable. One reason we're excited about going to the Keck Observatory is that although the high-res spectrograph, which was built by Dr. Steve Vogt at UC Santa Cruz, is not in an evacuated enclosure, it is on the top of Mauna Kea. And it turns out that the temperature on the top of Mauna Kea is fairly constant,

almost zero degrees Celsius year-round. And so that helps to stabilize the instrument quite a bit more than the situation at Lick Observatory. So we're excited about taking what we've learned at Lick and applying it to the Keck Observatory. So this effort that is now underway is a follow-on to the original Fines instrument? It is, but something interesting happened. When we went and looked at the Keck telescope. We discovered that we had almost no space to put in one of these fiber scramblers. I'm still amazed when I think about what we have at Lick Observatory. It's something like a cubic foot in size. The space that we had at HI-RES, the Keck telescope, is sort of the size of a matchbox. Julian Sprong, in a couple of days, came up with a really ingenious design. And so we're excited to try this new prototype at Keck. So this is basically going to have the same function, but in a far, far smaller volume. It is, exactly. It'll have exactly the same function. But in the meantime,

in the last two years, we've actually learned, and we've been contracting with companies that make fibers, to build some exotic shapes of fibers. And that turns out to be important. So the standard fiber optic cables that you would get would be, you know, if you looked at the diameter, you'd see a sort of a circular diameter. We're in the process of ordering and having special fibers made that have square cross sections or hexagonal or octagonal. And we're finding in the laboratory that those give much better scrambling, much smoother light coming out and illuminating the spectrograph optics. Is it this effort that you are looking for more help with and that the Planetary Society hopes to once again step in? Exactly. That would be wonderful.

We see this as an important first step at the Keck Observatory. We know that in the end, we'll need something like a $10 million instrument to really do the job right. We need a proof of concept, and this is going to give us the information that we need to do the job right. We need a proof of concept. And this is going to give us the information that we need to take the next step. And it's not just incremental. We're also going to get better radial velocities and higher precision. If you achieve this, how much of an improvement? I mean, how much better will we be at finding

these Earth-sized planets? That's a good question. Right now, what we've done is one of my graduate students at Yale has run some simulations, and he starts out with a perfect spectrum, perfect eye. Everything is perfect. We call it, you know, jokingly, the spectrum from God. And he finds that when everything is perfect, he can create synthetic observations and he can recover a precision of two centimeters per second. So 50 times, if I have that right, 50 times better resolution than you have now. Exactly. And of course, other things aren't perfect.

And we're trying to find out where it is in the spectrograph that things start to go bad. it is in the spectrograph that things start to go bad. And we know that one of the most important thing is something called the point spread function of the instrument. And that's, we've already seen dramatic improvements in the point spread function from the fiber that we're using at Lick and at Keck. So we're on our way on this path going from a sort of one and a half meter per second, which is where we are now, and shooting for 10 centimeters a second, 5 centimeters a second, and we'll see how far we can get. Anybody who would like to learn more about this, what's now being called the effort to create the Fines ExoEarths 2 instrument,

can do so at planetary.org, the Planetary Society website. Just go to the projects drop-down up there near the top of the screen. Go into that list and look for fines, and you can read about it. There is a fairly new article there, I think, by my colleague, Amir Alexander, that will give you much more detail about the fines effort. Now moving into fines 2. Deborah, please keep up the great work, and we look forward to finding all those other Earths out there and going on from there to tell us just how much they are

like our home sweet home. Okay, thanks, Matt, and thanks very much to all the Planetary Society supporters. Deborah Fisher is a professor of astronomy at Yale University. She has a joint appointment, though, at the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics, and she still has a relationship with San Francisco State, where she came from. She's an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy there. Don't go away. We'll be right back with the astronomer who joins us every week.

That's Bruce Betts, the director of projects at the Planetary Society, and we'll give away another T-shirt. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is on the other end of the Skype line. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Hi there. Hello. Got you a gift at JPL. You know, I always have to get you some little junky thing at the store out there.

Bad news is you don't get it until I see you again in person, which I suppose might be, I hope it won't be long. But anyway, you're going to love it. I look forward to it. What's up there to look forward to tonight? Saturn in the evening, Venus in the morning. So check out in the evening sky over in the east, right around sunset, Saturn will be rising on April 15th and the day before and after. The full moon or nearly full moon will be very close to Saturn, just below it.

Saturn will look kind of yellowish over there. And you can also check it out in the middle of the night overhead or over in the west in the pre-dawn. Venus is in the east in the pre-dawn, quite low down, but extremely bright. Very good. We move on to this week in space history, a big week, certainly, because it is the 50th anniversary of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the 30th anniversary, same day, 20 years later, of the first space shuttle launch. Congratulations to the folks who are just about to put on the 50th anniversary Yuri's Night with parties going on all over the world. You might want to Google that and see if there's something going on near you.

I was involved with that at the 40th anniversary when things were just getting started. I guess it's maybe bigger than ever. So time to party. Party on. We move on to Random space fact. We'll speed that up. Thank you.

It's just kind of how my brain feels today. Marzenator action there. Or is that the other way? I think the Marzenator made your voice higher, didn't it? No, it makes your voice lower. Your voice would be lower on Mars. There you go. This is something nice for you to think about.

If you squished all the humans on Earth down to the size doesn't sound like fun but go ahead you take all the humans and you squish them into the size of a sugar cube centimeter or so on a side then you would have the density of a neutron star every human on earth what are there six and a half billion of us now, something like that? Oh, darn it. Now there's more. It doesn't work out. Okay. One and a half sugar cubes.

Close enough. That's pretty amazing. You just take all that empty, wasted space out of the atoms, right? Exactly. Wasted, wasted, wasted. We move on to the trivia contest and i asked you what was the first spacecraft to orbit the sun at the sun earth l1 lagrange point how'd we do matt got a few people out there who were interested in winning a planetary radio t-shirt one of them was wayne

likely of seattle washington, that's Likely. Yeah, Likely story. Sorry. He's never heard that one before. Have you, Wayne? Anyway, Wayne. Don't make me do it. And Wayne came up with, I guess this spacecraft has had two names,

and he came up with the first one, IC3, I-S-E-E 3. The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3. And then became just ICE, I-C-E. Yeah, when it got older, it just wanted to be cooler. It shortened its name to ICE. I know a lot of people who've done that, yeah. Well, it even stood for different words, International Cometary Explorer,

because they took it out of L1 and went off to check out comets. We heard from a couple of people, including Ilya Schwartz, that this thing, it still wasn't dead. NASA has gotten in touch with it fairly recently. Yes, that's true, but it didn't really want to speak. It was busy. That's not true. That's not true at all.

That's not true. After many, many years, apparently they got in touch with it, what, in fall of 2008, not long ago, after many years in space. Yeah, and they only just received the first postcard from its original L1. Space Postal Service, what are you going to do? There's a lot of stuff floating out there. I'm not surprised to find there are some postcards. All right, we move on to the next trivia contest. Here's the question to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Who was the first American general officer to fly in space while a general? Any kind of general. Who was that? Go to planetary take any cereal up. No, this is, I'm looking for an actual human.

Okay. Not that General Mills wasn't a human. Maybe. I don't think so. Okay. Regardless of which general you come up with, you'll need to tell us which one it is by April 18 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Monday the 18th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Monday the 18th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. I think he was involved in one of the battles of Manassas

at that Civil War field I went to a couple weeks ago. Yeah, you were just out there. That's right. Playing with them, they're critters. We're going to talk to those guys at ATCC very soon, possibly next week. I know it'll be an interesting conversation. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about turquoise. Thank you and good night. I prefer cobalt myself, cobalt blue. We can deal with turquoise. He's

Bruce Betts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Don't forget PlanRad Live on Saturday, May 28. I hope you can join us. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова