Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Emily Lakdawalla's Special Report on the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

Episode Date: December 12, 2011

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A special report from the AGU meeting this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. The fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union brought tens of thousands of scientists to San Francisco last week. Many of them were there to hear news about planets other than Earth. And one of these planetary scientists was our own Emily Lakdawalla. We'll get some of her observations in a few minutes. Toward the end of the show, Bruce Betts and I will give you another chance to win a Planetary Radio T-shirt and a copy of The Christmas Planet, a children's book that brings the solar system home for the holidays.

That will be part of our What's Up review of the night sky and space history. Bill Nye will tell us about a special NASA meeting. And there's another news item I want to share. On Thursday, December 8, the worldwide members of the Phobos Grunt team received a letter from Lev Zelenyi of the Russian Space Research Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zelenyi's message acknowledged the now almost certain loss of the Phobos Grunt or soil spacecraft. Of course, this also means the Planetary Society Phobos Life will not make its trip to the moon of Mars and back. Also lost is the Chinese Mars orbiter that sat atop Phobos Grunt.

Zelenyi apologized for the failure, thanked the team, and thanked the international space agencies that had joined the attempt to save the mission. He also spoke of the ongoing Russian commitment to the exploration of our solar system. Bruce Betts is the Phobos Life project manager. You can read his comments and Zelenyi's letter at planetary.org. Here's how Bruce closed his message. The loss of Phobos Life is a blow, but we are already recovering and looking forward to the future. We are even now analyzing the microorganisms that flew with our Shuttle Life

project on the last flight of Endeavour, and we are seeking out future exploratory opportunities to share with you. With your invaluable help and support, we know that together we will make our future in space vibrant, coming ever closer to our shared goals of understanding and appreciating the worlds around us. Thank you again for all your support. Time for our weekly visit with Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Bill, you're just back from Seattle. Now, that in itself is not out of the ordinary for you, but you attended quite an interesting get-together.

The NASA Future Forum. So Deputy Administrator Lori Garver was there. Boeing, Ball Aerospace. But along with that, Matt, were all the companies, representatives of the companies that want to take people into orbit or on suborbital flights into space. Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic. They were all represented and they answered questions from the audience. Sounds like, though, a lot of focus on human spaceflight. Exactly. There's this thing.

Now, this is at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, which by many reckonings is the third largest aviation museum in the world. So the people, in my opinion, the people who attended were maybe slanted toward flying, flying with people in a plane. And so everybody was really engaged. All the audience members were very much engaged when it came to sending people into space. But in my opinion, as the CEO of the Planetary Society, there wasn't as much awareness of the planetary missions. I mean, we have missions on the way to Pluto. We have Cassini out there taking astonishing pictures of Saturn. Juno's on the way to Jupiter. Messengers orbiting Mercury. And Curiosity's on the way to Mars. We're in this sort of golden age

of planetary exploration. And there's this lull in humans in orbit and humans in suborbital flights. So I think that area, that arena of humans in space is going to be filled in very quickly by these commercial companies. It's a remarkable time, a remarkable time in space exploration. It would be nice to see this golden age in robotic planetary exploration joined by a new golden age in human exploration. It could change the world. Bill, thanks very much. We'll get another report from you next week. And you'll be with us at Planetary Radio Live, which we won't hear next week,

but we will be taping here in Pasadena. Yes. Now, when you say taping, let's go with recording. We hope. Come on down, everybody. Come on to Pasadena for Planetary Radio Live. It'll be big fun. Yeah, and if you're going to join in, you better get on the stick right away.

You've got to go to the KPCC website, and last I checked, it was almost full. So don't worry. We'll do it again if you want to make it to one of these, and this one happens to be full up. But we will have a good time there, and I look forward to seeing you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Can't wait. I can wait, but I look forward. He's Bill Nye. He is the CEO, the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society. You may know him as the science guy. We know him as the planetary guy. And he'll join us again next week, one way or another.

Up next, though, just a few moments away, a special extended visit with Emily Lakdawalla, who was also on the road last week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The AGU has many meetings over the course of each year, but the biggie, the one that attracts tens of thousands of scientists, is its fall meeting in San Francisco. While most of the attendees primarily study our own planet, a significant minority look outward at other worlds. That was more than enough reason for Emily Lakdawalla to attend. Emily is the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator and the editor of the

Society's blog, but she's also a geologist. We hear from her every week, of course, but I asked her for an extended report right after she returned from the Bay Area. Emily, welcome back from San Francisco. How was it up there? It was fun, but it's kind of overwhelming. This conference is absolutely enormous. 20,000 people? I hear 22,000 people actually walked in the door at one time or another. Now, of course, not all of them were there at exactly the same time, but still, 22,000 is big no matter how you slice it up. Who is this crowd? Are they all scientists? They are all scientists, and this has to be one of the biggest scientific meetings in any discipline all year long. scientific meetings in any discipline all year long. AGU stands for the American Geophysical Union. And as such, it represents really a mix of a lot of physical science disciplines that have to

do with the natural world. You've got everything from oceanographers to seismologists to meteorologists to space scientists and everything in between. Great place for a planetary scientist to hang out. That's right. And I think there are roughly 2,000 of them there. Was there any public participation or is this pretty much just the science community? This is really just a science community thing. And I always think it's kind of funny

that a meeting collects so many geologists in San Francisco at once. I think it's kind of tempting fate to have all those geologists at an earthquake zone. Well, they certainly have no shortage of people to analyze it when it happens. How do you organize your time at this? I'm guessing there are lots and lots of things happening all at once. Yeah, with a meeting with so many people, there are just overlapping sessions. There's dozens of oral sessions going concurrently. And then there's an enormous poster hall where there are

people standing by posters doing presentations. So you kind of have to just figure out if there's a particular session where you might want to see a few talks in a row, but you just can't sit inside a dark room all day at a conference that gathers so many people. You want to get out and talk to people. So I was finding that the poster sessions are often the most fruitful places to go. Is there a sense of community as well? I mean, did you run into a lot of people you know? Oh, absolutely. And people go to these meetings largely in order to see people that they know, both to network professionally and personally.

And there's a lot of catching up in the hallways. It's fueled by coffee in the mornings. And at 4 o'clock, they're geologists. They switch to beer. And there's actually free beer served in the poster sessions. Well, free, of course, if you registered for the conference. Yeah, no extra charge, at least. That's impressive.

I've never been to one with free, quote-unquote, beer. We better get to some of the stuff you've written up. And, of course, you put a lot of it in your Twitter page, your Twitter account. But there are several nice pieces that people can find on the blog if they look at the previous week's entries, beginning with one about Voyager, that venerable spacecraft, two of them really, which are still doing amazing things. Yeah, and actually this update is specifically regarding Voyager 1. I always forget that it's really Voyager 1 that's doing the most exciting science right now.

Voyager 2 is the one that brought back all those lovely pictures from Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 just skipped out of the solar system after passing by Saturn. So we didn't get a lot of images from it late in its mission. But it was the one that returned the solar system family portrait. And because it didn't stop to travel to those more distant planets, it's actually exiting the solar system faster than Voyager 2. So it's the one that's probing the edges of the heliosphere, the part of the galaxy that our sun actually influences. declined almost to zero, and they thought that it had turned direction. So they actually rotated the spacecraft this year to try to see if they could measure its changed direction, and they were quite surprised to find out that the wind, it was actually just kind of not blowing in any particular direction at all, very quiet, kind of like an interstellar doldrums, and that sometimes

the wind even seems to blow back at the spacecraft, which is very strange. So there's a lot of crazy stuff going on out there that wasn't part of anybody's models. No, it wasn't. And it's really incredible to me that we can actually measure this now with such an old spacecraft that's flying so far away from Earth. It's really amazing.

And here is this basically antique spacecraft and they're still getting it to dance a bit. That's right. And, you know, sometimes they actually have to turn that dish away from Earth to make it do this. And that's very scary for a spacecraft that's so far away. When you think about how far away it is and how accurately it has to point its dish in order for its faint signal to be received on Earth, it's just incredible that it can

continue to roll and respond to commands. And even after all these years, still not quite considered out in interstellar space. That's right. This Doldrums region is probably the last sort of border region. And the reason they think it's there is because the sun had such an extended minimum period where it wasn't putting out much energetic particles at all. So the bubble that it kind of inflates

in the interstellar medium within the galaxy was collapsing a bit because there wasn't so much pressure. And so now that the sun's getting more active, it's going to start pushing that back out again. Somewhere in here, Voyager will pass through the boundary and get into interstellar space. And scientists are convinced that it's going to happen before Voyager runs out of energy. You just got to hope that the sun stops pushing the goalposts there. Let's go to another one of the stories that you wrote up. And this was, interestingly enough, a weather report.

Yeah. And again, we're talking about the sun. And it was about space weather and how we're measuring it with a huge number of spacecraft that are out there. I don't really write about this very often because I'm not as comfortable with solar science as I am with geology. But there are two spacecraft in between us and the sun that can provide advanced warning of events that are coming in our direction. But the exciting thing that they were reporting at this conference is that for the first time, they have a model that works, that actually can predict effectively what's going to happen with solar weather. When I say model, it's probably not what you're thinking. You might be thinking of something that

you assemble with plastic or some very tall and skinny woman. No, who me? No, a model is basically a set of equations or a program that you can write down, you can put it into a computer or even write it out on a piece of paper, that if you take a set of input conditions and run it through your equations or run it through your program, you come up with a set of predictions. And so now they have a model for solar weather that actually works, and they've implemented it. The National Weather Service is now actually using this to help organizations like airlines and electrical companies figure out when they should be concerned about what's happening with the sun. That's Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society reporting on her recent stay at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

She'll tell us more about the sun and then take us out to the asteroid Vesta when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show,

its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 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. We're spending a few extra minutes with our regular commentator, Emily Lakdawalla.

She spent a couple of days at the recent fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This year, 22,000 scientists flocked to the city by the bay to hear and see results submitted by researchers from around the Earth, some of it based on data gathered well beyond our own planet. You can read Emily's several reports in the Planetary Society blog, where her AGU entries began on Monday, December 5. Before the break, she was telling us what was revealed at the meeting about space weather, which, like our own weather, can be traced back to the sun. Emily told us that the first accurate models of space weather have been built.

Were you surprised to see how many spacecraft have actually been examining our star and delivering the data that was needed to build this model? Well, I guess in the back of my mind, you know, if you'd asked me, I could have named a lot of these spacecraft. But really, it's comparable to the number of spacecraft that are actively exploring the planets in our solar system. So it's really a very large number, and they're sending a lot of data back to Earth. There are lots of beautiful images and animations in this. And a couple which are, well, lots of them are eye-catching, but a couple that just look like, I thought of them as sort of rainbow pinwheels.

Was that real stuff from these satellites or from these probes that we were looking at? No, those are actually the simulations from the model that they produced. And that pinwheel effect, I learned something new at this conference. That is the sun's magnetic field lines, which because of the way that the sun rotates rather rapidly, its whole magnetic field rotates and that spiral propagates all across the solar system, all the way to the solar system's edge where Voyager 1 is actually feeling it right now. Yeah, it's incredible and quite beautiful. Last one we're going to talk about your most recent article from AGU is all about dawn at Vesta. Why are they looking for volcanoes up there? Well, they're having trouble figuring out at Vesta. Why are they looking for volcanoes up there?

Well, they're having trouble figuring out whether Vesta is more like a planet or more like an asteroid. It's as colorful as a planet, colorful to scientists, that is. When you look at it in the infrared, there's all kinds of different colors that show different compositions across its surface, but if you actually would look at it with your naked eye,

it wouldn't be quite as colorful. It'd be pretty gray. But still, all of that color means that it's had a complicated geologic history. We also know that Vesta is differentiated, meaning that its mass is concentrated toward the center. This was strongly suspected before Don got there, and now Don's confirmed it with gravitational measurements. Both of those things mean that Vesta almost certainly has had volcanic activity in the past. So one of the things that scientists were looking for was volcanoes or other evidence of volcanic activity like lava flows. So far, they have seen nothing. Part of the problem is that

Vesta is covered with an extremely thick surface layer that's called regolith of broken up rock and dust from all of the times that it's been impacted. And the moon's also covered with regolith, but the moon's is only 5 or 10 meters thick. So it's, you know, a hundredth or maybe a fiftieth of the thickness of the regolith on Vesta. And that regolith is just probably obscuring all the things that scientists want to see. Also, coming back to us from the Dawn spacecraft, some images of craters that I guess have also been somewhat puzzling. Yeah, Vesta's craters look really strange.

And they're kind of hard to understand until you combine it with the excellent topographic data that they're also getting from the Dawn mission. And one thing you realize is that Vesta is extremely slopey. So if you consider most planets, if you consider their entire diameter and then how much their topography goes up and down on that diameter, there's only about 1% of the planet's diameter is accounted for in its topography. If you scaled the Earth to a ball about three or four inches across its topography, it would look like an orange. It's no bumpier than that. Vesta is super bumpy. Vesta has extremely high highs,

extremely deep lows, and it means that it has extremely steep slopes. And so when craters form on these steep slopes on a body that has pretty significant gravity, there's a huge amount of landsliding. And most of the features that scientists are mapping now across the surface of Vesta are landslides. You get a crater, the upslope wall collapses, slides into the floor, and sometimes even flows out over the downslope wall. So you have nothing but landslides covering the surface of Vesta. I don't know why it seems so odd to me to think of this little body with no atmosphere to speak of, with all this crazy dynamic activity going on. Does some of this possibly have to do with impacts? A lot of it has to do

with impacts. And of course, the shape of Vesta is largely due to the fact that its south pole was struck by two enormous impactors, probably things about 40 or 50 kilometers in diameter. And that's why it's so flat and so flat on the bottom and so slopey in general. Probably impacts are the main thing that has shaped Vesta's geologic history, but you know that because it's differentiated, it had to have its own internal geology as well. And the challenge of the Dawn mission is going to be to try to figure out if they can find any signs of that on what they can see on the surface. You actually posted lots more crazy images and animations as part of this article about Vesta. And one of them

is this mightily violent simulation of another big body hitting Vesta. Yeah, that's a simulation that was put together a couple years ago. And it's really cool to watch. It's fun to watch over and over. One of the reasons that the giant impact that hit Vesta is so odd compared to impacts on other planets is because Vesta rotates very quickly. It's got a five-hour day. The impact takes about an hour to develop from the time that the body hits Vesta to the time that all of the debris lands. It's about an hour. And so the fact that you've got this five-hour day and it takes an hour for the impact to happen means that Coriolis forces are actually important in shaping where the ejecta goes. It's like storms on Earth. So

there was actually one quote that I really enjoyed from the scientist who was talking about this one where he said, is the impact a maelstrom of ejecta? And you just think about this swirling mass of gigantic rocks raining down all over the whole planet, it's pretty mind-boggling. Boy, more spirals. You write about how a lot of this is flowing out of the work that a lot of people are trying to do to model Vesta. And specifically, you mentioned a couple of guys who are doing their best, but it's a really tough challenge. Well, of course, it was Eric Asphod giving the talk, and his quote was that there's a sweet spot for modelers where you have enough data but not too much data. Because, of course, more data always falsifies everybody's models because models necessarily are too simple. They don't really represent everything that happens in the real world.

More data coming in than the modelers have had time to handle, and they're going to have to work much harder to figure out what exactly they have to have as inputs into their models that is important for describing what happened in the real world. Right now, they don't have their models tuned properly, and they're going to have to go back to the drawing board. It's Goldilocks data. Not too much, not too little, but just right. Emily, thank you for once again giving us just the right amount of data, this report, really just a glance at the recent AGU fall meeting in San Francisco. That's right. It was only two days out of a five-day meeting. So there is so much more that I didn't even get a chance to see about Messenger and Mars

and everywhere else in the solar system. Talk to you again next week. Yes, Matt. See you then. Emily Laktawala is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Next up is going to be Bruce for our regular conversation about other things going on in the solar system and much more.

That's what's up just a few moments away. Back in Bruce Batt's office at the Planetary Society headquarters to talk about what's up in the night sky, because this is What's Up. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Hello once again. Hello and welcome. Good job walking across the hallway. Thank you. I'm not limping today like I was yesterday.

Something happened to my knee. I don't know what. Was I napping and you kicked me? Maybe. No. I'm going with no and that's my final. You have no evidence of that. Retaliation for that forehead thing last week, wasn't it? Exactly. Getting me to slap my forehead recreationally. Twice. Yeah, you know you're stupid when uh we've got super bright planets in the evening sky look in the west after sunset see venus look in the east after sunset see jupiter they're glorious uh we also have dimmer planets in the

middle of the night we've got Mars coming up over in the east, looking reddish, and in the pre-dawn, as well as the middle of the night, we've got Saturn looking kind of yellowish. Also, depending on when you listen to this, there may still be the Geminid meteor shower peak on December 13th, 14th.

This is typically the best shower of the year in terms of meteors per hour. Unfortunately, there will be moonlight, so they will, during this peak time, obscure the fainter meteors, but still might be worth it if you've got clear skies going out and staring at the sky some. Okay, we move on to this week in space history. This week saw, in 1903, the first powered flight. Yay! And it saw the last footprints on the moon in 1972.

Aww. Did the Wright brothers make it to low-Earth orbit? Maybe. If you'd like to believe they did. No, not other than in some spiritual sense. And then it was high-Earth orbit. Oh, I like that. Yeah, I'm not so sure. We move on to random space fact. Sort of a Cats and Jammer kid thing there.

You really have to go back to understand that one, folks. Google it. Wow. That's deep references to the past, although I guess more recent than the Wright brothers. The International Space Station has the mass of more than 320 automobiles. So automobiles the size of yours, it's more like 400 or 500. That's true.

It's not actually made of crushed automobiles, is it? Maybe. It's my standard answer for the show. I'm sticking with it. Let's go on to the trivia contest. And we asked you one on the easier side. Where is Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover supposed to land on Mars? How'd we do, Matt? I'll tell you how we did. You know what we

got to this from a lot of people? Duh! That's not the right answer. No, it's not. And so they're not going to win. We did also get, though, from John Heater in Slattington, Pennsylvania. He said it's going to land, duh, in Gale Crater on Mars. Did he actually say duh? No, he didn't. Okay. Dar he.

We also got from Waldek Benarczyk in Poland. He wanted us to make sure that we knew that it was named after Walter Frederick Gale, an amateur astronomer, and was what discovered in the late 19th century. I thought it was Dorothy Gale. Dorothy Gale. Yeah. Lions and mare and valets. Oh my. Oh my. Oh that Dorothy Gale. There's no place like Mars. there's no place like Mars there's no place like Mars we go on to the next trivia contest that has very little to do with Kansas

although I suppose it could follow the red brick road follow the red brick road alright we have to stop this now we're going to go on to another one that I didn't know we were getting complaints. People will probably find this one too elementary as well. I'll try to have some cosmology quantum physics question for next week. But for now, what year will Halley's Comet have its next perihelion, its next closest pass by the sun? The next time it'll be visible in the skies of Earth.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until the 19th of December, 19th of December at 2 p.m. Pacific time, and you might just win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. You know, I neglected to say that our winner this week is getting that t-shirt, but also a copy of The Christmas Planet.

You may remember we mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. This is the kids' book from Dave Dooling, the education and public outreach guy up at the National Solar Observatory. It's illustrated, and it even has directions making your own solar system model in the back of the book. We're going to throw that in once again with the T-shirt for the winner of this newest trivia contest. Righteous. By the way, you can learn more about the Christmas planet at thechristmasplanet.com. Can I mention one more thing? I forgot to bring this up because I thought this was so cute. This is from Steve and Kathy O'Rourke. You ready? Curiosity will be landing at Gale Crater. If one timeline I've seen for its proposed arrival is accurate, and it is, Curiosity could be landing on the Red Planet on our 17th

wedding anniversary, August 5th. And because we included our names and our kids' names on the microchip riding with Curiosity, we could be celebrating that anniversary on another planet. Too cool. Happy anniversary in advance, Steve and Kathy. Oh, and what is the proper gift for our 17th wedding anniversary? Mars dust. Mars meteorite. Mars meteorite.

There you go. All right, everybody. Go out there, look out for the night sky, and think about drawer handles. They're really important. Thank you. Good night. You know, we never put them on the drawers. I're really important. Thank you. Good night. You know, we never put them on the drawers. I put new fronts on the drawers in our kitchen and we never put the

handles on and we're just fine. So I don't know what you're talking about. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Assessing the ability of any planet to support life. That's next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society. Our show is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, by the members of the Planetary Society, and by our listeners. Clear skies. Thank you.