Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - "Drifting on Alien Winds" With Author and Artist Michael Carroll

Episode Date: March 19, 2012

"Drifting on Alien Winds" With Author and Artist Michael CarrollLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Drifting on Alien Winds, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan at the Planetary Society. Michael Carroll is an extraordinary space artist. I'll talk with him in a few minutes about his new, beautifully illustrated book about the atmospheres and climates of worlds throughout our solar system. I learned a lot from it, just as I learn from Emily Laktawalla each week. Emily, where are you?

I'm in Plano, Texas, visiting family on my way to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston next week. And that's something you've attended pretty regularly, a pretty exciting event. Many times before. It's definitely my favorite meeting of the year. It's the biggest meeting of planetary geologists as opposed to planetary astronomers, which is the DPS, Division of Planetary Sciences, meeting that happens in October. But this is all my friends are here, so I'm really looking forward to it. Well, great. I hope we can get a more thorough report after the fact from you next week. Let's talk about another visit you made much more locally here in Southern California to this company called Honeybee Robotics.

And this was the day before I made a similar visit to a small contractor doing terrific things. Yeah, I was really excited, actually, about this opportunity to visit Honeybee. I hadn't even realized that they'd set up an office in Pasadena. Their main office is in New York. But I knew about them because they had produced the rock abrasion tool on the Mars Exploration Rovers. That's the drill and brush that they use to get into rocks to be able to sample the actual composition of the rocks. And it turns out they're responsible for every rock drill that's ever been shipped to Mars, both the ones on the rovers and the one on Phoenix, the little rasp that that one had, and the main sampling tool on Curiosity. They built them all, and it's a pretty small company, and they're doing some amazing things. Like the event that I went to, this got remarkably little media attention. Well, it's not really surprising because it wasn't attached to any significant event. The event was that the new NASA chief technology officer, Mason Peck, was simply going on a tour of some of NASA's contractors, which on its face doesn't sound

that exciting. But you know that when the chief technology officer is going to visit a contractor, the contractor is going to put on a good show and show all of their best toys. And indeed, that's what Honeybee did. My favorite was their pneumatic sampling mechanisms, which, I mean, they basically look like vacuum cleaners and that's more or less what they are. But the reason that they're so cool is because you can acquire samples of powder with no moving parts whatsoever. And for a mission to another planet to reduce the number of moving parts reduces complexity, reduces risk. Remembering the experience of Phoenix and how difficult a time they had trying to get samples into their instruments,

solving it with honeybees' pneumatic mechanisms just seems so obvious and a wonderful addition, I think, to the technology that we have at our disposal for Mars sample return. Well, I think that people should take a look at your visual recounting of this visit. It's a March 15 entry in the Planetary Society blog. Planetary.org is where you can find it. And mine was the next day, actually, at Lagarde down in Tustin, California, where they are building a really impressive big solar sail. And again, there are two members of the media, me and a woman whose beat for a

website is normally health care. So great things happening sometimes very quietly all over in space development and space exploration. Emily, have a great time there at LPSC and we'll talk to you next week. I plan to and I'll have a lot of news, I'm sure. Emily Lochte-Wallace, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here's Bill Nye. So, Bill, what brought you to the office on a Saturday? Well, of course, normally I'm here every Saturday, Craig. No, today we are shooting some more of our videos for Exploravision,

the scholarship program sponsored by Toshiba USA and the National Science Teachers Association. We are a partner and we have three questions today that were submitted by people on the Toshiba Facebook website, Facebook site rather, and we are performing them in hilarious science guy fashion. So it's a lot of fun. We had a mouse on camera today talking about brains. We have me running around talking about the relationship between calories and energy and you. Then we did a bit about the aurora borealis and the aurora australis. Very nice. Are these also going to end up high above Times Square in New York City on that Toshiba screen? That's it, yes.

So if you're in New York or passing through, look up in the next, I guess, three weeks, and you will occasionally see me and the Planetary Society's version of answers to your listener or viewer questions. Now, next week, I neglected in talking with Emily about the LPSC conference that she's going to be at. We didn't mention that you're going to be joining her there. Oh, yes. For a couple days, I'm going to go to the NASA forum, NASA night, and I'll mingle with people at this forum.

We're going to talk about, I'm sure, space policy and especially the future of space science. You know, we're all very concerned that, although all the budgets are cut, which you can expect, space science budget has been disproportionately cut. The reasons for this are not clear, but the consequences are clear and they're not good. You cut space science, your whole society is going to slip back a little bit. It's not in our best interest. We're going to go to the Lunar Planetary Science Conference and, dare I say it, Matt, change the world.

That is going to be one lively discussion. I feel a little bit sorry for those NASA officials. Well, they're doing what they're being directed to do. I understand it. But we just want to make our voices heard. It's very important. It's very important to members of the Planetary Society. But, Matt, for now, we've got to get back on the set.

This is to say, I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. A bit of Hollywood taking place in Pasadena at the Planetary Society headquarters today. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. And he's got to get back in front of the camera. Makeup, please. Bill, we'll talk to you next week. Have fun at LPSC. Makeup, please! I'll be right back with the great astronomical

artist Michael Carroll to talk about his new book, Drifting on Alien Winds. It's no surprise that Michael Carroll's new book is richly illustrated. Mike has long been one of our planet's most distinguished and talented astronomical artists. But he also writes about science. Now he has written Drifting on Alien Winds, Exploring the Skies and Weather of Other Worlds. It is an outstanding layperson's guide to the atmospheres and climates of planets and a moon or two in our neighborhood. By the way, anyone who can make it to the Homestead of America National Monument

in Beatrice, Nebraska over the next six months can see Mike's spectacular 68-foot mural, From Long Ships to Spaceships, A Thousand Years of Exploration. Mike, I love this book. I'm not surprised that I love it after having read it because it was so highly recommended by my colleagues. Emily Lakdawalla, who I think you saw her glowing blog entry about this book, she said it was the first book about weather on other worlds that didn't put her to sleep. Nice compliment. That is. For a science writer, that's the ultimate compliment, I think. But a lot of the reason that I hope the book is accessible is that I am not a scientist. I'm not a researcher. I'm actually an

astronomical artist first, and then a writer. And so I know from kind of a lay standpoint what excites me, what I'd like to talk about, and what is intriguing to a person who doesn't have a deep understanding of the technical side of science. So I think it kind of comes naturally that way. Can I tell you my favorite image in this book, which is absolutely filled to the brim with images, lots of terrific photos taken by spacecraft, but also this great artwork, most of which originated with you, most of which you created. My very favorite piece is right at the beginning of chapter two, and it is

this rather impressionistic piece as opposed to all the hyper-realism in the rest of the book. Your impression of Leonardo's helicopter flying over Florence. That's right. And that's my wife modeling there. Oh, no kidding.

Little person there standing on the grass. Yeah, that was a fun one. I used a lot of sepia tones. And, you know, I just wanted to get the point across that people have been dreaming about exploring the skies for a very long time. Leonardo was dreaming in very scientific terms and engineering terms. And so if he had had slightly different materials, maybe that human-powered helicopter of his would have worked, and wouldn't that have been a fun thing to see going across the skies of Florence?

I'll say. I mention it in part because the book is in three sections, and this first section of the book traces the history of really human exploration, first of the skies and then up into other worlds, from really Leonardo and the Montgolfier brothers up through the modern era. I was fascinated to see that you were able to feature quotes from your father in this section of the book. Yeah, you know, that was a thrill to me. Dad was involved in some of the earliest planetary designs for planetary probes, working with what was then Martin Marietta,

today Lockheed Martin. And so I talked to him about working in the trenches, talked to a lot of his friends. There are many stories that I'm afraid we are on the verge of losing as we lose people who have worked on these things that came out of the golden era of exploration. And so I tried to share some of the wacky things that happened in the midst of the Cold War and early on when engineering wasn't what it is today and when we really didn't know much about the targets we were shooting for.

Quite a learning process to getting us to really this golden age of planetary exploration that we're in now. And that's really what the middle of the book, Section 2, is devoted to. And this was Emily's favorite part. I can easily understand why. You start at the innermost stretches of the solar system and work your way out, talking about basically the weather, climate on each of these worlds. It's quite fascinating. And as I said, I'm not sure when I've ever seen a book that was more richly illustrated.

Oh, well, thanks. I think eye candy is important. When we talk about astronomical stuff, the numbers are huge, the scales are bizarre, the environments are alien. We need something to see to help us to really lock into what these places are like. And the weather, you know, is all around us here.

After we watch the news, we watch the weather. It's an area of science that we can all kind of relate to. Perhaps the most fascinating, I've kind of ignored Venus. It's just this incredibly hot, nasty place. Put my focus on Mars and now maybe Europa and Titan. But you actually kindled a lot of interest on my part, much more than I had in the past, about Venus, because this is such an interesting and diverse world, as you were able to demonstrate. I'm looking right now at this painting that you did of the various layers of the Venusian

atmosphere, which are fascinating in their own right. Yeah, they really are. I mean, Venus is a complex world. There are three major cloud decks in the sky, and of course the bottom one rains sulfuric acid, which doesn't quite make it to the surface, at least in the lowlands. It may rain on the mountaintops a bit, but we also may get frost, metallic frost, on some of those mountainsides. So the weather is definitely alien on this place. The surface is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

The air is so dense that if you dropped a quarter, it would quake like a leaf as it fell to the ground. We are not sure yet about lightning, but suspicions run to it being up there in the mid-cloud deck. So yeah, and of course you have these hurricane force winds that blow the entire atmosphere of Venus around the globe once every four days or so. So it's not a good place for a picnic, but a great place to think about weird stuff. Yeah, as if sulfuric acid rain wasn't bad enough, here you talk about this metallic frost and even the possibility of metal rain. Just not a place I want on vacation, I think. Well, you would need a good umbrella, that's for sure.

We'll do some more Drifting on Alien Winds with artist and author Michael Carroll when Planetary Radio continues. 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 guest is the author of Drifting on Alien Winds,

Exploring the Skies and Weather of Other Worlds. Michael Carroll is best known as an outstanding astronomical or space artist. We were just talking about Venus not being at the top of Mike's list of favorite places for a picnic. I tell you, though, another of my favorite illustrations, one of your paintings, is of this concept in the last section of the book, where you look toward the future of exploration in our solar system. It is a floating, what, station in the upper atmosphere of Venus that has humans aboard. the upper atmosphere of Venus that has humans aboard. Yeah, it's a bizarre concept that comes out of Langley, I believe. A very fun piece of mental, just a thought exercise where the fact is that at a certain altitude, the air is room temperature and it's also about the same pressure as the Earth. So

it'd be a great place to live if you could have a buoyant Titan station that would remain at about 32 kilometers altitude. So these winds of Venus would just kind of carry you around the globe, and you could quite comfortably do research from that level. You spent a good deal of time, as I said, exploring the atmospheres of nearly every interesting body, every body with an atmosphere of any substance in our solar system. But you seem to take a particular interest in Titan, which of course a lot of us are nowadays with the data that has been gathered by Cassini and the Huygens probe. There is a series of three illustrations here.

The first one done by the great Chesley Bonestall in 1944 that shows an early concept of Titan. Can you take it from there? Because then it continues with a couple of other images, including one from you. Yeah, it was fun to look across the spectrum of art that's been done of Titan because what space art does is it shows us in an instant, in a glance, what modern science of the time was thinking. from the surface in the late 40s, early 50s. He showed a red, rocky landscape because we knew that Titan was red through telescopes,

and we also knew it had a little atmosphere at least. We didn't know how much. So Bonestell put a deep blue sky up above. As time went on, we realized that there was methane in the atmosphere and that if that methane was thin, the sky would probably be greenish. So Dave Hardy in the 1970s did a painting of some human explorers on Titan with a very dramatic greenish sky. And then in the 1970s, of course, Voyagers got out to, actually it was 81, I guess, to Saturn and showed us this place with a much thicker atmosphere and at the triple point of methane, which means that methane can exist as a liquid as well as a gas. And so I did a painting of a kind of a glacier on Titan calving off into this methane lake. Unfortunately, I forgot that methane when it freezes is heavier than the liquid stuff. And so all those icebergs would not be floating. I see those. Yes, that was wrong. But you know,

and so and then today, our view of Titan is a little bit different than that painting still. So it's fun to watch those kinds of historic progressions. You obviously had a great time, though I'm sure it was an enormous amount of work putting this together. What drove you? What inspired you to do a book about the atmospheres and the weather that we will find elsewhere around our solar neighborhood. I think a lot of it was just talking to the people over the years who are kind of on the cutting edge of this research and hearing all the strange stories, things that I had not read in publications for lay people. And finally, one day, I just thought, somebody's got to put this stuff down. It's a fascinating history, and there's some fascinating science going on out there. And the weather on other worlds is something that we can kind of relate to. I'm going to put you on the spot as we're just about out of time. Do you have a favorite among the worlds in our solar system on any basis,

perhaps just a favorite one to paint? No. Oh, that's tough. I think my favorite for environment is Titan, which you mentioned before. I'm not surprised. Yeah, I love Mars. I have more Mars t-shirts than any other time. So that's got to tell you something. For painting, I think the gas giants and ice giants are the most challenging because of the scales. You have these massive clouds and nothing to compare them to. And so, you know, every planet offers its own unique fun stuff as well as challenges to depict. So I have to narrow it down to two or three, I guess. Mike, thank you so much for being one of these people that every now and then we get to talk to who takes us to other worlds and shows us things that have not yet been fully revealed by science,

but only hinted at and making them so beautiful and even romantic. Well, thanks a lot, Matt. It was a blast. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Michael Carroll is a science writer, science journalist, and as you heard, primarily a space artist, something he has been doing for a very, very long time. His latest work in print is Drifting on Alien Winds, Exploring the Skies and Weather of Other Worlds. It's available from Springer, highly recommended by not just me,

but many of my colleagues at the Planetary Society as well. Stay tuned for a somewhat long-distance view around our solar system as we do every week here on What's Up with my friend, Dr. Bruce Betts. Now, we are just reminiscing about sitcoms from our youth, which has absolutely nothing to do with What's Up in the Night Sky. Bruce Betts is here. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Well, if we think about it long enough, maybe it will. Probably not. Take it away, Dobie. What's up there? Well, Maynard, there's Venus and Jupiter.

You rain? What the heck happened to Venus and Jupiter? They switched positions. Crazy. Crazy, I tell you. Look over in the west. There's still the bright, shiny objects right near each other. But now brighter Venus is above dimmer Jupiter as they do their crazy orbital motions. And we've also got Mars over in the east, even easier to see, rising earlier. And so you can check it out.

Still looking quite bright, not too long after its opposition we also feel like those conjunctions we've got the moon hanging out near in between jupiter and venus on march 25th and 26th will be spectacular and then dimmer saturn but also lovely particularly with a telescope yellowish coming up around 9 pm. in the east and high overhead in the later evening. All right, Professor. Tell Marianne and the rest of us about this week in space history. Just sit right back and hear a tale about this week in space history. It was comet week in 1996 with Comet Hyukutake that challenged all of us English speakers to try to pronounce it.

And the following year, Earth approach during the same week, but a year later was Comet Hale-Bopp. Good one. Fuzzy blobs in the sky. We move on, but I just wish I could think of a clever way to work it into a theme song. Random space fact. That didn't really work, but I'm moving on anyway. I get it. I get it.

Okay. Thank you. Speaking of professor, if you would listen to my show this week, you would already know. You mean you're sharing it with everyone? Your lecture. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what I meant. Well, it is a show.

It really is a show. It is. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what I meant. Well, it is a show. It really is a show. I'm putting on a show. Yeah. My intellectual academic lecture that you can find linked from our homepage at planetary.org to the online intro astronomy course I'm doing focusing on planets at California

State University, Dominguez Hills. And I talked about asteroids this last week and one of the things I told people was all the asteroids in the asteroid belt combined. If you superglued them all together, you would still only have less than 5% of the mass of the moon. We think there's so much stuff out there. And there are. There are gazillions, to use the technical number, of these asteroids. But it's still not a lot of mass. And the asteroid belt is still mostly, like the rest of space, empty.

And what a cool idea for keeping track of all those near-Earth objects. Just glue them all together. We only have to keep track of one. Please support my new idea. It'd be much easier if they didn't have all these silly different orbits. Yeah, you're going to get a grant. Yeah, exactly. We move on to the trivia question, and it was time to play Where in the Solar System?

I asked you, where is the solar system? It's the crater named Hubble, named after the famous astronomer. A strange space telescope you may have heard of was named after. Where is the crater Hubble? Matt, how did we do? What did people tell us? Great response. And I'm very pleased to say that our winner this week is Steve O'Rourke from Mamaroneck. I don't have any idea. Mamaroneck, New York. That's better than Hickokaki. Well, the reason I'm happy is that Steve and I have been corresponding a little bit. And he told me a few weeks ago

that his wedding anniversary is August 5th. And he and his wife, they put their names and their kids' names on Curiosity. So on their wedding anniversary, they will probably arrive on Mars. I told him, you've got to come to Planet Fest. Come to Pasadena and we'll sing happy anniversary to you. Cool. But in the meantime, he's won a Planetary Radio t-shirt because he said that Hubble crater is on our moon. On the edge, I guess, right? It is. It's over right towards the edge as seen from the Earth.

There's no actual edge to the moon. It's a sphere. Just making sure you know. But relative to the disk, you know, the side we see from Earth, it is over right towards the edge. All right, we move back to the asteroid belt. Oh, wait, I got other good stuff. No, no, please no. No, this was amazing and terrifying.

You just have to put up with it. This is fun. Stop blathering. Ilya Schwartz, he pointed out exactly where it is, gave us the coordinates, but he said there might be another Hubble crater if the Hubble Space Telescope comes down, then that might be Hubble crater somewhere here on Earth. But I was most amused by what William Stewart pointed out. An anagram for crater Hubble is Bruce Blather. Crater Hubble is Bruce Blather.

How very appropriate. I can't believe anyone figured out why I asked about Crater Hubble. And I'm going to blather a little bit more right now. Now can I move back to the asteroid belt? Absolutely. All right. In the asteroid belt, also another spot of emptiness in orbits, or near emptiness in some cases, at least a drop in distribution. There are gaps at certain orbital distances and they're really tied to the orbital periods

and they are formed by a resonance with Jupiter. So like if you have half the orbital period of Jupiter, you do not tend to stay in that orbit. Jupiter fools with you, messes with your head. Same with a three to one or a few other more complicated permutations. My question this week, what do you call these gaps or drops in distribution with semi-major axis in the asteroid belt caused by the orbital resonances of Jupiter? A lot of words, but it's just a one word, well, two word answer if you count the word.

I'll even give you the second word. It's gaps. Give you the second word. It's gaps. Give me the first word. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And, you know, you can find that answer various places, including possibly in my introductory to astronomy class. God, such a shill.

Linked from the home page of the Planetary Society, planetary.org. And there's no real benefit to it, but it'll be glorious. But you want those eyes out there. And I recommend it highly. It's a most entertaining presentation. You've got until the 26th of March, Monday the 26th, at 2pm to get us this answer and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Also, check me out on Twitter at randomspacefact and send contributions to my fund. All right, all right. Come on. All right, everybody. Go out there and look up in the night sky and think about Maynard G. Krebs. Thank you. Good night. Bob Denver, where are you now? We need you more than ever. Bruce Vess is the guy who's been telling you all this stuff.

He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.