Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Diving Europa with the Makers of Under the Sea 3D and Lonne Lane

Episode Date: February 9, 2009

Diving Europa with the Makers of Under the Sea 3D and Lonne LaneLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're diving Europa, 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. All the usual suspects are with us once again, and we're still all about exploring the universe, but today we'll try it a little differently. Howard and Michelle Hall have just finished Under the Sea 3D, an IMAX film that will take you to the alien environment known as the deep sea. We'll sit down with them and one of our planet's foremost experts on how we'll someday

swim in a sea that is half a billion miles away, the one that awaits us under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. It's a wild ride, one that Bill Nye is going to prepare us for with his commentary about what may be the closest thing on Earth to that distant sea. Put on your parka as Bill takes us to the South Pole. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. And this week, let's look down by looking east. I refer, of course, to Lake Vostok. Now, Lake Vostok and the Vostok crater on Mars are named for the Russian word for east. Now in Antarctica, there's a lake named Vostok, but it's under two and a half miles of ice. And people are drilling down.

They're within two soccer fields, 200 meters of this lake. And they want to bore all the way down and look at these microbes that live in this ancient lake. And perhaps these microbes in this Antarctic cold would be related to the kind of microbes you might find on Mars. But here's the thing. Nobody wants to contaminate Lake Vostok. Nobody wants to make a mess of it and fill it with human microbes and stuff from the surface because that would contaminate it. We'd never know how it was preserved frozen in ice. We would change everything by accident.

So we can use the technology that we are developing for exploring other worlds by sterilizing our spacecraft to prevent so-called forward contamination. As you may know, you cannot violate the prime directive. We would use that technology to keep from contaminating our own Lake Vostok here on Earth. It's a little bit controversial because there are Russian scientists who believe that they got this figured out, and there are scientists in other parts of the world who aren't so sure. But isn't it a wonderful debate? Isn't it a wonderful thing? If we can figure out how to explore Lake Vostok, we can figure out maybe how to explore what? That's right,

Europa, the moon of Jupiter. We could go out to Europa with a similar probe and bore through the ice and see with a camera maybe, a remote camera, to see if any Europanian microbe licks the lens, as the saying goes. And we're going to learn about climate change. We're going to learn about our own world by preparing to explore space. Well, I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. If you've never seen an IMAX film, here's a good start. Under the Sea 3D will come to 100 theaters across North America this week,

spreading soon across the world. A few days ago, I visited the IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica, California, so that I could visit with the makers of this stunningly beautiful work. I wanted to introduce Howard and Michelle Hall to Arthur Lonnie Lane. Lonnie spent more than 40 years at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where he has been part of missions to seven planets. He hasn't just thought about how we might explore an ocean like that under the ice that surrounds Europa. He has actually designed instruments that may be the precursors of those we'll someday send to that

moon of Jupiter. And he has tested some of them in deep-sea dives with filmmaker and explorer James Cameron. Lonnie and I had not yet seen Under the Sea 3D, though that would be taken care of when we attended the premiere later that day. But just from what I have read in the press materials, I'm very excited. As a very, very moderate diver, I think I'm going to see things I've never seen before. Well, I guarantee you will see things you've never seen before.

As far as seeing the film, I haven't seen it totally complete either. We just got it off the editing shelf a week and a half ago. So it's brand new to us, and I've seen a hundred different varieties of it, but I haven't seen it completely put together yet, and I'll see that tonight. This is not the first one of these you've done. It's not even the first one in 3D. No, this is my third 3D film.

We did one in 1994 called Into the Deep, and then four years ago we did Deep Sea 3D, and this is the sequel to Deep Sea 3D. Michelle, as I read through the material, it sounds, well, you are also a diver, and you've had a lot of photography published, National Geographic and elsewhere. But your job apparently was up on the surface for the most part? I am one of the, am one of the producers of the film, and I did dive a bit to take some production stills, behind the scene production stills, and to document some of the wildlife, but my primary responsibility is to

monitor the activities, keep things going. I sort of think of myself as a den mother to my boys. The crew are all guys. I'm often the only woman on board. So I have to have, you know, the eyes behind my head and keep things going, be the interface between our crew and the boat crew, and trying to keep everybody safe and keep things going on schedule when I can. You faced challenges making this film that immediately made me start to think of the kinds of things that people face when they decide we're going to send something to another planet. Except, of course, we mostly send robots,

exclusively send robots to other planets. You had to worry about life support. And spending, what, six hours at a time underwater with this 1,300-pound camera? Well, not surprisingly, the technology that we use for life support for technical dives is very similar to what the astronauts use in outer space. We use a system called a closed-circuit mixed-gas rebreather. This piece of diving gear does not create any bubbles.

It allows us to stay down up to 12 hours on a single dive. And it's very similar to what the astronauts wear. And I didn't realize that since you're shooting film, I thought, well, you can get 20 minutes out of a reel, I guess. No, not even close. No, the IMAX 3D camera system is, well, it's the most impractical underwater camera system ever invented. I mean, it's laughable.

The camera system in the underwater housing weighs almost 1,300 pounds. It will only run for three minutes before you have to change film, and then sending it to the surface and changing film takes between a half an hour and an hour. So it's a very difficult format to use for capturing wildlife behavior. But it makes beautiful pictures. Oh, the pictures are extraordinary. If you haven't seen IMAX 3D, you have no clue what 3D is. The image that you see when you're in the theater, when you put these glasses on, is virtually identical to the image that I saw through my diving mask when I was down there. The same color, the same detail.

You'll see every little hair, every little scale. You'll see the pupils on tiny animals' eyes. Extraordinary detail. And you'll see it in the same proximity. These animals will appear to be two or three feet away from you, and if they appear to be two or three feet away from you, that's how close they were to the underwater camera. So it's a form of virtual reality that's better than any other definition I can think of. Michelle, I read that you saw things on film that you hadn't noticed when you

were diving. Exactly. I was just thinking that when Howard was saying that. There's a sequence of reef cuttlefish, and in one of the shots, the reef cuttlefish is going after a crab and it is sort of stalking. We watched this in the wild and it was fascinating to watch but when we actually watched the 70mm footage I could see little appendages. Reef cuttlefish, their skin can change and these little appendages came up around its eye that none of us appreciated while we were in the wild.

So you see things in this format that you couldn't see as a diver. Lonnie, Lane, as you listen to this and the technology that it takes, but also the wonders that are there to be discovered, revealed, does it make you feel at home? Makes me feel at home, but also makes me wish I were there. make you feel at home? Makes me feel at home, but also makes me wish I were there. No, it's very clear there is a strong analogy and tie between the largely unexplored liquid planet we have and those we try to go to in the outer solar system. Mars is the benefit of having a lot of visitors in the last 50 years, but places like Europa, the Galilean system, Saturnian system,

where we're finding now from the current missions, unique aspects of their evolution, their formation, and what they are today is different point to point to point. So we have basically another 25 worlds out there with sufficiently large variation. And at least three or four of them have liquid water. Europa has potentially a large, somewhat salty ocean. It has possibly hydrothermal vents from the heating of the gravitational interaction of Europa with the other Jovian satellites that are big. Enceladus, we know, has some water because we see these plumes coming out that have been measured now to contain water as well as some organics.

Very exciting. Callisto and Ganymede, cold, somewhat warmer on the outside, good size compared to Europa. And in fact, they have their own activity and maybe some liquid water. We'll return to the seas of Europa with Howard and Michelle Hall and Lonnie Lane 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. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guests are Howard and Michelle Hall, makers of the brand new and visually stunning IMAX film, Under the Sea 3D. Also joining us is Lonnie Lane, Jet Propulsion Lab veteran of missions to seven planets, and an expert on how we may someday explore the water oceans elsewhere in our solar system, and especially at Jupiter's moon, Europa. The conversation continues with a question for Director Howard Hall.

How many surprises are still waiting for us under our own oceans? Well, there's certainly many species beneath the sea that we haven't discovered yet. Some of these are large species. There are species of sharks, and they recently discovered a new species of cetacean. There's big things down there that we don't know about. Nobody's ever seen a giant squid in the wild, and these are not even uncommon. They just live very deep. I think Lonnie would agree with me that the exploration of it on this planet

has had a profound influence on how we look at the extraterrestrial bodies, especially Europa. A few decades ago, we learned about hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean floor, and we learned that photosynthesis was not the only game in town. Animals actually live by using chemosynthesis, something that doesn't require light at all. And all of a sudden, we look, well, there's no light on Europa, but there might be thermal activity, which means it could be the same kind of life that we've discovered in our oceans. So there's a very close analogy to what we've learned about our oceans and what we hope to learn on some of

these extraterrestrial bodies. Lonnie, you've spent a lot of your time in recent years working exactly there with the hydrothermal vents on this planet. You must be hoping that someone like you or someone like Howard someday is going to look around underneath that thick sheet of ice and find the same on Europa. I think that's just very, very likely. I mean, the drive of the human psyche to go explore this is very important. But more than that, we're finding the parallels of what we're beginning to understand here.

We use the Earth's ocean to do our experiments, to do this exploration, which drives our mind on how to design an instrument to go to Europa, survive, and be able to potentially make these kinds of measurements. And we've been talking about small little hydrobots that will eventually get down through the ice, swim around, sniff the chemicals in the water there, try to find the hydrothermal vent areas, and begin to look for the synthesis of simple organic compounds leading to more complex

things. Now, in the process of all that, if something were to, quote, swim by, I assure you, it would be enormously exciting. And that would be world-making news. Okay, so the crazy premise that I've been leading up to here is that it's, you know, 2100, 2150. Remarkably well-preserved Howard and Michelle Hall are contacted by the IMAX organization, or National Geographic, or Interplanetary Geographic, and they say, we want you to be the first humans to film under the ice.

Well, first of all, would you go? And second, could you even imagine how you would accomplish such a thing? Well, they'd have to give me a heck of a wetsuit, that's for sure. But seriously, you're not going to go up there and go diving, but you might take a submersible up there, which is a form of diving, and that's, I hope, what will happen. There's, I think, a very, very good chance there's life up there. The whole question is whether the creation of life is a simple, common chemical reaction or whether it's almost unique. My guess is that it's a relatively common thing and that the evidence that we're seeing that there may be life on other planets,

we're seeing these methane plumes on Mars, we're seeing a lot of evidence that points in the direction of life. I think we're going to find that life's common. And I'd be a bit surprised if we don't find it on the moons of Jupiter or someplace close. I'm with you. Lonnie, you've been hired as a consultant by the Halls. What are the challenges they're going to face getting that submersible down there and getting the information, the pictures back up? Well, there's a basic presumption here that we understand Europa, which means that the precursors to this activity have to be the radar mapping of the outer shell, find out where there are access points. Do those access

points imply chemistry coming up from below? And therefore, you can look at it as you go down. And then the utilization of modern and very exotic thermal sources to basically melt that part of the shell to get access. Once you're in liquid water, believe it or not, it becomes a lot easier. The penetration through that ice barrier is the magic because not only is there water ice, there are some other chemicals, but Europa also collects a lot of dust

from the solar system over 4 billion years. And in the course of that, you have these layered gritty zones, and so the way you drill down, the way you melt through has to interact with all of that. It's a technology problem, but it's solvable. The depth of the European ocean floor, we think based on what we know now, is no worse in pressure than the Marianas ocean floor, we think, based on what we know now, is no worse in pressure than the Marianas Trench. And we are sending both instruments and people to that zone, which means we have the base technology to be able to do this. The problem is the cab fare, that is the transport of these

fairly heavy solid objects to get to Europa is a pretty expensive ride, and we have to figure ways to make it less expensive. Because if you want to take a human, that requires a lot more support system, as Michelle understands it's going to be. If you even got to the surface with the technology that would work, how would you organize something like this? Can you even extrapolate from what the two of you do now to a mission like this that is, you know, I don't know, how many orders of magnitude more difficult? In the movie Armageddon, they needed people to drill on a comet, so they went out and they got drillers, you know. I think that if you're going to go to Europa, you might want to hire people that are familiar with deep-sea submersibles,

train them as astronauts, or at least have them collaborate with astronauts because you're going to need a deep-sea submersible. That's a technology that's been around. It's being used. It's developing and getting better all the time. And we're just going to need to take what we've learned about diving in our own deep ocean and take it up there and melt a hole through the ice and go. You asked how to very carefully.

The planning would be very careful and very meticulous and be sure that all your I's are dotted and your T's are crossed before you go. Arthur Clarke, one of his laws, he said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. Do you have any doubt, Lonnie? No doubt at all. We're basically, as humans, generally limited to maybe factors of three and four in our imagination based on what we know because that's the point we launch from. We know because that's the point we launch from. And I fully believe that not only in the Earth's ocean, but other places,

factors of 50 to 100 are going to be required. And that takes into the realm you just said. It's stranger and more wonderful and more unusual than anything you're able to sit down and write with a connection to your current experience base. you're able to sit down and write with a connection to your current experience base. Howard and Michelle Hall are the producers, main powers, cinematographer, director of photography. You wrote the script, I think, as well, right, Howard? For Under the Sea 3D, which will be premiering here in Los Angeles tonight, and then moving across the country, I'm sure, Arthur Lonnie Lane is sort of retired,

but not really from JPL, where he has had missions, been part of missions to seven of the either eight or nine planets, you count. And it is a great honor, once again, to be in the presence of three explorers. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, When we look for life beyond Earth, we seem to assume it requires water. Aren't there other solvents that could support the chemistry needed for life? Looking only for water-based life does seem like a short-sightedly narrow focus. There are

other solvents that are relatively common in other parts of the solar system, but there are good reasons for sticking with water. You do need a liquid because liquids provide a medium in which more complex chemicals can dissolve and interact with each other at relatively high rates. Some of the possible alternative solvents include methane, ethane, and ammonia. One problem with these is that they're liquids at much lower temperatures than water is, which means that any chemical reactions that would take place within these solvents would be much slower. Another problem is the range of temperatures over which the solvents are liquid. Ethane isn't bad. It stays liquid over a range of 94 degrees Celsius,

similar to water's 100. But methane and ammonia are only liquid over much smaller temperature ranges, just 18 degrees in the case of methane, so life in a methane system could be threatened just by a normal day-night temperature cycle. Water also has a very high specific heat capacity, which means that it can buffer an ecosystem against wide swings in atmospheric temperature, absorbing lots of heat without changing temperature itself. There's also the important and unusual characteristic that solid water, that is ice, floats on liquid water, which can insulate life-rich oceans against temporary extreme cold. The problems with other solvents could be overcome by unusual conditions beyond our current thinking,

but water has so many advantages that it seems reasonable to continue to search for extraterrestrial life in wet places. 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 on Planetary Radio. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Tell us about the night sky, first of all. Oh, it's beautiful. It tends to be black on a really clear night,

and it's got little bright speckly things in it. you can check out a really bright speckly thing which is venus over in the uh west after sunset you will still see brenus brenus the home of the the breens i believe uh venus looking like the extremely bright star like object over there and if you want a pretty picture, February 27th, Crescent Moon next to Venus. We won't see, like, Venus inside the Crescent. Oh, gosh. Yes, you've hit one of my pet peeves from every cartoon show ever made. No, no Venus, no star within the Crescent. Because, you know, that's the solid moon in there.

It's just shadowed. I don't know if you knew that, Matt. It could have been somebody, you know, with a laser a laser pointer well that would be different okay i just haven't seen that yet but also let's go to the pre-dawn sky start warming you up this is only for those people who have a really good clear view to the eastern horizon because things are going to be down low but a whole party of planets we're going to have jupiter bright star like objects so one of the easiest things you can check out but also Mercury making a low to the horizon appearance mid-February to early March, and Mars gradually grows higher, especially coming up in March, and it is in the

near future below Jupiter looking kind of reddish. This week in space history, we had Apollo 14 coming back in 1971. We had Galileo flying past Venus on its way to Jupiter in that wacky gravity assist kind of way in 1990. First shuttle landing 25 years ago. First shuttle landing to land after a flight at Kennedy Space Center as opposed to Edwards Air Force Base. Also near the orbiter that could, that actually landed on the surface of an asteroid Eros and transmitted some data back. That happened in 2001. On to random space fact!

It was the Puccini version, I think. You're a good little Puccini. Hey, Europa, I hear you're learning all sorts of things about Europa. Yeah, we're ready to go, man. I got the scuba tank all pumped up. We're setting out. Well, that's some Europa facts. Europa, at just over 3,000 kilometers in diameter,

it is slightly smaller than the Earth's moon and is the sixth largest moon in the solar system. Although it's interesting. It's kind of where the Earth's moon and is the sixth largest moon in the solar system. Although it's interesting. It's kind of where the big moons cut off and you get into the smaller moons. So despite being the least massive of all these others, its mass is more than the combined mass of all the other moons in the solar system, smaller than itself. Huh. And hopefully some of that mass is biomass. There you go.

Yes, I'm sure that at least half of it is made up of biomass. That's right. Nasty algae and stuff. Unless they're using an algaestate of some kind. Yeah. Anyway, that's not important right now. What is important right now? As we asked you about extrasolar planets in the last trivia contest.

We asked you, as of now, which extrasolar planetary system is known to have the most extrasolar planets and how many? How do we do? You know, it's changing so fast. It is. It's a tricky question. I was just figuring over a couple of weeks it would be stable. As far as we know, and as far as John Anderson knows, John Anderson of Craig Avon, Northern Ireland in the UK, it's five, five planets circling 55 Cancri in the constellation of Cancer.

Cancri, I guess that is Cancer, right? Did he get it right? He got it right. Excellent. We also got the same answer from Kevin Hecht and a lot of other people, but Kevin added something to it I wanted to tell you about. He's saying, why don't we take that Doppler data that is used to find these extrasolar planets and turn it into an audio file?

He says each planet would produce a pure tone with frequencies representing orbital period, amplitude representing planetary mass. You'd add notch filters, signal generators, a little Dolby. And, you know, who knows what would come out? Music of the spheres. But that's from Kevin. Wow. Anyway, it's John, though, John Anderson, who we're going to send a year in space calendar to.

And an OPT rewards card from Oceanside Photo and Telescope, optcorp.com. Well, congratulations. And here is an opportunity for you to win a year in space calendar, the official desk calendar of this show and us. Subatomic particles, they're important in the universe. They're cool. They hung out at the Big Bang. Here's my question for you. First part, not really that hard. A lot of people probably know off the top of their heads what is the anti-matter equivalent of the electron the anti-matter equivalent of the electron but that's the first part that's part one part two okay part two go for. When those two particles come together and annihilate each other. Big party.

How much energy do they give off? Oh, okay. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter, how to tell us about those subatomic parties and the amount of energy. I want to know how long it would run my cell phone for. That's the important thing. Well, I guess if people can give you that, then that's serious extra bonus points. Aren't they working on that, an antimatter battery for cell phones?

They should be if they're not. It's kind of a drag, though, when it comes together accidentally with a matter battery. Vaporizes everything. No, you don't see that. There's the matters in there, and they're separated, and there's a little dilithium. Never mind. You've got to get that answer to us by the 16th of February, 2009. And that will make you eligible for this latest and greatest,

well, latest trivia contest from What's Up. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about staples, paperclips, rubber bands, and any other kind of fastener you can think of. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of Projects for the Planetary Society, holding it all together here on What's Up. Elon Musk of SpaceX.

That's next time on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.