Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Emily Lakawalla's DPS Report

Episode Date: October 14, 2013

The Planetary Society’s Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist recaps this year’s revealing meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Emily Lakdawalla's special report from the DPS meeting, 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. DPS, that's the Division for Planetary Sciences, one of the two big meetings each year that pulls in lots of the worldwide researchers who study objects like asteroids, comets, moons and planets. We'll get Emily's wrap-up in a couple of minutes. All my conversations with Bruce Betts are eccentric,

but this week's What's Up will really go off-center. You'll see what I mean, but first, let's go straight to Bill Nye to get this week's show underway. Bill, welcome back to the show. I think you should talk about the Juno spacecraft, which had a big day last week. Big day. It got slingshot around the Earth. I mean, this is really rocket science, man. So I went to Cape Canaveral in 2011 for the launch of Juno. Now, Juno, strangely enough, is not an acronym. Juno is Jupiter's

wife in mythology. And so it's a spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. Like everybody else, you're on a budget. So they bought an Atlas V rocket. They sent the thing out beyond the orbit of Mars. And it fell back toward the Earth and actually, if I may, toward the Earth-Sun system. And last Wednesday, phew, got slingshot around the Earth, taking the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit of energy from the Earth's orbit, which is sending it on the way out to Jupiter, escaping the gravity of the Earth and the Sun. Amazing thing. It arrived there in 2016.

I love how you put that. It reminded me that all things are conserved. The Earth is ever so slightly slower now because we have a mission going to Jupiter. That's right. But you're talking about something like on the order of 10 to the minus 23rd, whatever units you'd be messing with, meters per second, something like that. And it's a shame that people can't go – at least they can't go to the NASA site for the Juno mission right now. No, because the government shut down. Matt, I mean, of course, we are a political advocacy organization advocating for space exploration at the Planetary Society.

But, I mean, my word, if you hire people to run the government and they shut it down, they're not doing a very good job, just objectively. So one of the things that fell through the crack or is not supported right now is the Juno official website. So the guys are still coming in. The people are still coming in, rather, and they're monitoring spacecraft and making sure it's cool. It was in safe mode, and they're checking on that,

but it's on the proper trajectory to get to Jupiter and go in orbit around Jupiter. I mean, it's not hitting Jupiter like a bullseye. It has to go just off to the side of Jupiter. So it ends up in orbit. What an extraordinary thing. And we're going to have to talk to somebody from this mission again sometime soon. Just a few seconds left. When are we going to see you on Big Bang Theory? November 7th. So, you know, I'm doing a scene. Oh, my goodness, Matt. I'm in a scene with Johnny, with Leonard and Sheldon, you know, Jim Parsons, and Bob Newhart.

Bob Newhart plays Professor Proton. Professor Arthur Jeffries. And I asked the crew if this Jeffries last name was a reference to the Jeffries tube from the original Star Trek. They all looked at me blankly. But let the record show Bill Prady wasn't around, the executive producer. I think he's a real Trekkie, and I got a suspicion that that's actually a distant reference. Oh, it's just crazy fun. Crazy fun, man.

All right. I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'll see you in the Jefferies tube. Yes. Oh, boy. It's like I'm scrolling over my buddy. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. He is Bill Nye.

He's the science guy. He runs the place. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. The why of Nye is Bill's brand new series of videos presented by NASA's Juno mission via the Thinker YouTube channel. They're great fun and very informative. We have links at planetary.org. Here's a brief sample of the episode about why Juno needs gigantic solar panels for its mission to Jupiter. Juno needs gigantic solar panels for its mission to Jupiter. Now, in the case of the Juno spacecraft, if it's in orbit around the Earth, it has 12,000 watts of electricity.

That's enough to run this whole studio. But by the time it gets way out in orbit around Jupiter, these same solar arrays are only going to be able to produce 400 watts. solar arrays are only going to be able to produce 400 watts. If you had a hair dryer like this, it would run fine when it's near the Sun. But as we moved out farther and farther from the Sun, the hair dryer would have less and less energy available to it. In fact, a typical hair dryer powered by the Juno spacecraft out of Jupiter wouldn't have enough energy to run at all. But because the instruments onboard Juno are so efficient, it's going to work just fine.

Of course, you might wonder why you would take a hair dryer out to Jupiter to dry your hair. Well, you wouldn't. I mean, it's just to give you an idea of the power. The Division for Planetary Sciences is an arm of the American Astronomical Society. Last week, hundreds of scientists were in Denver for its 45th annual meeting, hobnobbing with their fellow wizards as they listened to hundreds of presentations and viewed, yes, hundreds of posters. We got a preliminary on-location report from our own Emily Lakdawalla last week. I asked the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist to tell us a bit more about this great gathering.

editor and planetary evangelist, to tell us a bit more about this great gathering. Emily, we said last week we would get a longer report from you now that DPS is complete, and you spent the entire week there. First of all, you told us, teased us a little bit by saying that you were filling in for NASA on so-called Agency Night. How did that go? That went pretty well, actually. So at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting every year, usually on the Tuesday, there's what they typically call NASA night, although ESA can show up and the National Science Foundation, basically funding agencies stand up and give a spiel to the assembled scientists about upcoming grant programs and

projects and generally how things are going in Washington. Well, as we know, things are not going well in Washington right now. And they were talking about canceling agency night. And I said, no, we can't do that. This is a time more than ever that we really need to gather the community together and kind of rally together for support of planetary exploration. So they got a quick program together. Someone was able to get up and talk about what she could, she was a contractor, could talk about current grant programs, which was pretty depressing. A couple of other only marginally less depressing presenters. And then it was my turn. And I felt that it was really important, although we need to acknowledge the challenges that we face, we also need to recognize how exciting a time it is in planetary exploration, how many active

missions there are, and how many really cool things are happening over the next couple of years. Two Mars launches coming up in November with MAVEN and India's Mars Orbiter mission. China is going to be landing a lander and a rover on the moon. Next year, we've got Rosetta arriving at a comet. And the following year is the year of the dwarf planet, 2015, when both Dawn approaches Ceres and New Horizons approaches Pluto. So I got up there and I tried to rally the troops, and I have to say I did a great job. What a great batting position, two following all those downers.

That's right. And people, I think, really appreciated the positive message. And I hope that they go forth and take that positive message because it's with communication about the amazing things that planetary science can accomplish that we are going to get the public support that we need to make sure that NASA can continue doing these things. Here, here. All right, let's go on to some of that planetary science, so much of which is unveiled at this conference each year. You said that you could kind of break things up into a certain number of themes. Yeah, you know, I always look for thematic things to unify, because DPS, it's a whole bunch of 10-minute talks. They're really, really short. And so it can be kind of choppy and difficult to understand unless you kind of bring things together. One of the ones that seemed to unify a lot of the talks that I saw this year had to do

with taking new information on the topography, the elevations from place to place across a world, and compare that with other data sets and see what kinds of things you can learn about it. On the 9th of October, you wrote a lot about Titan, and that had a lot to do with some of these topographic findings. That's right. Just this year, Ralph Lawrence and co-workers published a new global map of Titan's topography. It's kind of interesting because Titan, like Earth, is fatter around the middle than it is at the poles. But unlike Earth, that fatness around the middle really is higher elevation. Most of the planets kind of fundamentally similar in elevation so that we have oceans covering the whole planet, right? Because that's the sea level.

You can find oceans everywhere. If Titan actually had oceans, you would only find them near the north and south poles because it really is lower elevation near the poles than it is near the equator. And that means some kind of funny things for some aspects of Titan's geology. One example is that you only see lakes at the poles, not at the equator. Another one is that you actually see craters on Titan only at high elevations, only closer to the equator. And there's no known process that could shield Titan from impacts at the poles and yet allow them near the equator. And there's no known process that could shield Titan from impacts at the poles and yet allow them near the equator. So instead, something's either got to be preventing

them from forming near the poles or they've been covered up since they happened nearer the poles. And that's usually the interpretation that people started with first that, oh, well, they just got obliterated by some process. Kathy Meech presented and showed that, no, they really couldn't completely obliterate all traces of cr Kathy Meech presented and showed that, no, they really couldn't completely obliterate all traces of craters, none of the processes that have been suggested. So instead, what she proposed, which was really cool, is that you have a process operating on Titan similarly to Earth, where if you have an impact into land that is saturated, either an ocean or a wetland, it forms a crater, but almost instantly the crater collapses in on itself

because the sediment is all wet. It just slumps back into the center, and there's no evidence of a crater at all. And she proposed that that's what's happening at Titan, and that all of that high-latitude terrain is actually wet, and that's why there are no craters there. Yeah, anybody who's ever tried to dig a hole near the waterline at the beach, I guess, knows what's going on here. That's right. It's the same process. And this is a really interesting piece, and people can see what's going on here. That's right. It's the same process. And this is a really interesting piece. And people can see some beautiful radar images here, but also this map

you're talking about. And Ralph Lorenz himself has a couple of comments after this blog entry that Emily posted on the 9th. Ralph is really great at explaining his science to the public. And he's got a great book out on Titan and a new one coming out on dunes, sand dunes on planets, too. So let's move on. What was another one of these themes? Well, a second theme that I saw over the course of the week had to do with the real significant help that amateur astronomers are providing to professional astronomers. This week in particular, it had to do with a particular kind of observation called an occultation. Now, an occultation is when a small foreground object like an asteroid or a Kuiper belt object passes in front of a distant star. And when that happens, the starlight winks out. And the reason you want to observe an occultation is because just by timing the amount of time it takes for the star's light to go out and come

back on again, that can tell you very precisely what the diameter of the distant object is. And because these objects are so tiny, we can't resolve them with our telescopes. They're just points in our telescopes. So timing occultations gets us sizes much more precisely than any other kind of observation we can do on these bodies. The problem is that often, especially with Kuiper Belt objects, their orbits aren't known well enough to know exactly where you need to have a telescope in order to watch an occultation. So professional astronomers do their best. They get some friends and they set out a bunch of telescopes along sometimes a very long baseline, several hundred kilometers or more,

and hope that at least one of them catches the occultation. Well, both an asteroid astronomer, Frank Marchese, and a Kuiper Belt astronomer, Mark Buey, talked about recruiting more and more amateurs to help them out in getting these occultations of these asteroids. Frank did it for a triple asteroid called Sylvia and reported results that got very accurate diameter of a regularly shaped asteroid, Sylvia. And one of the stations even caught Sylvia's moon, Romulus, so it was able to figure out the diameter of Romulus. Mark Buey presented a really cool idea for a huge network of amateur stations that would be set up at rural public schools

where science teachers could work with kids to time these occultations. Because the KBO orbits are really not known very well, only one or two of these schools along a network that spans from California to Washington would actually catch it. But they can all participate in just the act of observing as a great scientific education for the kids participating. So I really hope that Mark Buey's project goes forward. It's called Recon. Emily Lakdawalla will tell us more about last week's GPS meeting when Planetary Radio continues in a minute.

Stay with us. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org.

I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Emily Lakdawalla spent all of last week in Denver at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, or DPS. She can't possibly report to us about all the great research unveiled at the conference, so she has distilled some of it into three themes. One of these is amateur astronomy,

and a proposal for rural school kids and their teachers to help determine the nature of faraway Kuiper Belt objects as they block the light from stars. I asked Emily what kind of equipment is needed to observe these occultations. Well, it doesn't take a particularly big telescope, because the thing about occultations is that you don't have to have a telescope that's good enough to see the object. You only need to be able to see the light of the star that the object is obscuring. So they said that they're working toward a limiting magnitude of magnitude 13, which is faint, but within the reach of, you know, a reasonable off-the-shelf telescope. 13, which is faint, but within the reach of, you know, a reasonable off-the-shelf telescope.

They said it costs about $3,000 to set up a station, and they're working with grant programs and local donors and things to help set up stations at different schools. And the other thing that they need is an accurate clock. So they supply a device to the school that helps them time the occultation very precisely so that everything is all synchronized. So like I said, they can set up a station for $3,000. They do one training session with the teacher, and the teacher trains the kids, and they're off and running. All right, let's move on to one more theme. And, of course, if you want to read more detail about all of these, really, you can go to planetary.org and look for Emily's blog and see some pretty pictures as well, as we mentioned with the topographical theme. Now, this next one is about a comet, which is either going to be a really, really great experience for a lot of people on Earth or not. Well, it's still going to be a

really, really great experience for amateur astronomers. I think there's no question that anybody with a telescope is going to enjoy ISON as it goes past the sun and comes back and hopefully puts on a nice show. But we don't know how big a show it's going to put on. And the funniest thing about ISON coverage over the course of the week at DPS was that what the astronomers were predicting actually changed over the course of that week. I went to a press briefing early in the week in which they talked about a really cool recent result where they looked at the shape of a jet that they saw in telescopic images that seemed to be pointed forward along the comet's trajectory. The comet is on a hyperbolic trajectory, and that's a conic section that basically acts like a straight line until it gets really close to the sun. So it's

basically barreling along a straight line toward the sun. If it has this jet that's pointed forward and never seems to shift position, and it's heading straight toward the sun that would mean that one of its poles was directed at the sun and as it spins only one hemisphere ever gets pointed at the sun which presents a really exciting possibility that there could be this back side of the comet that has not yet seen the sun before and so that in the final week as it rounds the the the nose of the hyperola, then that other side of the comet would get exposed to sunlight for the first time. And the comet should just switch on with hugely dramatic outgassing of supervolatiles like carbon monoxide and all kinds of other cool stuff. And we'll be able to detect some of these spectroscopically? Absolutely. And we'd also be able to detect it just in the huge, I mean, the comet would just really bloom if that happened. Later on in the week, I went to lunch with some comet scientists on Friday, and they said, yeah, well, actually, we're not real sure we're right about that pole position anymore.

Oh, well. to be pretty reliable from brand new Hubble observations performed just a week ago, is that the water emission from the comet is beginning to ramp up at quite a rapid rate now. So there's no question that the comet's going to be getting brighter and more spectacular. It's still a very much open question whether it will be a naked eye object at all. A lot of people are no longer predicting it to be the comet of the century the way that some people had at one time. It's still, it's an extremely exciting object for astronomers to look at because all of the evidence suggests that this is, it's a large comet. It's got a two kilometer nucleus, not as big as Halley, but it's still a pretty big object. And it's almost certainly its first ever path into the solar system. And what that means is that it's got a primeval supply of stuff on its surface that is being vaporized for the first time. And so we're going to get a really, really good look

at the composition of a really old relic of the formation of the solar system. So it's going to be cool scientifically no matter what. The question is, how cool is it going to be visually? And we don't know yet. Yeah, I'm getting a little bit tired of these comments of the century that seem to come every 10 years or so and mostly peter out. One of these, though, it's only a matter of time. We only have a minute or two left. Just give me general impressions of DPS this year, because I know it's such a special event for you and so many other planetary scientists. Well, of course, DPS and another meeting in March, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, or LPSC, these are the times that the scientists get to get together and talk about their lives and talk about ongoing research. And we go to these presentations, and then we have lunch where we're talking about science. We have

poster sessions where we're talking about science. We have drinks in the bar, and we're still talking about science. And it's really, really fun, if a bit exhausting. Our colleagues who work for NASA centers and the United States Geologic Survey were not there this year. There were a few people who re-registered as private citizens and attended the sessions no longer as federal employees. And we were glad to see them, but a lot of people were sorely missed this year. We really hope they come back. In general, DPS this year was a lot of incremental results on ongoing projects. There wasn't a lot that I would regard as earth-shattering, but it was still a very enjoyable experience, and I'm looking forward to LPSC. I guess when there's nothing earth-shattering mentioned at DPS, that's probably a good thing in some ways. In a lot of ways, it's a good thing, and it really is science proceeding according to the way science is supposed to proceed. You know, you're supposed to keep poking at things, and you get incremental results, and you bring things together, and you, you know, you just, you refine your story over time. Science doesn't usually proceed by revolution after revolution. It's usually just little baby steps, little modifications of existing ideas. And that's

pretty much what was operating at DPS this year. Well, thank you for giving us this report, and I envy you getting to go this year. I'd love to think that maybe I'll make it next time, but it is always a delight to talk to you, and it's especially fun to have these longer conversations every now and then. Emily, we'll do it again next week. Do it again next week, and DPS next year in Tucson, Arizona. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. And you've just heard her evangelizing because it's that enthusiasm that she shared with the planetary science community that goes over so well with the rest of us as well. We're going to move right on to this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts just a few moments away.

It's time for a rather eccentric edition of What's Up. That's Bruce Betts, the fine there. He's the director of projects with the Planetary Society. Hello there. We're getting director of projects with the Planetary Society. Hello there. We're getting nice comments about what's up. People loving how you get them excited about the night sky. And I heard from one person who is going out to buy a telescope now, wants to start seeing what's up for himself. Oh, good. Well, hopefully, as people notice, most of what I try to give you are the easy things.

Just look up and see with just your eyes. But it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to Telescope Land and taking in a whole new level of the universe. Yep. So Venus still looking super bright over there. Low in the west just after sunset time. Stunningly bright. It really is. I keep telling people about it, but I'm still amazed every time I say it. You'd think I wouldn't be, but I am.

It's also very close now to the brightest star, the reddish star, Antares in Scorpius. And so you can see them just about a degree and a half apart in the sky, Antares being much dimmer and reddish, but a generally fairly bright star. Jupiter's rising around midnight and is high in the south at dawn and looking really bright. And Mars, also really close to a star, even closer to a bright star, rising around three in the morning, then up in the east in the pre-dawn, and it's about one degree away from the bright star Regulus. This week in space history, it was 10 years ago that Shenzhou 5 was launched,

making Yang Lui the first Chinese astronaut. That's quite a record, and it doesn't feel like 10 years. No, I was kind of confused. So if I've got that wrong, people let me know, but I fear time just passed quickly. So I went farther back, so I don't have a clear memory of 1967. Mariner 5 flew past Venus this week.

Round old space bat. Kind of eating the microphone there at the end. I was trying. I could hear you cringing from the other end of the line. Looking back to honor Scott Carp the other end of the line. landing location downrange. So all those planes, helicopters, and ships had to move significantly to get him. It took about 40 minutes to find him and three hours to recover him, in which time he was hanging out on a life raft next to a spacecraft. Now, oddly enough, even though I was very small, I remember this because my parents and so many other Americans were kind of nervous because this guy was way off by himself. But thank you also for bringing up Scott Carpenter's name so that we can have at least a minor tribute to this pioneering astronaut.

Don't worry. We'll come back to him in the trivia question. Oh, great. First, let's cover the previous trivia question. I asked you, what is Mercury's eccentricity? And I asked you to actually get a number. It didn't have to be super lots of digits, but at least a basic number.

How did we do? Quite well, quite well. Very big response to this. I don't know, maybe people just wanted to get in on this eccentric topic, or they want that prize package from the movie Gravity, which for a second week in a row is number one in the U.S., and I am not a bit surprised. Our winner this week, brand new, first-time winner, Tom Kilsdunk.

Tom Kilsdunk of Sunnyvale, California, up north. He said that the orbit eccentricity is about 0.2056, and that did seem to be the consensus answer. Is that correct as far as you know, Mr. Stoner? Yes, that is correct. We do know that one. What does that number mean? It means, first, the broad general thing about Mercury. It has the most eccentric orbit of the planets, all the planets, if you think there are only eight planets. And basically, it's a measure of how much smooshed out it is compared to a circle. So an eccentricity of zero is a perfect circle. And an eccentricity of one means it's actually become open.

It's a parabolic orbit. Over one is a hyperbola, but that's not important right now. What's important is the bigger the number initially, the more your ellipse, your orbit is squished out. Mercury's is pretty squished out, whereas the Earth and most of the others are pretty darn circular. Squished out enough that Rachel Miller told us that Mercury can therefore be anywhere from 46 million to 70 million kilometers from the sun. That's eccentric. It can indeed. It means you can just have a lovely, cool, scorching hot day if you're out at the 70 million point. Now, here is another interesting observation,

I suppose, because of that eccentricity. This came from Steve Witte. He said that Mercury is that place where standing on the surface, one can watch the sun rise, reverse, and set where it rose from, and then rise again to go across the sky. What fun. Yeah, it's got a really weird orbit because it's also in a three to two resonance between the length of its year and the length of its day. So it just has all sorts of weird implications

if one were actually hanging out on the surface. I have one more for you from Torsten Zimmer. He gives the correct answer for the eccentricity of the planet, but he also says what's pretty eccentric about Mercury are some of his outfits, except there he's talking about Freddie Mercury. Yeah, that's different, but similar, both eccentric. And he provided some photos which are ample proof of this. So thank you.

Thank you, Torsten. Both great and both eccentric. You got it. ample proof of this. So thank you. Thank you, Torsten. Both great and both eccentric. You got it. Move back to Scott Carpenter and all the Mercury astronauts. Name their space capsules.

What was the name of Scott Carpenter's spacecraft that he flew around the Earth? A relatively simple one for big fans of the early space program. Go to planetary.org slash radio... Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to enter. And what are they trying to win, Matt?

You've been doing so well for several weeks now. We're going back to the brand new, the new design of the Planetary Radio t-shirt. So get in on that. And you have until the 21st, the 21st of October at 2 p.m. Pacific to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and thinking about eating a full meal in space. Scott Carpenter, one of the first to do something similar to that. Thank you and good night. I have a sudden craving for Tang. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the astronomical members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.