Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Dr. J and the World’s Biggest Telescope

Episode Date: January 13, 2015

Joe Liske, host of Hubblecast, is also the top scientist on the European Southern Observatory’s European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), now under construction on a Chilean mountaintop. “Dr. J��� tells us what this largest ever telescope will help us discover.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The biggest telescope yet, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Our guest this week is Dr. Jay. No, not Julius, though you'll hear another basketball reference soon. You may know our Dr. Jay as the host of Hubblecast, but Joe Liska is also acting program scientist for the European Extremely Large Telescope, queen of the new generation of superscopes now being built. Bill Nye shares his thoughts about the near miss by SpaceX

as it tried to soft land a Falcon 9 first stage at sea. And Bruce Betts goes Huygens happy in our What's Up segment. Here with her regular update is the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Welcome back, Emily. Where will we start around the solar system today? I think we have to start on Mars and just congratulate the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity team for reaching the top of the mountain. Who knew Opportunity would be a mountain climber? And now she's on the top of Cape Tribulation, taking a massive panorama. It's going to be amazing. Almost 11 Earth years in. It is pretty amazing. And she's got dementia now. Her memory is not working very well, but she somehow still manages to drive every day. She's an inspiration to us all. All of us should do so well as senior citizens.

She's an inspiration to us all. All of us should do so well as senior citizens. Let's move on to a blog post that you put up last week, I believe on the 6th of January, beginning with what's going on out at Venus or what we hope will be going on out at Venus and maybe what just ended. Yeah, well, Akatsuki is the Japanese spacecraft that attempted to enter orbit at Venus a few years back and failed. They're coming back around. They have now picked a date that they're going to be shooting for December for an orbit insertion attempt. And if they manage to do it, they'll be in this really long orbit that goes out to three or 400,000 kilometers away from the planet. But hopefully they manage it and we'll be

looking for them to make progress with that later on this year. And then there's Venus Express, which we've talked about. Venus Express, the mission has formally been ended, but the spacecraft is still trying to communicate with Earth. And they still have radio telescope time scheduled for communications. The spacecraft can't actually point at Earth anymore. So all they can do is listen for this faint carrier signal that they can't quite lock on to. And it's very tragic and sad, but we got to keep reminding ourselves Venus Express is just as long live to mission as the Mars Exploration Rovers were.

And she's done a good job in her mission. And in that same piece that you posted on January 6th is this fascinating bit of lunar astronomy. That's right. So the Chang'e 3 lander has an ultraviolet telescope on it, which is something you can only do in space. Ultraviolet, very thankfully for us people who don't like skin cancer, is blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

And so you have to go above the atmosphere in order to do ultraviolet astronomy. And that's one of the things that Chang'e 3 is doing. And they got this beautiful picture of the pinwheel galaxy and ultraviolet astronomy. And that's one of the things that Chang'e 3 is doing. And they got this beautiful picture of the pinwheel galaxy and ultraviolet wavelengths. You know, when I was a kid, we grew up with these pictures of moon bases with giant observatories on the backside of the moon. It was pretty fascinating. I guess this is a start, not exactly what they were illustrating back then. Not exactly.

And of course, it's also not the first time. The Apollo 16 astronauts did this as well. Everything was done on the moon first by Apollo. So there's still a little ways from doing new things on the moon. But hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Much more to come. And Emily, we'll talk to you again next week. Thank you for this.

Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. And next, we're going to our boss, the CEO, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, apparently kudos are due once again to SpaceX. Yes, they first of all got the resupply ship all the way up to the International Space Station carrying about two tons of food, water, and clothing. And then they tried this cool thing, the big cost savings idea to get the first stage

of the rocket instead of burning up in the atmosphere or sinking in the ocean. They got it to land on a floating platform. You and I might call it a barge, but it's an autonomous drone ship. Yeah, don't don't tell Elon it's a barge. No, it's fine. It's cool. It's it. I mean, everybody think about this. Normally, these are fantastically complex engines. And for my old business, the pumps, that's what used to break my heart, burning up the pumps. These things land back on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, or you could use them again. It has the potential to save a lot of money and, of course, save resources and not pollute the ocean and so on and on and on. And it almost worked. They ran out of steering

fluid right before they got to the barge. They lost lateral, as the saying goes in airplanes. And it hit the barge, but hit real hard. So next time, they're going to have extra fuel so they can slow down that little bit more and steer a little better and i bet you next time it works really well it's the kind of thing that people never really tried before and yet we've been watching in science fiction movies for decades and decades oh well yeah the landing on its tail that's right yeah absolutely yeah and so you can do that if the whole thing isn't too heavy and so after all the fuel is burned up and then you let the main second stage, the next stage, go up on and on, it's doable. And this is what, you know, we engineers, we run the numbers.

So way to go, man. That's just really, it's visionary and it's exciting. And maybe an example for, I don't know, other people and other industries. I mean, this is a company that really takes chances. They do. Keep in mind, everybody, that we all go way to go SpaceX. It's true. But they're doing it on a NASA contract. I mean, somewhere in here, the public sector is paying for part of this mission.

So it's all good. It's good in every way. I'm glad the astronauts and everybody's getting resupplied, and I'm glad this thing almost worked, and I'm delighted about SpaceX's overall attitude toward it, which was, hey, we're going to try this, and man, it almost worked. We're going to nail it next time. Very exciting, man. Thank you very much, Bill. Good to talk to you.

Good to talk with you. Let's change the world. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Next, we're going to talk about an extremely large telescope. There was a time when responsible scientists thought telescopes would never get much larger than the Hale telescope on California's Mount Palomar. That still magnificent instrument has a roughly 20-square-meter mirror. The segmented primary mirror for the European extremely large telescope will be 50 times that size. Construction on this biggest of all the ambitious new optical reflectors has just begun, according to our guest. Joe Liska of the European Southern Observatory

is the acting program scientist for the EELT. Here's my extended conversation with Joe, recorded via Skype from his office at the ESO's science headquarters in Germany. Joe, or perhaps I should say Dr. J, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Hi, Matt. It's a pleasure to be here. Let us now, while we could talk to you about many, many things, like your nearly eight years now, I think, of hosting Hubblecast, one of the best astronomy or space-oriented webcasts or podcasts on the net. Perhaps the best. I think that argument could be made, certainly among video. Thanks very much. You're welcome.

But you said that's just the third half of your life, another half of it being research. And then there is this involvement with our topic today, the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is coming together. Other than being gigantic, what will make this new telescope such a great instrument for learning more about the universe? Well, being gigantic is, in fact, the most important thing by far. As you probably know, there are two very important reasons why astronomers want bigger and bigger telescopes all the time. Number one is, of course, the light collecting power.

The bigger the telescope, the more light per unit time can you collect. But the other really important issue is, of course, that the resolution of the images, i.e. the sharpness of the images that you can make with a telescope, depends on the size of the telescope. The bigger your telescope, the sharper are the images that you can make. And so the spatial resolution is, of course, extremely important for astronomers. They want to resolve objects. They want to resolve individual objects. They want to see inside objects like galaxies,

but they also want to separate objects that are very close on the sky, such as, for example, an exoplanet and its parent star. So being gigantic is the most important thing. But in order to make it the largest telescope in the world, there are, of course, a number of other or a number of technological challenges. And there's a number of things you have to do in order to make such a big telescope work. And individually, none of these other things are that new. They've been done before, but putting it all together, I guess that's where the big challenge lies for the EELT, for the European Extremely Large Telescope. So number one is, of course, that the primary mirror with its 39 or more than 39 meters in diameter is far too large to be built from a single piece of glass,

so you have to segment it. This is not new. The Keck telescopes are segmented telescopes. In fact, even the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be a segmented telescope. Then, of course, you need the technology of adaptive optics, which allows you to correct for the blurring effects of the atmosphere. Now, again, this is something we've been doing for a number of years

and is currently being done on the 8- and 10-meter telescopes. So in the adaptive optics, what you need there is a deformable mirror that deforms itself in such a way as to precisely cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere. Now, in the past, usually these deformable mirrors were in the instruments, in the astronomical instruments. But now we're actually in the ELT. We're actually putting it into the telescope right from the start.

So there's going to be a massive two and a half meter deformable mirror inside the telescope. So putting these things together, adaptive optics, a segmented primary mirror, and of course the entire telescope is not a static thing. It's an active telescope that keeps track of its own image quality and corrects itself all the time. So putting all of these things together and controlling a telescope like that is a big challenge and probably the biggest challenge for the ELT. The biggest telescope that I have personally visited is sort of a shrine for me. People have heard me describe it that way. It's the

200-inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar, which of course was the biggest in the world for decades. And then I think of this instrument and others that we've talked about on this show, the Giant Magellan Telescope, the 30-meter telescope, both of

which the EELT will be quite a bit larger than. It's just mind-boggling to think of a telescope with a mirror big enough to play a basketball game on, which I don't recommend. Yes, I don't think we would take kindly to that if we tried to play basketball. Yeah, no, it is mind-boggling. The evolution in the size of the telescope is really quite staggering. The area, the photon collecting area of the EELT is, you know, on the order is almost 1,000 square meters.

And that is really huge. And this is larger than all of the collecting areas of all the existing telescopes put together. Wow. So it's really quite stunning. So again, if you look into the past, usually the jump from going from one generation of telescopes to the next generation of telescopes was usually roughly a factor of two in diameter. But now, of course, we're going from the 8 and 10 meter class to a 40 meter class telescope, it's a factor of four. That was only made possible by essentially breaking the cost law. There used to be a relation between the size of a telescope and the cost of a telescope, and this was a reasonably steep power law. That had to be

broken in order to be able to build this new generation of very large telescopes to make that possible. And that is partly because of the segmentation of primary mirrors and having much smaller domes now and these kinds of things. But you're right, it's really quite a stunning development. I already mentioned a couple of the other major projects that are underway, the future sisters of the EELT. Let's mention one more telescope that many of us have our fingers crossed about, and I'm sure you do too, and that's the James Webb Space Telescope,

that much larger descendant of the Hubble Space Telescope. What will these very large Earth-based telescopes be able to do in contrast with or maybe complementing the JWST? Yes, it will certainly be a complementing role, and we're very keen on the JWST, of course. We're keeping our eyes on it. So we've had an extremely successful relationship in the past between the Hubble Space Telescope and the current generation of largest telescopes, things like the Keck Telescope and the very large telescope, the VLT. That relationship was extremely successful. And we're very much hoping and planning to building a similarly successful relationship between the next generation of ground-based telescopes and the next generation of space telescopes, i.e. between JWST and the ELTs. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of collaboration is going to be in the area of trying to detect and to characterize the very first generation of galaxies that was born in the very early universe. So with Hubble, we've been able to see galaxies that are so far away that their light has taken about roughly 13.2 billion years to reach us.

2 billion years to reach us. But we can tell that these galaxies, these are the most distant ones that we can see with Hubble, that these galaxies are not the very first generation. These very first galaxies we've not yet detected, we've not yet seen. And there's very much the hope that with JWST we'll be able to detect them and then with the ELTs we'll be able to characterize them in more detail. It's actually quite interesting that there's going to be a bit of a reversal in the roles played by the space telescopes and the ground-based telescopes. So in the past with Hubble and the 8 and 10 meter telescopes you needed Hubble for the resolution you know to get the high resolution

imaging and you needed the ground-based telescopes for the sensitivity, you know, with their larger collecting areas with the sensitivity. With JWST and the ground-based, it's actually going to be slightly different in the sense that the ground-based telescopes, being so much larger and having now the adaptive optics capabilities, they will actually achieve a much higher resolution than JWST. But the wavelength range in which JWST will be operating, that is in the infrared, especially the thermal infrared, in that wavelength range,

JWST is actually going to beat even the very large, the extremely large telescopes on the ground in terms of sensitivity. So in the thermal infrared sensitivity, JWST will beat the ground-based telescopes. But in resolution, the ground-based telescopes will beat JWST. So this is essentially a bit of a reversal of the roles that the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck MDLT had. Yes, like I said, we're hoping for a very fruitful collaboration. But, of course, the big difference to the Hubble area will be, of course, that JWST will not last forever. JWST is scheduled or has a guaranteed lifetime of just five years, whereas Hubble has been up there for almost 25 years now. And JWST will be there for, like I said, for about five years, possibly as long as maybe 10 years.

But that's it. So we're very concerned about the overlap between JWST and the ELTs, and we hope that we will be able to squeeze a few years of concurrent operational lifetimes out of the two telescopes. You gave us one example of some of the science that the EELT and other instruments like it may soon be doing, well, soon being perhaps 10 years away, but soon enough. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the other work that they'll be doing. Please start with the search for and the effort to characterize exoplanets. Is the EELT projected to be involved with that? Yes, absolutely. That is one of the major reasons for building a telescope that is almost 40 meters in size. In fact, one of the main drivers for the size of the telescope

is our ambition to detect Earth-like or super-Earths in the habitable zone around nearby sun-like stars. And by detecting, I mean direct imaging and even doing spectroscopy of these planets, so trying to study their atmospheres with enough detail so that we can actually see what these atmospheres are made of, what their composition is. Because in the long term, the long term goal really is to try and say something about whether on some of these exoplanets, there might be life on the surface of these planets.

So we know that on planet Earth, the emergence of life fundamentally changed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. We presume that something similar would be happening on an exoplanet. So the idea is that by studying an exoplanet atmosphere with enough detail, it might be possible, if you're seeing the right combination of different molecules and different elements, things like methane and CO2 and water and ozone, if you see the right combination of these elements in the right mix, then that might enable us to say something on whether life might exist on these planets. So this is the very big and long-term goal that we have for the EELT. That's something that we are very, very keen on.

That's Joe Liska, Acting Program Scientist for the European Extremely Large Telescope. Dr. J will be back in a minute to tell us more about the science we can expect from the EELT. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here. Thank you for listening to Planetary Radio. The Planetary Society has lots more ways for you to hear the latest news and see the greatest pictures from around our solar system. I lead a growing family of expert bloggers at Planetary.org. We cover nearly every angle on space exploration.

And you can find us all over online, tweeting, and posting to our popular Facebook and Google Plus pages. We're also producing great new videos for our YouTube channel. There's no doubt about it, we really are your place in space. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is

and hilarious. See, Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash Planetary Society. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Of all the gigantic new telescope projects, the EELT is the most gargantuan. That's the European Extremely Large Telescope, and Joe Liska is its acting program scientist. Here's more of my extended conversation with Dr. Jay. What other science do you hope that the EELT will help us to investigate? Well, my own personal favorite thing to do has to do with the accelerated expansion of the universe.

So back in 1998, two different teams discovered that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down as had been assumed, reasonably assumed until that time, but was in fact accelerating. And this accelerated expansion is very difficult to understand. It definitely involves new physics. The solution to this problem either means that we don't understand gravity, which is interesting, or it means that there is a weird energy component in the universe that, for lack of a better name, we call dark energy. And it's not just a little bit, something like three quarters of the entire universe is made out of this dark energy. But we completely fail to understand what dark energy is. The only thing we know about it is that it has the weird property of having a negative pressure, which causes the acceleration. So what people are trying to do now is trying to understand more about dark energy. They're trying to reconstruct very precisely the expansion history of the universe.

So they're trying to see exactly how the universe grew, how it expanded, when exactly the accelerated phase set in, what exactly this expansion history is. So with the EOT, for the first time, we'll be able to do this in a completely new way, in a completely dynamic way. By dynamic, I mean we'll actually be able to do this in a completely new way, in a completely dynamic way. By dynamic, I mean, we'll actually be able to watch over a human lifetime. We'll actually be able to watch the universe change its expansion speed in real time. So where real time means over a time scale of,

say, 10 or 20 years. And that's something that I'm extremely excited about. But like I said, this experiment will take something like 10 or 20 years. I hope that I'll still get to see some results. So this is definitely a long-term thing. To be able to do that, what you have to be able to do is you have to be able to measure velocities very, very precisely. To be able to do that, you need the huge collecting power of an extremely large telescope. But I'm also quite confident that apart from this application in the area of cosmology of the accelerated expansion, I'm very confident that this ability to measure these very precise radial velocities, that will open up a huge new parameter space and will enable us to

do a lot of other experiments. I mean, the obvious thing is, again, in exoplanets, one of the most successful methods to detect exoplanets is the so-called radial velocity method, where you detect the gravitational pull of an exoplanet on its parent star. You detect that in the light of the parent star. And to do that, again, you have to measure very precise velocities. But something like the Earth orbiting the Sun induces a very small velocity shift only in the Sun. And to be able to detect that, that's something we cannot do at the moment. But with the ELT, we would definitely be able to do this. So that's just one example where, again, being able to measure very precise velocities will open up new science. And I'm pretty confident that

there will be a lot of other applications where the ELT will open up, or the ability of the ELT to measure very precise velocities will open up new signs. I have no doubt that you are just one of hundreds of astronomers who cannot wait for first light from the EELT and the other big telescopes, this new generation of gigantic telescopes that will be online before too long, but it's still a ways off. What is the current status of the EELT project? Well, the current status is that we're off. We're in construction. That's the great news.

We've been working on the EELT for a number of years now. We went through a conceptual design. We went through a detailed design for a while. The member states of the European Southern Observatory were quite committed to doing this, but for quite a number of years, the money wasn't there, wasn't in place, wasn't fully in place. But that has now, that's the most recent event. That problem has now finally been solved back in December last year, December 2014. The ESO's governing body, the ESO Council, finally gave the go-ahead and essentially released the money for the construction. So we're talking about roughly 1 billion euros here. And so we are now fully in the construction phase.

Roughly 1 billion euros here. And so we are now fully in the construction phase. Earlier in 2014, in the middle of 2014, we already started with preparing the site. So the ELT is going to be built in Chile again, as are our other observatories, on the 3,000-meter-high mountain Cerro Amazonas. In July, we started preparing the site. We have to make the mountain slightly shorter. We have to take the top off about 18 meters. At the top, we have to take off to create a site that is big enough for the ELT. So that work is progressing really well. Obviously, we have to build a road up the mountain and stuff like that. That work is progressing well. Yeah, so we're now

finally fully in the construction phase, and everyone here at ESO is extremely excited about that and very motivated. I think it should be exciting to pretty much everybody to know that this project is actually taking shape there. When does the team hope to start being able to use this instrument? Well, the schedule says that the construction phase will last 10 years. So we're hoping that at the end of 2024, we'll be able to have the first light of the telescope. Now, we all know these predictions for large projects like this are difficult to make, but that's the current schedule, and we'll do our best to try and stick to the schedule as best as we can. Tell us about your role. I'm not sure what a program scientist does.

Well, the program scientist, or normally, more usually, they're called a project scientist, their job is essentially to ensure that what is being built, that the telescope that is being built, actually lives up to the expectation of the scientists. So that what the engineers are doing will result in a facility that will actually be able to answer the scientific questions that the astronomers are asking. That's a complicated way of saying that I hold the top, or am responsible for the top-level requirements of the observatory. So I have to define, essentially,

what the observatory will actually be able to achieve scientifically. And then there are many other jobs. There are the jobs of trying to keep my ear to the ground regarding scientific developments in the community, in the various science areas, where are things going? Are there any new things coming out? I have to define also the requirements for instrumentationation for the instruments that are being put on the telescope, making instrument plans for the instrumentation. And so if there are new developments, then one might have to react to that or change our plans, keeping the communication with our user community, keeping the communication lines open there,

getting advice from them, having conferences about these things. So all of those things fall into the remit of a project scientist. And, of course, also thinking about synergies, synergies between the EELT and other facilities that will be up and running in the 2020s, including, of course, existing facilities like the VLT or ALMA, but also future facilities. We already talked about JWST, but of course, also the the other ELTs and also possibly SKA, the LSST. The ELT is not going to be the only new facility around in the 2020s. And just to go through some of those abbreviations, the SKA, that's the Square Kilometre Array, a big radio telescope, right? And Alma, some people may remember my trip down there to visit that magnificent radio telescope facility on the southern

hemisphere of our planet. Your balance of responsibilities, you are an administrator, you are a scientist, and a very successful science communicator. It has to be a difficult balance to maintain, or so I have heard from the colleague of yours who most comes

to mind with that same balance of duties, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yes, it is difficult to maintain the balance at times, but it's also part of the reason why this job is so much fun. Obviously, I enjoy the science, otherwise I wouldn't be in this job, but I also enjoy the technical aspects of getting a new facility like the ELT on the road. Of course, there are also sort of semi-political aspects to this, which I've also enjoyed just seeing a billion-dollar science project being put together and put on the road. That was a tremendous experience. And the communication part I also enjoy very much.

I've always thought that this is an important or should be important life of most scientists to get out there and tell people what we're doing. And of course, in astronomy, we're in the very fortunate situation that most people out there are very interested in what we do. It's much easier for an astronomer to communicate with the public than it is, say, for our particle physics colleagues or, you know, a material science scientist or something like this. So I just relish that opportunity and to get people excited about science and about astronomy in particular. Thank you, Joe, for continuing that science communication function by joining us here on

Planetary Radio. And the best of luck as this project, the EELT, moves forward. I know we'll all be looking forward to first light from the EELT and the other members of this new generation of telescopes that really are going to reveal the universe as never before. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me on the show. Astronomer Joe Liska is the

acting program scientist for the European Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction on a mountaintop in Chile. Joe also hosts Hubblecast. Bruce Betts and What's Up are next. We're going to finish up this week's edition of Planetary Radio, as we always do, with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us now via Skype. Welcome back. Hello.

So I'm not getting to see that comet because it has been nothing but overcast here in Southern California for days. I know. I've had plans to go out and look for it and hunt it and try to take pictures and it's just not working. Even when we haven't had heavy clouds, we've had enough to obscure it. But others, and maybe us, in the next week or two can see Comet Lovejoy with a little bit of effort. So you're going to want to find a finder chart online because it's a comet. It keeps moving. But not a lot from one night to another.

And it's up in the evening, starting out over in the east, southeast. If you're at an incredibly dark site, you might be able to see it with just your eyes. But at least most of us, you're going to want to do binoculars. It's probably the best way to look for it over the next couple weeks. There's a lack of moon for the next week or so, so that would be a really good time to try to see it if the clouds ever clear. Well, that's what I'm hoping for, and we'll look to your leadership. What else is up there?

Well, the other groovy thing to look for, which is also time-sensitive, is Venus and Mercury close together in the afterglow of sunset, a little bit after, over in the west. So look in the early evening in the west. As soon as it gets dark, you'll see super bright Venus, and this is all low towards the horizon. And below Venus is Mercury, which on its own is pretty bright.

It's just much dimmer than Mercury. We also have Mars up in the early evening, Jupiter coming up by 7 or 8 p.m. over in the east, and Saturn up in the middle of the night. All right, so still a big week for us. It is. There's lots of good stuff. If we can get a clearing, we can check out the planets hanging out together and check out a comet. All right, and how about this week in space history? Hard to believe it, but it was 10 years ago that the Huygens probe descended through the atmosphere of Titan and landed on the surface of Titan. On to random space facts. Tired and old random space facts.

It was part of the Cassini-Huygens mission. When it landed 10 years ago, it completed by far the most distant landing ever by a human-made spacecraft. You know, I never thought of it that way, but of course that's the case. Wow, something else to be proud of. And yes, all we did to make that happen. Yeah, right. I'm proud of my species. How's that? Way to go, Homo sapiens! Yeah, right. I'm proud of my species. How's that? Way to go, Homo sapiens!

Yeah, yay us! All right, on to the trivia contest. I asked, how many rocket launches with humans on board occurred in 2014? How'd we do? Entries were kind of depressed this week. I don't know why. It was a good time. They probably figured out they were old. They were too old and tired to go to their computer, if they have a computer. But Ted Judah did, and it was Random.org that picked out Ted Judah this week. Ted from Petaluma, California said, I believe there were four manned spaceflights to orbit in 2014. Maybe we should say human spaceflights to orbit in 2014. Was he correct?

That is correct. Four, and of course, all of them, Soyuz launches to the International Space Station. Yeah, the only game in town for at least for a little while, maybe another three years or so. Well, Ted, congratulations. You've won yourself the 2015 Year in Space Wall and Desk Calendars, that desk calendar, which is the basis, I believe, for this week in space history. It is indeed. It's such a wonderful source. I got a couple of other fun ones here. Mark Smith, he said, sadly, the high water mark was in 1985 when there were 11 human launches, launches of humans into low

earth orbit. I love this that came from Mark Little in San Diego. He said the cost of a ticket for a seat on one of those Soyuz, for a U.S. astronaut anyway, increased by eight and a half percent to get this $62.7 million each. That's not including the additional $50 for a window seat. Is there a way to get more leg room? I don't think so. It's best if you don't have legs in a Soyuz capsule. And you have to bring your own food now.

Right. See, the astronauts, they have it just like us. There you go. All right, we move on to another trivia contest, sticking with our Huygens theme, to the nearest half hour. How long did it take the Huygens probe to descend from the top of the atmosphere to the surface? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest, get us your entry. Good question. Okay, shouldn't be too hard to find out. And if you find out, we'll do this one more time. You might be the winner of these. They're really very attractive

and fascinating and will make you the life of the party at Space Geek cocktail gatherings. It's the year in space desk and wall calendars. We'll do this one more time at least. And you'll need to get everything to us, of course, by the 20th. That would be Tuesday, January 20th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. They're beautiful calendars and so functional. I use both versions. Everybody go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about the glory of paper towels.

Thank you and good night. Paper towels, love them, love them, use them all the time. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society who joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Josh Doyle composed our cosmic new theme music.

The show is made possible by the wide-eyed members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. The show is made possible by the wide-eyed members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.