Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Emily Lakdawalla At Her Favorite Conference While Alan Stern Stirs Up the Solar System

Episode Date: March 25, 2014

Emily shares highlights from last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and Alan Stern provides updates on the Rosetta comet mission and his New Horizons probe that is nearing Pluto, and addresses the controversy around Uwingu’s Name a Martian Crater project.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 and Alan Stern, 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. The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference was last week, and Emily was there. She'll share some of the highlights with us. Alan Stern will provide quick updates on the Rosetta comet mission and his own New Horizons probe that is nearing Pluto, but he'll also make his case for an effort that is allowing anyone to unofficially name the half million craters on Mars. Bruce Betts

will go all Mooney in today's What's Up segment, and we'll begin by making some waves with Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, I am so glad that you want to talk about one of the most momentous discoveries in the history of cosmology, and it just happened. Yes, the gravity waves, the crazy gravity waves, as predicted by Einstein. When the expanding universe was discovered, it was consistent with relativity, and so people expected that when the universe banged in a big way, there would be sort of pulses or waves within the expansion. It's a very subtle thing, and they detected this polarization of the light There would be sort of pulses or waves within the expansion. It's a very subtle thing.

And they detected this polarization of the light in these curl patterns. It's just wild, Matt. And I've heard several people say, well, this is an intellectual achievement. It has no practical value. And my feeling is we'll just see about that. I mean, when relativity was discovered in my father's day, when my father was a very young kid, there was no practical application for it. Yet everybody in the developed world runs around with a global positioning system, which depends on satellites, which work on both general and special relativity. It's amazing. Who knows what will be next? There is even speculation that this may be the further indication that there is something going on between quantum mechanics and relativity that we just have the slightest hint of.

Well, this is where, not to be dismissive of my astrophysical colleagues, heavens, pun intended. But when people say, well, why is the universe accelerating its expansion? Well, because there's dark energy. Well, what's that? It just has, for me as an engineer, it just has a hand-waving quality. I mean, it's fantastic. It's cool. It reminds me, Matt, of the discovery of the microwave background radiation, which is evidence

of the Big Bang. You were going to say. No, no, I think that's perfect. But I was going to ask you if for 30 seconds you would wax poetic just on a species that uncovers such wonders in the universe. It is astonishing that we, made of the dust of stars,

have come together in gravitational field with electromagnetic energy pouring in here from our mother star. And we have been able to discover patterns in nature described by mathematics that show the origin of everything, at least everything that we can observe. If there are universes outside of our universe, how remarkable would that be? But this is done by this humble little species on this humble planet orbiting an ordinary star. Just think what's ahead. Just think what else we are able to do. You would think to be passionate about it, you would think that with all this capability,

with all this intellect brought to bear on this fundamental problem about where we all come from, you just think that we could be nicer to each other and just do a better job as a global tribe and take better care of our planet and our local environments. I hope this discovery inspires us all to just do better at everything. It's a great day in science, Matt. Bravo. Thank you, Bill. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO

of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Stay with us. In just a few moments, we will visit with the guy that I have called the busiest man in space exploration, Alan Stern. We know you love to hear and read Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor for the Planetary Society. We're going to spend more time than usual with the planetary evangelist. She has just returned from an annual gathering that makes her feel right at home. This year's LPSC in the Woodlands, Texas, was the 45th. Emily told me it didn't have one overriding theme or revelation, as sometimes happens,

but there was still plenty of great science. I asked her to tell us about some of the results that wowed her. Welcome back, Emily, for this extended conversation about, well, tell me, why is LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, generally your favorite of the year? Well, it's one of the two big meetings that's devoted mostly to planetary science. The other one's the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting, which happens in October. But that meeting is for astronomers, and LPSC is for geologists. And, of course, that's the training that I came in with.

And I find geologists to be just really a fun group of people to hang around with. You know, they're the sort of kind of people who like to go hiking and sit around a campfire and drink beer and swap stories. So they're really fun to get together with at a conference. And I enjoy the hallway chatter and the meeting in the bars in the evenings as much as I enjoy all the great science that comes out during the oral and poster presentations. Not that any criticism is implied of astronomers. Oh, no, not at all. It's just a different kind of group, a different kind of astronomers. Oh, no, not at all. It's just a different, it's just a different kind of group, a different kind of personality. And this is,

this is my group. These are my people. You've already written a couple of stories. Let's start with your piece about Europa. Yeah, I have to say that this is the single thing that I was most excited about coming out of LPSC. It's this idea that Simon Kattenhorn and Louise Proctor have finally found subduction zones on Europa. And to explain why that's cool, you have to recognize that Europa is a place with a lot of geology, and it's been recognized for quite a long time. In fact, going back to 1980, I'm now learning that some of these features on the surface of Europa are places where its crusts spread apart and new crust formed in between. And if it's spreading, and this kind of thing happens on Earth too at our oceans. But the thing is, if you're creating new crust,

you have to be destroying old crust somewhere else unless the whole moon is expanding, which it's not. That means there has to be some place on Europa where you're either crushing crust together into mountains, or more provocatively, subducting it underneath other crusts like happens on Earth. And people have been looking for this for decades, and it's been really hard to find. But Simon and Louise think they may actually finally have found it in this type of terrain called a tabular band on Europa, and that's what they were presenting about.

And there, I guess, were some other evidence of places where the land is splitting apart that was much more obvious, right? That's right. In fact, it's really pretty cool. You can take a photograph of Europa and take a pair of scissors to it and cut it along one of these bands and slide them together. And you actually match up features that were torn apart by these grooved bands on Europa. It's very easy. Well, fairly easy. bands on Europa. It's very easy, well, fairly easy. It's one of the easier arguments to make in planetary exploration that spreading did occur at these spots because you can match up other features so perfectly. The subduction has been harder to find, but it makes Europa, if true,

if this is borne out through further study, it makes Europa the only other place in the solar system besides Earth where we know of the complete cycle of plate tectonics, ridge spreading and subduction. Wow. And all the more reason to get back there again, right? Absolutely. Let's go to Vesta, where there were some, talk about provocative results, which you aren't entirely confident in. Yeah, I'm less convinced by this one, but it's a very cool idea to think about.

The idea that if you look at Vesta, and indeed, if you look at any other small body or large body, you'll find that there are places where something called mass wasting has occurred. That's scientist terms for stuff rolling downhill, landslides, basically. And there's lots of different ways that mass wasting can happen. And on Vesta, it can form gullies like we see on Mars, like we see on Earth, like we see on the moon. And most of them are dry avalanches. They're just loose, powdery material, fall downhill. Often it's a result of like an impact or something shakes the ground and makes things unstable and it slides downhill. But there are a couple of what they call these curvilinear gullies. They look different from the other kinds of gullies on Vesta.

different from the other kinds of gullies on Vesta. And they end in these pools or ponds of, they're not currently liquid, it's solid, but at the bottom where they end is this pitted terrain. And pits usually form in places where something has disappeared and this stuff from the surface is falling into it. And so the notion is that this kind of gullies was actually made by water flowing across Vesta, pooling, freezing, and then sublimating into gas. And that's what left the pitted terrain at the bottom. Now, how can you possibly get liquid water on an asteroid? Their answer to that question was, well, maybe it happened during an impact. Maybe there were ice deposits buried underneath the surface of Vesta, which is possible, but they kind of slid over how you could possibly

get this ice under there. If it's there, it could last for billions of years, so that's okay. But how you get it there in the first place is a little hard. But if you did and you had the impact, the impact would heat the ground. It could melt this water. The water could flow out after the crater formed and make this deposit. I think there's a lot of geophysics modeling work that needs to be done to check to see whether this really is a viable idea.

But it's really cool to think about. So that's why I wrote about it. Yeah, and if this proves out, it also just proves once again that the solar system is just stranger and stranger than we possibly imagined. Let's talk about another place where we know that there has been water, is water. That's Mars. Any news from there? Yeah, there were sessions, actually often two side-by-side sessions on Mars all week long. There's so much data from Mars, so much exciting work being done on it. And a lot of these

presentations focused on ground ice on Mars. That's ice that's located beneath the surface. It's kind of armored and protected from the low pressure of the atmosphere by a thin deposit of soil. You can tell that it's there in a number of different ways. I saw lots of talks using the Sharad radar sounder results from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission that actually saw layers beneath the surface. And also Marsis on Mars Express is another radar sounder. So you can tell that this ice is there. is another radar sounder. So you can tell that this ice is there. They showed some pretty meticulous results indicating that the radar was, yes, interacting with ice beneath the surface, that it's still there on Mars today. It's flowed like glaciers do on Earth, these cold-based

glaciers that have a lot of rock inside them and made really cool-looking terrain all over the planet. I saw somebody trying to estimate just how much ice we're talking about. And he did a lot of mapping. Actually, he got his undergrads to do a lot of mapping of features all over the globe. Professors always crack jokes about that. It's sort of funny, but sort of not. But anyway, after they did all this meticulous mapping work, and he did some back of the envelope estimations, he figured out that all of the ice in Mars' ground ice deposits came out to about a global layer of water two and a half meters deep, which is nothing to sneeze at. It's only about a tenth as much water as there is in the polar caps that we can see today, so it's not that much water, but it's still a lot of water and it would take a long time for it to form. He figured about 750 million years for these deposits to form from the kinds of intermittent

snowfall we think happened on Mars. So there was this long period of time on Mars when it was cold but wet in a cold kind of way with mostly ice, but potentially occasional meltwater doing exciting things. So these kinds of stories are really fleshing Mars out as it's dry, but it's a glacial kind of dry. And there's actually a lot of ice all over the place. Sounds pretty wet to me. Let's follow the water, or at least the liquid, on out to Titan. Yeah, so there was a whole session devoted to lakes on Titan, and I didn't get to see the whole session because part of the problem with LPSC is that there's four concurrent sessions,

so I was in the moon for part of the Titan Lake session, and I missed one of the most exciting talks, I think, the one that talked about how they finally found waves on the surface of a Titan Lake. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, you know, we've been hoping to surf Titan for a long time. I've got the t-shirt. I did read a paper about this, so I don't feel like I completely missed it. The waves have been really hard to find because they're very, very small. You can't surf these. Even an ant would have a hard time surfing these. They're about six millimeters high. But at least we have finally observed them. So something can surf Titan, but just not us.

Tiny surfs up. Emily, there is much more that we could talk about, but I think we're out of time. Will people be finding more on the website, in the blog? Yes, I've written a couple of blog entries. I hope to get another two or three written this week with more of the latest science from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Excellent. Thank you so much for this extended report. Thank you, Matt.

She is the Senior Editor and the Planetary Evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor at Sky and Telescope magazine. And she'll be back next week with her regular commentary here on Planetary Radio. Coming up right after the break, Alan Stern to talk about a whole bunch of stuff. This is Planetary Radio. 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.

Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list.

The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The problem with talking to the Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern is deciding which of his many projects and initiatives you have time for. The decision was a bit easier in this go-around, since I knew I wanted to hear Alan's side of a story that has generated some heat in recent days. We'll get to this latest undertaking by his company called Uingu in a couple of minutes, but I first wanted to get an update on Europe's Rosetta mission

that is speeding toward orbital insertion at Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Alan is principal investigator for the Rosetta instrument called ALICE. That's not an acronym. It's just a name Alan likes. Alan, welcome back. Before we get into Uingu, would you help us get reacquainted again with your friend Alice. Sure, Matt. Absolutely. Alice is the NASA-provided ultraviolet spectrometer on board the Rosetta Comet Orbiter mission, which just woke up from almost three years of continuous deep hibernation. Alice is going to be providing compositional information on the surface and the atmosphere of the comet beginning this summer, in fact. What's going on right now, literally as we speak, this week is the beginning of payload commissioning. After that long hibernation,

they've started to wake the instruments up one at a time. In fact, Alice got a self-test last week and passed with flying colors, all the voltages and currents, the computer checksums, those kinds of things all work. We're very happy to see that. And we're going to begin the more rigorous testing of our mechanisms, of our detector, a recalibration of the instrument, as will all the other orbiter instruments and the lander package as well over the next several weeks. All right. Well, we wish all of you instrument folks the best of luck as this long, long mission finally reaches its destination. Let's move on to Uingu. For this as well, remind us of what's going on here. Well, Uingu is a little for-profit company that we formed a few years ago, several of us in space

science, planetary science, and astronomy, with the express goals of engaging the public in new ways in space and the sky and astronomy and planetary exploration and using the proceeds to generate a grant fund, an extra lane on the funding highway, if you will, for organizations and individuals involved in space research and space education. Some of the people involved are probably people your listeners know, like Andy Chaykin, a space historian, like David Eicher, the editor of Astronomy Magazine, and most recently, Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the Mars Phoenix lander.

Didn't know about Peter, but yeah, some of those folks. Andy, he hasn't been on this show quite as many times as you, but he's certainly one of our good friends. You've given out a couple of awards, too, to some organizations listeners may have heard of. Well, that's really our job, is to give grants from the proceeds that come from people engaging in a wingoo. If you go to our website at www.awingoo.com, you can look up some of the example awards. Lingu.com, you can look up some of the example awards. We've given more than a dozen grants now, most recently, just in the past 10 days, in fact, to Astronomers Without Borders,

to Explore Mars, and to Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Yeah, SEDS, which is another group that we've talked to on this show. So as you said, it's a for-profit company. This is an example, you've also said, of space commercialization, which maybe is one of the things that bothers some of your critics. Here's a quote from the International Astronomical Union press release that I received. The IAU would like to emphasize that such initiatives go against the spirit of free and equal access to space, as well as against internationally recognized regulations. Hence, no purchase names can ever be used on official maps and globes. Are you still thinking that the IAU ought to chill out?

Of course they should. Let me give a little background for listeners. Last week of February, we launched a new project to create a new map of Mars. There are over 500,000 unnamed craters on the surface of Mars in scientific databases. And we put them all in a map, opened it up to the public to start naming anything you like, as long as it's not profane or pejorative, in which case we just take it right back out. It just awaited for people to engage. And we found people naming after their family members, other loved ones, co-workers, sports teams, places they grew up. Some really touching stories.

One guy proposed by naming a crater and telling his girlfriend that, hey, I named a crater on Mars. Check it out. And then she popped up the place on the map and said, the crater was named, will you marry me? Well, that could only be done once, can't it? Well, I guess others could propose too. Sure. They put it on Facebook. That's how we found out about it. There are tributes to lost loved ones. And, you know, it's very touching. It's

very humanizing. And people are really liking this. We have now seen almost 10,000 craters named in just a few weeks. That's many, many more than have been named by astronomical committees in the 50 years that they've been at it. And we're turning that into grants. I don't know why the IEU is so upset. Really, we're doing something great, we think, for space exploration and space research. And the analogy I would make, after all, this is a public engagement activity, would be a little bit like a professional realtors association complaining about the invention of the board game Monopoly as if it was real real estate that you were selling. Now I will say that this

map that we've created we hope to have all the craters of Mars named publicly by the end of the year. This is the 50th year of Mars exploration and we've signed a contract with the Mars One mission to carry that map to Mars on their robotic lander in 2018. So we know that people really groove on that. They really like the idea that their names are going to Mars. And we hope that listeners to Planetary Radio will check it out at our website and get involved too. And we spell a wingu, U-W-I-N-G-U. And remind us, what is that? I think it's a Swahili word.

It is. It is an African word from the Swahili language. It means the sky in Swahili. It's a cool name. With maybe 30 seconds to go, status report on New Horizons. New Horizons is bearing down on Pluto, now inside of four astronomical units away. The spacecraft's in great shape. It's currently hibernating.

We'll be waking it up in June for its last hibernation wake-up. Then we'll put it back to bed in late August, and it'll hibernate until December 7th. And then we will wake it up for encounter. Encounter begins next January, just 10 months from now. It's going to be a big year, 2015. Alan, thank you again. I'm sure we'll be talking to you before long. Thank you, Matt.

I've often called him the busiest man in space exploration. It's still true. Alan Stern, planetary scientist, he's the former associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, has been and is a participant in many, many missions around our solar system, including New Horizons, which reaches Pluto next year. That one he's in charge of as the principal investigator. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

By the way, you can still catch his class. It's still running from Cal State Dominguez. Where should they go if they want to check out your astronomy course? Go to planetary.org slash Betts class. You will find information about how to watch it live or how to watch the archives, how to catch up. How's it going? It's going really well. We're about halfway through.

how to watch the archives, how to catch up. How's it going? It's going really well. We're about halfway through. We're playing with the Saturnian, Jupiter and Saturn systems this coming week. Cool. And are they up in the night sky? They are.

Nice segue. Jupiter up in the evening high in the south. You can pull out some binoculars or a small telescope and see the big gal-land moons of Jupiter. We've got Saturn coming up in the middle of the night in the east, looking yellowish. And in between them, we've got Mars. Mars is a good thing to focus on for the next few weeks because Mars will be closest point to Earth for a couple years on April 8th. So it is brightening quickly. In fact, if you look at it night to night, you can probably even see that it gets brighter through the 8th and then dims

after that. It'll get about as bright as the brightest star in the sky on the 8th, and it's quite bright now. Much brighter than the companion star that happens to be near it right now, Spica, which is a nice contrast between reddish Mars and blue Spica. And then if you're up in the pre-dawn, you can check out Venus looking super bright as always, low in the, fairly low in the east. On the 26th and particularly the morning of the 27th, it is hanging out near the moon looking, making for a lovely picture. So I am relatively confident now that is Mars that I saw along with Spica. I don't know if it was last night or the night before, but boy, it is bright already.

Yeah, it's brightening up. It really goes from being a pretty dim object to being, as I say, the brightest star in the sky this time around. Excellent. A little preview. I'll talk more about it next week. Total lunar eclipse, April 15th, visible throughout much of North America,

South America, and Australia. On to this week in space history. Mariner 10, 40 years ago this week, gave us our first ever close-up view of the planet Mercury doing its first flyby. We move on to... fly by. We move on to random space.

You know, it's rare nowadays, after doing this for 11 and a half years, that you come up with a truly unique one. And there it was. I should have gotten Alan Stern to say it, of course. But okay, go ahead. Guest star thing you always forgot to ask for. Yeah. All right, so on to the random

space facts. Saturn's largest moon moon titan is 59 times more massive than saturn's second largest moon raya huh so it's one really big moon and a lot of not nearly as big moons i can't get enough moons i can't get enough moons right now we move on on to the trivia contest. We'll move away. Although it's moon related, but I asked you, what was the first time astronauts flew separately in a spacecraft not designed to reenter the Earth's atmosphere? How'd we do, Matt? Wow. Some very interesting responses to this.

Here's the winner. I don't know where he's from, but I do know his name is Richard Cronkite, selected by random.org. And he said it was Apollo 9, March 9, 1969. Spider, the first of the lunar modules to go into space. Yep. And they did tests in Earth orbit, testing the lunar module and separated it from the command module.

And of course, the lunar module designed to land on the moon and not safely re-enter the atmosphere. So the beginning of kind of the tension that you really have to get back to the command module or you can bake troubles. So yes, Spider. Spider and its return to its little friend Gumdrop and everybody was safe. And our friend Rusty Schweikert was flying it, I think. Yep. So here are a couple of extra little facts from Stephen Coulter out there in Australia. He said the descent stage of SPDR, the lunar module, came back to Earth on March 22nd, not very long after at all that launch. But it wasn't until 1981, October of 1981, that the ascent stage of SPDR re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Did not survive. What a shock. Cool. And fortunately, the astronauts came back

long before that in the command module. So here are the people who might have had a bone to pick with you. We got one from Mark Wilson. He nominated Alexei Leonov's spacesuit because a spacesuit is really a small spacecraft. Okay. I can see the bone, but I guess since he wasn't picked by random.org anyway, we'll let the bone lie. All right, speaking of bones,

this one came from Joe Murray. How about Sputnik 2 with Laika? Oh. Did talk about astronauts, not dogonauts. Cosmo-dogonauts. Caninonauts. Caninonauts. To be or not to be.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Good try, Joseph. I think we're going to stick with Mr. Cronkite on this one. And do you have something for us for next time when we will once again give away a Planetary Radio t-shirt? I do. Moons, moons, and more moons. Here's your question. What major moon orbits Saturn at about the same distance that the moon orbits Earth?

So radius, distance from Saturn about the same as the moon from Earth. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and get us your entry by... By April Fool's Day. That's Tuesday, April 1 at 8 a.m. Pacific time. By the way, I implied that Richard Cronkite is getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt. He's not. He's getting the last of those wonderful Chop Shop posters, the chopshopstore.com posters, Beyond Earth. And we did get those in, and they really are cool. So congratulations, Richard. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about chattering teeth.

Thank you, and good night. Well, that was me a couple of weeks ago. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Don't moon him. That's not what he meant. He likes moons. He 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 moonshining members of the Society, and the other ones, too. Clear skies. Thank you.