Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Discovering Mars with Jim Bell and William Sheehan

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

Space historian William Sheehan and planetary scientist Jim Bell have written a fascinating history of humankind’s at least 5,000-year relationship with the Red Planet. “Discovering Mars” is filled with anecdotes about the people who have revealed Mars. The chronicle includes Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s flights and then looks to the future of exploration. Someone will win the book in Bruce Betts’ latest What’s Up space trivia contest. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2021-discovering-mars-book-bell-sheehanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Discovering Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Humans have been discovering Mars for at least 5,000 years. The mission continues and though the flow of data and facts has vastly accelerated in the last half century, the Red Planet's mysteries still haunt us, just as they did the ancient Babylonians. William Sheehan and Jim Bell have written a book that traces this entire history. It's terrific, and so is my conversation with the authors that you'll hear in a couple of minutes. It's terrific, and so is my conversation with the authors that you'll hear in a couple of minutes.

You'll also get your chance to win their book when Bruce sends us out past Neptune for this week's What's Up Space Trivia Contest. As I prepared this week's show, we learned that launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been pushed back a few more hours. It's now set for the very early morning of December 25th, Christmas Day, at least for those of us in the Americas and Europe. Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis has prepared a complete guide to the launch. You'll find it at planetary.org. Go JWST! Have you seen the mesmerizing, awe-inspiring video taken by the Parker Solar Probe as it flew through the sun's corona? It is one of the most spectacular space videos I've ever witnessed. Our CEO, Bill Nye, worked with some of my colleagues to do it justice in a new video. It's on all our channels and at planetary.org slash video.

channels and at planetary.org slash video. Then there's our newsletter, The Downlink, where you'll learn about an exciting find by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The spacecraft has detected large amounts of hydrogen along the floor of the Valles Marineris Canyon. It probably means there's water down there in the soil, or at least water-rich material. Might be a good place to homestead someday. There's much more at planetary.org. You know Jim Bell.

The Arizona State University professor has written bestsellers, including Postcards from Mars. Jim is principal investigator for Mastcam-Z, the sharp-eyed 3D zoom camera that's atop the Perseverance rover's mast. And that barely scratches the surface of his past and present planetary science activity. Jim also served as president of the Planetary Society Board of Directors for many years. He has now teamed up with retired psychiatrist and longtime historian of astronomy and space, William Sheehan. Sheehan has written many books, including one in 1996 that this new work updates extensively. The full title is Discovering Mars, a History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet. You'll hear me call it monumental. That's not just because it's big. The book is something of a monument to the thousands of scientists and proto-scientists

who have looked up in wonder at that flickering, red, wandering star. Here's what Bill Nye says about the book. This is a detailed history of exploration, to be sure, but it's really about the passionate characters, the humans with their telescopes and robots, who have worked to know what goes on out there on this other world. As you read, remember, what we've discovered there over the last couple of centuries is amazing. What we'll soon learn about Mars will be astonishing. Bill is right. It's why I looked forward to joining Jim Bell in his ASU office a few floors up from where his Mastcam-Z team was working with the latest images to arrive from the rover.

Bill Sheehan couldn't join us in person, so I put a microphone in front of Jim's computer speaker and dove in. Thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio and for this outstanding book that every Mars lover or aerophile really ought to own. Thanks for coming on the show. Well, thanks for having us, man. It's great to be here. I already shared what Bill Nye has said about the book. Here's a quote from our friend Andy Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon. the author of A Man and the Moon, read and understand why we will never be done with Mars,

which is short and sweet, I would say. Bill, I think you and I got our first small telescopes in the same mid-60s year, and we both immediately turned them toward the red planet. Did that begin your passion for Mars? It certainly did. I mean, Mars was the main act, really, back then, as in many ways it still is. So as a kid, getting everything I could out of the branch library and all of the books being several years out of date, the idea that Mars might still be inhabited, even by intelligent beings, had not been exorcised from our imagination. So I was a believer at the time in the canals of Mars and, you know, hoped against hope that that

might all pan out. And I certainly remember looking at Mars through a small telescope, one of those department store telescopes that everybody pretty much says are worthless, but tell that to a kid of about 10. And seeing that little red disc up there, even though it was a little bit bigger than a pin's head, it still was infinitely evocative to the imagination. So yeah, that was 1965, March 1965, that was the opposition I got started. Just about the time I got my little department store refractor. And that belief, that wanting to believe in the canals of Mars, and that we might just find somebody up there to welcome us, that is a theme that runs through this book, how belief sometimes got in the way almost, well, right

from the start of the science, of the actual facts about the planet Mars. Jim, do you also see that thread? Yeah, absolutely. And it really starts with Bill taking the historical perspective. And, you know, part of this book is an update to Bill's book from 96, I want to say. 96, right? The planet Mars. Yeah.

And a lot has happened since then, of course, on the mission side, but a lot has happened on the historical side as well. Lots of research, lots of new photos and manuscripts uncovered, et cetera. And so, yes, that thread of belief winds all the way through the historical side that Bill has researched so expertly. And, you know, it also runs through the spacecraft side, right? We wanted to believe that the ALH84001 meteorite was loaded with Martian microfossils. Some people want to believe there are human faces carved into the rocks of Mars, right? Some people want to believe that we can do sample return in the next decade, right? And so there's, yes, there's scientific facts.

Yes, there's engineering reality. But yes, it's also a very human endeavor, this exploration of Mars. Bill, how did you get from that 1996 book, The Planet Mars, to discovering Mars and this partnership with Jim Bell? Well, I think one of the things that happened to me about 1965, because that was also the year of Mariner 4, which showed that there weren't canals on Mars. Instead, there was this stark, barren, crater-packed terrain that was revealed in those rather poor quality images. But they, you know, they were very gray, very bleak looking. So one of the things that happened to me at that point was that I wanted to understand how

people, scientists, could have gotten it so wrong. How did they end up going down this primrose path into this very appealing but ultimately illusory world that they'd conjured for themselves? So a large part of my subsequent interest in the history of Mars had to do with the way that the brain constructs a reality and then tests that constructed reality against objective facts that we can find out whether it's with telescopes, spectrographs, thermocouples on Earth or spacecraft. And so I kind of took that

story as of 1996 as far as I could. As someone who wasn't a trained planetary scientist, we'd only just gotten to the Pathfinder landing at that point. And, you know, Vikings were already starting to become a bit hoary in history. Mariner 9 was almost antique history. Mine was almost antique history. So when I was approached by the University of Arizona Press to do an update, 25 years had passed very quickly, I might add. And I was totally unprepared to take the story forward. from many of his excellent books and in particular the amazing photography that he has pretty much supervised and implemented on the surface of Mars. So I approached Jim and very generously he agreed despite you know the fact that he's probably only sleeping for four hours a night now to turn that back to three hours a night and

help to bring this book up to date somehow we managed to do it and it was a wonderful collaboration i i learned so much uh by doing this and as jim said a lot of the themes that started out really back in the time of the babyians, the Greeks, you know, where Mars was already attracting human attention because of its intense red color and its sort of manic movements through the sky. That continued right through the very end. Yeah, it's true. And I'll just add, Matt, it was just such a treat. I'm a total fanboy of Bill Sheehan, okay? When I was in grad school, it was Planets and Perception, and as a postdoc, The Planet Mars. These were some of my favorite books, and they were impactful for me being an early career professional

astronomer, planetary scientist, learning how to observe places like Mars through modern instrumentation to have that context of the history leading up to it, and to have the context of the psychology leading up to it. And, you know, I experienced that firsthand up on Mauna Kea for my thesis research, seeing Mars, the moon, other planets through lenses that were unprecedented. And so it became really easy to understand through great writing and perspective and psychological experience that Bill provides kind of what was going on historically. Bill, you probably don't know that for many, many years now, I have called Jim Bell the Ansel Adams of Mars. But as you said, a fine writer as well. And however the two of you worked out this tag

team arrangement, it is a beautifully written and monumental book, over 700 pages, including appendices. And I will note two of those appendices, one by a current colleague, Casey Dreyer, talking about what we've paid to get to Mars. And then, of course, our good friend who we admire so much, Emily Lakdawalla, who provided another one of those. Yeah, great getting those appendices in there. I don't think the whole calendar system and Mars timekeeping system and the, you know, the chronology that is presented in the book, I don't think that's ever been published in one place like this. And certainly haven't seen the great work that, you know, Casey's work to figure out the cost of all of this and greatly justified costs of all this with references and resources and all that,

that's certainly never been published in a book. It's been online, but here it is preserved in paper. And, of course, Bill went out and got some great appendices from some of his colleagues as well on Martian nomenclature and other aspects of oppositions over history, etc. So it's partly, it's a resource for this kind of information that it's all in one place maybe for the first time. In the opening of the book, you both talk about how you got into this line of business. Well, particularly it's a business for you, Jim.

I think you came along a little bit after Bill and I got our telescopes, but you also talk about the one that you got. I don't think I've ever asked you how it all began for you, your love of what's going on up there over our heads. Yeah, no, it was really two things. And you're right. I was not observing Mars in March of 1965. I was busy being born in July of that year. It's great to hear you guys talk about your histories. But in the 70s and 80s, I was fortunate to live in a relatively rural place with relatively

clear skies on cold winter nights and have family support to help me purchase a telescope, an eight-inch Mead Newtonian telescope, which I still have. And just wonderful to be out there and see, you know, while other kids were collecting baseball cards or whatnot, somebody always had a better Hank Aaron card. Nobody had a better Saturn, right? That's the real deal right there. And you could see the rings and I could see features on Mars and the moon, lunar craters. And so me and some friends I grew up with would be out there observing the night skies, getting to influenced by one of the society's founders, Carl Sagan, who came along at a time when there was only three networks and PBS on television, hardly any science on TV at all. Nova was around, still around, amazing show, but very rare to have real science on television. And Sagan comes along and he's got this distinctive way of speaking and his turtleneck and his tweed jacket.

And, you know, my mother loves him, loved him, right? Because he was speaking English, the technical language of planetary science and astronomy, but he was speaking it in a way that we could understand. And that was not a popular thing for scientists to be doing in 1980. But he was on Johnny Carson, right? And it was just like having this direct conduit to a professional in the business that I was passionate and excited about as a kid was profoundly impactful. As it was for me. I want to get back to the book. It is monumental. In fact, I think there are about 230 pages of humanity's relationship with Mars until you get to the first time we successfully visit there with Mariner 4.

Bill, there are countless anecdotes about the scientists, the engineers, the observers of Mars, how they did their work. rivers of Mars, how they did their work. There are also what may seem like detours from the main narrative that turn out to be, at least in many cases, critical to understanding why some of the history happened the way it did. Now, one of those, and I think it goes back to what you were saying, Jim, about the psychology of all of this, is color theory, which is also the first of the beautiful color plates in the book. How did color theory end up in a book about Mars? Well, one of the things that I'm fond of saying when I'm giving talks to people is that Mars has always been a master of illusion. First of all, it's one of the few very clearly red objects in the night sky.

Bill Anders, when he was on Apollo 8, had said, you know, the Earth was the only blue thing in the sky. Everything else was pretty muted. Well, Mars is one of the only red things. And red is one of those things that really rivets our attention. And the reasons for that probably have to do with it being an ambiguous stimulus. It both signifies danger like the red eyes of the poisonous African tree frogs, but it also is associated with some of our appetites, which is why restaurants always use red as their theme color. So you have to pay special attention to red stimuli to determine whether to approach or to avoid it. So anyway, right from the beginning, Mars's color really set it apart and stirred our interest. Well, once Mars was observed

in telescopes, it appeared to have some bluish greens spread on somewhat reddish background. Humans being as they are, reasoning from analogy, thought, well, bluish areas must be seas and the reddish areas must be lands. Eventually, as people analyze these colors more closely, they realize that, as anyone that has color blindness can testify, we don't see colors in the same way, any two of us. And in particular, we don't really see colors separate from the background against which they're projected. And so eventually some of these Ray Bradbury has a nice phrase for this. You know, we found that in the case of Mars the blues were not really blues. They were actually rather neutral brownish areas on Mars, grayish areas and it was just our way

that that we generate color information in our brains that made us see it in this way. So yeah that all sort of took us down that what seemed to be somewhat of a detour, but it ended up being an important detour because so much of what we've made out about Mars's potential to be an inhabited planet had to do with our interpretation, either of Mars having seas or later vegetation tracks. I recently read an estimate that ranged the probability that Venus's clouds might have some sort of life. Depending on what initial assumptions you make, it can go from virtually nil to 1.0, if you pick the parameters correctly. Well, up until the 1950s, I think most astronomers would have said that the chance of there being life on Mars was about 1.0. They were almost sure that that was what they were going to find there.

And a lot of that had to do with these now clearly illicit recolors that so long we were entranced with. We're not going to be able to touch 5% of what is in this book in this brief conversation. But there are, as I said, so many of these wonderful anecdotes. I had no idea that Giovanni Cassini and Christian Huygens were rivals in 18th century France. I mean, how fitting that eventually two spacecraft carrying their names would, you know, centuries later travel together to Saturn. And I should say that this book has a lot of the history, not just of our exploration and observation of Mars, but of the whole solar system. Jim? Yeah, it's true. And Bill has done a masterful job of bringing that history, which is, of course, extensive throughout astronomy more broadly, focusing it on planetary science and

specifically Mars observations. You know, Bill, I went back and looked at the initial correspondence, eight and a half years. It took us eight and a half years to get this done. Just between our own research and time commitments for other projects, et cetera. Part of it was, I think, we both worked really hard to fill the back of the book with extensive notes and references and details. People who want to go dive into the Huygens, Cassini, Tiff, they can do that following, you know, some of Bill's own work and others, many others that he cites in detail in the notes. So in that sense, it's an academic work. It's not just, of course, we're trying to write for a more popular audience, but we're also writing for academic colleagues, students, others trying to learn and come up to

speed on the history, students of history, students of science history, students of science communication, Martians, you know, et cetera. So I think that was partly what you're seeing is a result of that extensive research. It's not a blurb on the book, but Bill Nye told me a few days ago that he thinks this is going to be the reference work for students of Mars for a long time to come, because it is so heavily researched and, you know, all those pages of footnotes. I got to mention one other anecdote, which I just love, Bill, and it has to do with Asaph Hall, love, Bill, and it has to do with Asaph Hall, the discoverer of Mars's moons, Phobos and Deimos, who was still not a very well-paid astronomer, apparently, when he was working at the Naval Observatory. And one night, he received a rather special visitor. Do you know the anecdote I'm

talking about? I do indeed, yes. It's not every night that you're at the telescope and a very tall, thin man with a top hat happens to wander in during the period when the Civil War is raging. So if it were, what's my line, you would probably pick him up pretty easily. And he just wanted to see the moon, right? Yeah, yeah. And it just shows, you know, a friend of mine that worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory said that during the, and of course the vice president's residence is now on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. And none of the vice presidents were interested except for Al Gore, who used to come over regularly. And so it just shows that somebody like Abraham Lincoln, despite all of the tensions that he faced, the difficult decisions, the fact that he was presiding over what so far anyway is probably the most decisive period of American history, still found solace in going up to the dome and spending a quiet evening looking at the moon. I wish we had a few more presidents who, you know, like make a side trip up the mountain at Mauna Kea. Members of Congress, governors, mayors. Yes, more the merrier.

All right, we'll move forward. November 28, 1964, I did not know, was 305 years to the day since Christian Huygens had sketched Sirtis Major from the observatory he had in his father's house. Pretty significant day. And I almost, Jim, began to think of it as two eras, before Mariner and after Mariner. Yeah. And that's, you know, those parts of the Mariner era chapters, I think Bill and I worked pretty closely on those. It was the beginning of the spacecraft era. Of course, it was the beginning of the end of our telescopic understanding and the beginning of something special and that really getting to know the place. I think we were both pretty delighted that the book came out right on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Mariner 9 going into orbit.

And so there's all kinds of celebration happening this year, 50 years in Mars orbit, almost uninterrupted. Well, certainly uninterrupted in terms of the spacecraft, almost uninterrupted in terms of the data. We've discovered with NASA and other space agencies, this is how you get to know a place. You spend time there. You spend time in that environment. You know, telescopic observers didn't have that luxury. You know, every couple of years, you get an opposition. Some of them are good.

Some of them are great. But those are only every 15 to 17 years. And you get a couple of months where you get this big 20, 25 arc second disk in your telescope. And then it's gone, right? And then you're trying to follow it through the fuzzy murk of the atmosphere. And so being there, those great oppositions that are written about and cataloged in the book are the closest that we could come to being there at the time. So there were lots of high stress, just like a rocket launch or a spacecraft landing. We've got a couple of months.

We've got to have this telescope system ready. We've got to hope for clear weather and all that. Just as much stress as today's modern exploration milestones. I'll be back with Jim Bell and Bill Sheehan in barely a minute. Hi, everybody. It's Bill. 2021 has brought so many thrilling advances in space exploration. Because of you, the Planetary Society has had a big impact on key missions like the

Perseverance landing on Mars, including the microphone we've championed for years. Our extended LightSail 2 mission is helping NASA prepare three solar sail projects of its own. Now it's time to make 2022 even more successful. We've captured the world's attention, but there's so much more work to be done. When you invest in the Planetary Fund today, your donation will be matched up to $100,000 thanks to a generous member. Every dollar you give will go twice as far as we explore the worlds of our solar system and beyond. Defend Earth from the impact of an asteroid or comet and find life beyond Earth by

making the search a space exploration priority. Will you help us launch into a new year? Please donate today. Visit planetary.org slash planetary fund. Thank you for your generous support. Thank you for your generous support. Mariner 4, which, as you both mentioned in the book, revealed only a tiny portion of Mars and not very well. Images of 200 by 200 pixels. Jim, my God, you do a little bit better today, don't you? A little bit. A little bit. A little bit.

But still, you know, I mean, revealing, right? It was sort of left up to the gods of celestial mechanics, Isaac Newton and his buddies, to figure out where that ground track would go for those flybys. There wasn't a lot of control over that. And, of course, the imaging technology, the spacecraft technology, by today's standards, relatively primitive, but by the standards of 1964, 65, super high tech, right? Lots of excitement about the potential. Bill talked about this earlier. You know, what are we going to see? What are astronomers going to be vindicated? We're going to see these vegetation canal, you know, these river networks, whatever. And it was a bittersweet, right? Because yes, the spacecraft was successful. Yes,

we got this technology out to the farthest reaches that we'd ever been able to take images. And oh man, is it just the moon? Is it just the moon with a thin atmosphere? You know, so excitement, elation by maybe engineers and depression from scientists thinking that, oh my gosh, what have we done? Have we made a huge mistake in what this world is really like? Yeah, well, not just scientists, Ray Bradbury, me, Bill, I think you, Bill, the New York Times, big headline declared Mars the dead planet. Yeah, even LBJ went up with that particular story and made a comment about that and sort of said, having remembered the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast with Orson Welles, maybe it's just as well it isn't after all.

But yeah, that was a devastating event in my life. It was like there's no Santa Claus and being told it definitively. And it did affect morale at NASA. You know, there were plans to cancel the later spacecraft that we're going to sort of build on Mariner 4's legacy because the idea was, well, what's the point of going so far afield to just explore another moon? Now, that's why I think in particular, Mariner 9, whose 50th anniversary we just celebrated, made such an impact because we discovered that Mars wasn't another Earth, as perhaps had been thought at one time, wasn't another moon either.

It was itself, itself alone. at one time wasn't another moon either it was itself itself alone we realized it had its own particular geologic history that included the buildup of shield volcanoes vast canyons that made the grand canyon of arizona look like something that was was in a child's sandbox also we realized for the first time because Mariner 9 arrived under these conditions, what earlier astronomers had largely missed, and that is that Mars is a planet of dust. That if you were to pick one theme about Mars, it's that it's a very dusty planet. It has these gigantic dust storms that can cover the whole planet from pole to pole. Before that, people thought Mars was a relatively clear, had a relatively clear atmosphere.

And so they tended to overestimate the thickness of the atmosphere and also failed to grasp what was shifting the features around that they observed in their telescopes. It wasn't that vegetation was growing and changing and withering with the seasons. It was that dust was coming across the planet and covering swaths of it for periods of time and then being cleared away again.

So Jim and his colleagues have written some significant papers on just how that process works. That will be the biggest shock after the disappointment of Mariner 4, Mariner 9, that we really have an interesting world up there after all. Yeah, and look, I mean, we point this out in the book. Dust is going to be a big thing for Mars into the future. When people go, and I'm an optimist. I've dragged some optimism out of Bill as well in the book.

People will go. And this dust, which they will have read lots about going back through the telescopic time and through the modern era, this dust is going to be a major, major nuisance. It's just going to be something that has to be dealt with every single day in air filtration systems and spacesuits and habitats and airlocks and wheels and other equipment on rovers and other vehicles there. That dust has been around on Mars for billions of years. It's accumulated and distributed globally because the planet dried out early in its history, because it went from a more Earth-like place to the Mars-like place it is today. And it's not going to go away anytime soon.

So Mars dust is here to stay, and it's going to be a major part of the future interactions with Mars. If it's not already obvious, we're concentrating mostly on the farther back in history missions of exploration to Mars, because we talk about the more recent ones. We certainly talk about Perseverance and Curiosity frequently on this show. I would love to talk about Viking. I was there at JPL in von Karman Auditorium, standing with Ray Bradbury and other people when Viking 1 set down. But I'm going to skip over that way ahead of its time, those two spacecraft, to the Mars Global Surveyor. And the beginning of some work on Mars that

continues today by Mike Malin, Ken Edgett, and Malin Space Science Systems, still a partner of yours, right, Tim? Absolutely, absolutely. The small company outside of San Diego, led by a bunch of really, really smart engineers and scientists. And they have now deployed, I think, more than 30 successful deep space cameras all over the solar system. You've seen these beautiful pictures of Jupiter from Juno. That's a Malan camera. The images coming back from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the visible wavelength images from Mars Odyssey, the MGS cameras, the Curiosity Mastcam cameras, the Perseverance Mastcam-Z, just an amazing amount of incredible work. And Malin and EGIT themselves, you know, taking those measurements from MGS,

first super high-resolution views of Mars like flying in an airplane over the Earth, and have really revolutionized our understanding of the planet. Again, like we did with Mariner 9. Every time we look with better eyes, with sharper vision, we discover new things and learn more about this amazing planet. We've learned so much about Mars from other instruments that we've sent there. How about MOLA, also on the Mars Global Surveyor, which revealed this amazing topography? Yeah, I mean, getting to know, for a time, I think it was the case that we knew the topography,

the elevations, the highs and lows of Mars better than our own planet, because, you know, much of the seafloor hadn't been mapped at that resolution or at least not publicly available at that resolution. So, yeah, getting to know the planet that way. And, you know, MOLA is an example of what I call squiggly line instruments, right? And, you know, Bill writes about the early history of spectroscopy of Mars in the 1920s and beyond and measuring the thermal energy from the planet. Getting these what just look like squiggly lines on graphs, that's where so much of the science happens. Yeah, the images are spectacular. I'm a huge fan of the images. Yes, I am. But what we do with the images really buttresses and supports and contextualizes what we get from these super high-tech spectroscopy and other LIDAR and other kinds of instruments.

Gentlemen, it's going to kill me to skip over things like Pathfinder and Sojourner and how that, what was really, you say, a technology demonstration mission, put us back on the road to Mars and generated so much public excitement. But I'm going to jump over the current era and go straight to the future, which is where you end the book. You end with an examination of this future of Mars exploration. You consider the huge challenge of getting humans there. And you describe several of the proposed pathways and plans that have been laid out by this diverse collection of individuals like Robert Zubrin and companies like Lockheed Martin. I was proud, and maybe you were too, Jim, to see the Planetary Society's contribution mentioned. Not the first time in the book that the Planetary Society's role in all of this came up. Yeah, well, you know, society is devoted to space exploration, space education, advocacy. You know, it's a group of like-minded people that think a lot about

how do we explore our solar system? How do we get out into our solar system? And I think maybe like me, they're optimists about this all happening. So, you know, this is why the society tries to, you know, put forward principles for human exploration, tries to guide our favorite space agencies in, you know, hey, keep this in mind that you've got a public out there that wants to support this, that does support this. So come up with some plans, come up with some timescales, come up with some reasonable milestones, reasonable budgets. Let's get some of our elected representatives super excited about this, just like we are. That is a really important part of what the society

does. It's not just enjoying pictures or enjoying telescopic images or learning how to tell time on Mars, whatever. It's much more than that. And I think both Bill and I thought it was important to acknowledge the role that the society and other organizations have played and will play in exploring Mars. I need to get more involved with the Planetary Society. That's definitely something I'm very keen to do because I think we talked about Carl Sagan earlier and how we need his voice today. he's one of the few people that had the stature and the eloquence to be able to cut through a lot of the superstition nonsense, you know, that floods the media airwaves these days. And as both of you have eloquently said, I mean, in order to get the public involved with this, you know, they need to be brought in at the level of understanding basic science, the scientific method.

I mean, we're talking about some stuff that's really exciting, but it's a little bit like trying to paint the third story windows when you're standing on a stepladder. I mean, you've got to at least have a ladder that's able to reach to that level if you have any chance to doing the job. And that's why the Planetary Society is so valuable. I think to a certain extent, even some of the billionaire short hop space missions are helpful because they do at least keep space in the public eye, even though obviously they're

recapitulating what was already done long ago. I think Mars really is, at this point, our best destination for mobilizing that sort of enthusiasm on the part of society. But we've got to get people educated so that they appreciate why it would matter to spend our tax dollars or private funds to do something like that. Yeah, that's a great point. And all of us involved with the society, from Bill Nye on down, all of us are constantly aware of the need. Why is this important? Share this. Why is this important? What is this going to do for our planet? What is this exploration of the solar system going to do for our species, for each other? There's lots and lots of answers, and we try to get those answers

out there. Bill, I'm going to go to you for what may be the last word, and it is very nearly the last word in this book, Discovering Mars, A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, by you, William Sheehan, and Jim Bell, available from the University of Arizona Press. Here's the line right at the end. The most important thing we have gained from the exploration of Mars is the view Mars has given us of Earth. Could you expand on that? has given us of Earth. Could you expand on that? Well, I think the whole thing started with Apollo 8 and Earthrise, you know, in 1968. For the first time, humans were able to contrast the beautiful oasis of the blue Earth rising over the stark gray barren surface of the moon. And that view did mobilize people for a short period of time before they sort of retreated back into the, you know, grandiosity that is so much a part of our species.

But just the fact that we now have explored Mars to some extent and have been able to realize that even though it looks that way when you see pictures of it, it's not like the Arizona desert that you can just go out into with shirt sleeves and quaff your favorite drink on the patio. I mean, it's a very stark environment. Someone said actually it was at a conference that Jim and his colleagues put on at Arizona State, but said that no matter how badly we screw up the Earth, it will still be infinitely more hospitable than Mars will ever be. So I think ultimately when you look back from the surface of Mars and you see that Earth, beautiful blue, but not even the brightest planet in Mars' sky. Actually, Venus is brighter. And you see the Martian moons frequently racing overhead, and they're brighter.

And then you realize, well, that little tiny bright object in the sky of Mars is all that we have, at least now. Some would say a pale blue dot. Some would say. Well, I was trying to avoid that. We never avoid that around here. Jim, do we go out there, at least in part, to find ourselves? Yeah, look, Bill's right. We explore out there to learn about ourselves here. Everything we do in space exploration, I'm convinced, is going to make life on Earth better.

If we figure out how to sustain ourselves as a species in the harsh vacuum of space or low-pressure environments like harsh vacuum of space or low pressure environments like the surface of Mars or low gravity environments like the surfaces of asteroids. If we figure out how to actually build settlements and structures and extend our civilization for real beyond this planet, that implies a mastery of sustainable engineering that is far beyond what we have in our capacity today. And if that has happened, then we are using that engineering to make life better here on our own planet. I'm convinced of it. In some sense, the work that NASA and other space agencies do,

I believe, spurs that kind of innovation. It does it through technology and engineering, but it also does it just through the, frankly, spiritual side, inspiring kids and their teachers and motivating people to explore and to better themselves and to push ourselves individually or as a species farther than we've ever been pushed. This is what the space program does for us. Mars is the beneficiary of that, and our species and our planet will ultimately be the ultimate beneficiaries of that. Gentlemen, thank you for this wonderful conversation. We are the beneficiaries of this great book,

which was published just a few weeks ago, Discovering Mars. Stick around because you have a chance to win one on the new space trivia contest when Bruce Betts arrives for this week's edition of What's Up. Again, guys, thank you very much. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Great interviewer. Jim Bell and Bill Sheehan are the authors of Discovering Mars, a history of observation and exploration of the Red Planet, published by the University of Arizona Press. Hey, guess what? It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Thank you. We got a lot of good stuff in the night sky. Let me dive right into it, Matt.

Oh, good. Lots of nice holiday gifts. Go ahead. Yes, indeed. We'll start with the planet party still going on low in the west, getting lower. Don't miss the planet party with super bright Venus lowest down, Saturn looking yellowish above it, and Jupiter looking really bright above that. And if that weren't enough, Mercury joining the party, although, you know, again, everything is getting pretty low, but Mercury will actually be pretty darn close to Venus, but much dimmer on the 28th of December. We also still have Comet Leonard, which is in the same part of the sky, but very much challenged by the glow of sunlight, so it's tough. It will be easier for our Southern Hemisphere listeners to see it, but it's still going to take binoculars. Coming up, January 2nd and 3rd,

peaking are the Quadrantids, which I mispronounce every single year, named after a constellation that doesn't exist anymore, the Quadrantids. Whew. It can be a really good shower, meteor shower, but they tend to have a very sharp peak. So check it out the night of January 2nd to 3rd.

Great news on moon, new moon, so no moonlight to interfere. So check that out. One of my favorite holiday traditions, getting to hear you try to say quantra tits. Yeah. I feel like I missed something here. I've gotten so... Oh, Mars. Mars is not that great

yet in the pre-dawn east. Be joined by other planets in the next month or so that will be running away from the evening sky and joining the morning sky. Oh, if you have a telescope and you check out Venus right now, it's going through quite a phase like the moon does. It's going through a phase. It's very much easy to see that we're seeing part of the dark, the night part, and part of the day part. All right, that's enough of that. On to this week in space history. This I found interesting and coincidental, Matt. 42 years ago, December 24th, the same day that

JWST, James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch, 42 years ago to the day was the first launch of the Ariane rocket. Now that was, of course, the Ariane 1, and they are now on the Ariane 5, which will be launching JWST shortly after this comes out, hopefully. Also, 1968, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, first humans to orbit the moon. Let's light that thing and get that telescope up there. Of course, by the time some of you hear this, we'll know if the JWST has been launched on its way by that big Ariane 5 rocket. Pretty cool.

But we're ignorant and trapped in time, so we do not know. We will. Send us a postcard. On to random space fact. As far as I can tell, I've only alluded to this before and never mentioned this just totally weird, freaky, freaky fact. Neutrinos, lots of them put out by the sun, also by stars flying everywhere. About 100 trillion, 100 trillion, and maybe that's 10 trillion or 1 trillion, but 100 trillion pass through you every second.

There are so many of them and they're so weakly interacting. Trillions of them are passing through us every second. The amount of time I've babbled has just been incomprehensible, one. And two, hard to imagine how many have done that. 100 trillion here, 100 trillion there. Pretty soon, you've got a lot of neutrinos on your hands or going through your hands, actually. I love that. Yeah, I've always loved that. I had an astrophysics professor who said, on average, a human will absorb one neutrino in their lifetime and you die once. And he said, is that a coincidence?

I think it is. Oh, come on. Correlation, not causality. All right. I'm not happy. No, I don't know. It matters. I'll just try to stand so you absorb fewer nutrients.

I don't know. Let's move on to the trivia contest. Are you saying there's a neutrino out there with my name on it? Yes, we call it Matt. Matt Neutrino. With one T. Well, yeah, of course, because it's a strange neutrino. Okay, that didn't make sense.

Let's move on to the trivia contest. And I pointed out the Galileo, of course, discovered the four Galilean moons, which he did not name after himself, but others did, of Jupiter in 1610. I asked you, when was the next one discovered? And what moon was it? How do we do, Matt? Here is the answer from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, in Kansas. Amalthea is the moon that came in number five back in 1892, before Bruce was alive. The reddest object you will find in all our solar system, Galileo would have claimed, but sadly, he just missed them. It's cute. I just thought that was amazing. It's's right those four are so much larger i just thought it was amazing that there were hundreds of years before the next one was discovered and now there's

known to be 80 ish here's our winner jean-marc bonnard in switzerland man we have listeners absolutely everywhere uh jean-marc i would love to deliver this on my own, your Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, but we'll just have to put it in the mail to you. Congratulations on your win there, and thanks for listening. Most excellent. Congratulations. Torsten Zimmer and a lot of other people talked about this discovery having been made at the 36-inch refractor at California's Lick Observatory, which is still in operation. I just am blown away by the idea of a 36-inch lens. Not a mirror, but a lens that big. That just is amazing to me.

It's very close to the largest, at least functional refractor in the world at, I believe, 40 inches at Yerkes Observatory. A little random telescope trivia for you. Pavel Kamesha and Belarus and others mentioned that it was Edward Emerson Barnard, E.E. Barnard, who discovered Amalthea. He was awarded, are you ready? The Bruce Medal in 1917. Could it be that Dr. Betts is hiding the secret of his past from us? Well, yeah, among others. They knew I was coming. They named a medal after me early on.

Someday there will be an astronomer and chief scientist who, okay, Norman Kassoon in the UK. Simon Marius had independently discovered the Galilean moons one day after Galileo, but he didn't publish his book on the subject until 1614. Even so, the names Marius assigned are the ones that we use today, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, which, yeah, probably disappointed Galileo. Better than naming them after his benefactors, which Galileo wanted to do. Yeah. What did he call them? The Medician stars, I think, after the Medicis?

Something like that. Joe Poutre in New Jersey, fascinating reading about the potential of hundreds of tiny moons. And he has a question for you, Bruce. When does a moon become a moonlet? And could a moon have its own tiny moon as some asteroids do? Well, moon to moonlet is a, the IAU, to my knowledge, has taken no position on the term moonlet, but I think it's cute for small moons, but I believe there's no definitive distinction. Someone can let me know if I'm wrong, but considering the confusion and naming going on as we find small stuff, it wouldn't surprise me. I believe that theoretically, at least for a moon in a distant orbit, another moon is possible,

but in a close orbit, it's not. But we haven't found any, whether it's possible or not. Joe, I hope you found that as nice an answer as I do. Just a couple more here. Bob Klain in Arizona. After missing a couple of weeks due to a family illness, I figured I owed you an answer to this one. Gonna meet it up to you guys with truly punny answers. No need to Europa me into this. Thanks, Bob. By the way, there's a message for you. Call is tomorrow. Call is tomorrow. That's a struggle. Finally, this very nice poem from gene lewin in washington oh tender goddess a gossamer ring radiates from where you lie hidden from view to nurture zeus away from chronos's eye then in 1892 from earth your location was spied ham Amalthea, a fitting epithet, once just known as Jupiter 5. Jupiter 5. Yeah, they all got

numbers and were referred to with nice Roman numerals for quite a while. Not to be confused with Jupiter 2, which of course was the spaceship that the Robinson family traveled on with Dr. Smith. I hate that guy. And the robot says, do you have another one? Yes, I do. Something about totally different objects, but a similar format, it turns out. I found this fascinating as well, Matt. So I'm sharing it as a trivia question. And I don't know why I'm using this voice. The first trans-Neptunian object discovered was Pluto,

of course, in 1930. So trans-Neptunians spending most of their time out beyond the orbit of Neptune, not counting moons of Pluto. When was the next trans-Neptunian object discovered? And what is it now named? Trans-Neptunian objects first found in 1930. When was the next found? And what is it now named? Transneptionary objects first found in 1930. When was the next found? And what is it that's not Sharon Moon of Pluto? You have until the 29th. That's December 29th, Wednesday, 8 a.m. Pacific time on that day, the 29th of December. And as promised, we have for the winner of this one, I'm holding it in my hand, all 720 pages, Discovering Mars, A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet,

William Sheehan and Jim Bell. You heard how much I enjoyed the book, and I bet you will too. So good luck, and we're done. Everybody go out there, look in the night sky, and think of your favorite planetary pun. Thank you. I'm so flustered the night sky, and think of your favorite planetary pun. Thank you. I'm so flustered. Thank you and good night.

I'm all theocracy. No, never mind. Call us tomorrow. No, you can listen today to What's Up. You can listen anytime to What's Up with the chief scientist of Planetary Society, who has been joining me for this segment on the show for well over 19 years now. That's Bruce Betts. You know, in old-time taverns, you could gain a mead if you ordered one.

Where's the bouncer when we need him? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who love rolling across the sands of Mars. Come on a drive with us at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Jason Davis are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.