Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ending the World With a Song at Dragon Con

Episode Date: September 12, 2011

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The End of the World, put to music 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. As promised, a taste of DragonCon, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy convention, came to Atlanta once again over the first weekend in September. We've got an extended excerpt of the session called These are the Ways the World Will End,

featuring astronomers Phil Plait and Pamela Gay. You'll also hear a song about that weighty topic. Bill Nye will report on his just-completed trip to the Goddard Space Flight Center and Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., while Bruce Betts will step aside for a guest rendition of Random Space Fact, right after he tells us about the night sky and this week in space history. First, though, a conversation with Emily Lakdawalla about the latest moon mission and a 35-year-old 3-D movie made on Mars.

Emily, a couple of things to talk about this week. One of them quite a psychedelic experience, but let's talk about GRAIL first. Not one, but two spacecraft on their way to the moon. Yeah, this is a pretty cool mission. They're two absolutely identical spacecraft that were launched side by side on a single Delta II rocket that was, by the way, the very last Delta II that will be launched from Florida. There's only one more Delta II launch coming up from California. So that was the end of an era. Delayed a couple times by extremely irritating upper level winds that had even the normally dry NASA TV commentators sounding exasperated.

But finally it went up, and the most amazing thing about the launch is that they had a rocket cam on the second stage that actually watched as first one and then the other of these two twin spacecraft was pushed away from the second stage. I actually got to watch that live on NASA TV. I thought that was pretty amazing. Now, very quickly, this is also a mission that should warm the heart of any geologist. Yeah, this is special. It takes a look at the gravity field of the moon. The two spacecraft will orbit in the same orbit, just 200 kilometers apart, and will measure very minutely the distance between the two of them, which will change slightly as they go over areas with higher gravity and areas with lower gravity. And that actually

provides a very sensitive probe as to the inner layering of the moon and where there's concentrations of heavier mass and where there's missing mass. And that'll really tell geologists a lot about what's inside the moon, not what's on the surface. Now, let's move on. And everybody, grab your 3D glasses. Not the nice ones they give you at the movies, but the red and blue ones. Go to planetary.org, to the blog, check out a 3D movie from the 1970s. This thing, the vibe from this is just perfect.

Well, it has absolutely marvelous analog synthesized music. All of the Mars missions that have gone to the surface have carried 3D cameras, but this is the only movie I think I've seen that actually shows the surface in 3D for half an hour. And it's just marvelous. It's a very thorough introduction to the two Viking landing sites, which are, by the way, so much rockier than any other place we've landed since then. And also some pretty amazing video of a model of the Viking spacecraft sampling the surface and delivering the samples to its chambers. I actually learned quite a lot about how the spacecraft worked watching the video. It really is just a perfect piece, including the extreme 70s narration that goes with it. Yeah, it's kind of pedantic. And

the narrator has this funny way of pronouncing stereo that I just chuckle every time I heard it. Well, this works on many levels. So check it out. It's a September 9, 2011 entry in the Planetary Society blog. Weekend watching, 3D movie from Mars. More than a half hour of it. Emily, thanks so much. You're welcome, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We'll be off to DragonCon in a couple of minutes, but first, let's say hi to Bill Nye, the executive director of the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Bill. It was my pleasure to accompany you on a trip to Washington that actually got started before I got there. You made a little side trip down to Goddard. I did indeed. I went to the Goddard

Space Flight Center my first time there, and I saw the hardware for the James Webb Space Telescope. Say what you will, people talk about canceling and so on. It is an astonishing piece of hardware. Oh, my goodness. These mirrors are solid beryllium and then gold-plated because that's the perfect thing. So the idea is this telescope would be put in space above the Earth's atmosphere, The idea is this telescope would be put in space above the Earth's atmosphere, way out behind the Earth along the Earth's orbit, looking at distant, distant objects. The time machine of astronomers looking at ancient light.

It's quite a thing. Anyway, then the next day, as you know, Matt, you and I went wild. We went to the U.S. Capitol. Went wild and got soaked also. Yeah, it was pouring rain, everybody, just pouring rain. Many of the members of the Planetary Society and supporters sent us petitions. When you say many, how many do you mean? Over 22,000, I guess. So we took those petitions to their proper places. The House of Representatives gets delivered one way, the U.S. Senate gets delivered another way, and then we went from there. We did a luncheon for congressional staffers. Matt, did that, do you think that

went well? I thought it went extremely well. Many of them are in the science guy demographic, and I think they probably were intrigued by getting to see you. But the great thing is that they heard terrific stuff from Jim Green of NASA, Planetary Science Division Director, and Steve Squires, Mars Exploration Rovers. And they just seemed to hang on every word. And we had one congressman there as well. Everybody, we went there representing the Planetary Society, and we fought the good fight. You know, NASA, the largest space agency in the world, is under this big budget constraint. And these missions, when you try to send these things way out into the solar system to learn more about our place in space and seek answers to those two questions, where did we come from? Are we alone? When you try to do that, it's

just a complicated, expensive business. It is certainly worthy because if we send those missions, we will make discoveries that I guarantee you, Matt, will, dare I say it, change the world. That's right, you got it. And so we met with Congressman Lamar Smith, and we met with staffers from Senator Patty Murray's office. It was a really good trip. Great trip. And if people want to see a very quick video of you in front of the Capitol with those

boxes of petitions, it's at planetary.org. Where else would you be? It's your homepage, isn't it, everybody? Thank you, Bill. He is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society, also the science and planetary guy. And we'll talk to him again next week. Up next, our visit to DragonCon. Saturday, September 3rd, in Atlanta, Georgia. The heat and humidity are just beginning to wilt the marching Klingons, fairies, Boba Fetts, Ghostbusters and other assorted DragonCon attendees. But it hasn't stopped them from joining the parade down Peachtree that is a highlight of the convention each year. Fortunately, almost all the action is indoors. DragonCon has entirely conquered five of the biggest hotels downtown.

This is no place for the claustrophobic. I can easily believe that there are more than 40,000 fans jamming most of the public spaces. I'm also immensely impressed and entertained by the costumes. 36 special interest tracks include a few real world themes like science and space. Don't ask me which of these attracted the guy in the bacon suit. It's the skepticism track that has gotten me to a packed meeting room for the session called These Are the Ways the World Will End. Those wicked ways include planet-wide pandemic and super volcanoes, but the majority of cataclysms came from outer space, beginning with gamma ray bursts. You'll hear Pamela Gay,

our guest, just a few weeks ago on Planetary Radio, but first to respond is Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, another past guest. Writer Scott Siegler also chimes in. Well, I spent five years studying them, so why not? There are a lot of different ways of making them, but they are essentially gigantic explosions when stars die. And one of them is caused by a very supermassive star that blows up as a supernova, but in the core of the star, the core collapses down. The outer parts blow outward. The inner parts collapse

down and form a black hole. All kinds of things happen that are very complicated and take way more than 3 minutes and 28 seconds to describe. You get a disk of material that swirls around the black hole and that focuses twin beams of matter and energy that shoot out of this thing at approximately the speed of light. The amount of energy in these beams is beyond comprehension.

It's as if you took the entire sun's lifetime output of energy over 11 billion years lifetime of the sun and compress it down into a beam that is basically going to last a few seconds. And so anything in the path of this beam is going to get vaporized for a ways. As the beam goes, it spreads out, and as it moves across the galaxy, the energy in the beam gets spread out so that it's not as deadly. So it turns out that if one is about 7,000 or 8,000 light years away, the number's a little squishy, but it's that kind of distance. It's far enough away that it doesn't hurt us.

The good news is we don't think there are any stars that close to the Earth that can do this. The bad news is there are two that are right sort of kind of on the edge of that. The good news is they might not be pointed at us. The bad news is they might be. In fact, we don't think that the stars that can do this form in the current universe. We see these things really, really, really far away where they can't hurt us. And we think the conditions in the universe back then were different and could form these things better. There's not much to say about this, except I did the calculations years ago,

where if I said, what if one of these things were 100 light years from the Earth instead of 100 billion or 100 million? What would happen? And it turns out it would be like blowing up tens of millions of nuclear weapons all over the side of the earth facing the gamma ray burst. So that would be bad. There's not much you can do about that, actually. Can you stop, drop, and roll? Will that fix it?

Yeah, yeah. Stop, drop, and be nucleated down to your subatomic carbon. Just duck and cover. Duck and vaporize, I believe is the term. One of the fascinating things about these things is it makes you remember the sun is moving. Because while there's none nearby now, every

135 million years we go all the way around this Milky Way galaxy that we live in. Get new neighbors along the way and some of them might be less well behaved. So while we do believe there probably aren't any stars forming Get new neighbors along the way, and some of them might be less well-behaved. So while we do believe there probably aren't any stars forming in the modern universe, we've been proven wrong on things like this before. So it could be 70 million years from now, another part of the galaxy, boom, we're dead.

I'll add that there's circumstantial evidence that the trilobites in the Ordovician extinction, did I get that right? May have been wiped out by a gamma ray burst. It's not conclusive at all. It's interesting. And also there's concrete evidence that a nearby supernova blew up near the Earth about two to three million years ago. There's the presence of a radioactive isotope of iron

in the bottom of the ocean that's been picked up in sediments that's much higher than normal. And this isotope, iron-60, is only created in supernova explosions. And there had to have been one nearby to get that to the Earth before it decayed away. So two, three million years ago, there was probably something in the sky that blew up, and it was very close, probably, certainly within 100 light years. It's pretty amazing. In case you missed it, that means it rained stardust.

And that stardust is on the bottom of the ocean right now. Not a lot, but enough. But still, it rained stardust. Cool. And the street value of that stuff is through the door. I'll just want to put it on eBay.

We've got more from These are the Ways the World Will End at DragonCon. This is Planetary Radio. 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. The gigantic DragonCon fan event dominated downtown Atlanta over the Labor Day weekend. We are sampling just one of hundreds of events, a panel discussion about the ways the world will end. hundreds of events, a panel discussion about the ways the world will end. Moderator Rebecca Watson was ready to move on from gamma-ray bursts to those big space rocks coming our way. You'll once again hear astronomers and science boosters Phil Plait and Pamela Gay. Asteroid impact. We're still doing astronomy?

Yes, yes. We're going to go to this one. This is why there's two of us. Yeah, but we have other topics that aren't astronomy, but we're going to go to asteroid impact. Tag me in. Tag me in. Okay, I'll start. I like this one. This is something that will happen eventually if we don't prevent it. As I like to say, you could ask a dinosaur, but you can't. And there's a reason for that.

So there are these asteroids out there and these, you know, we, okay, let me put it this way. There is debris hitting the Earth all the time. About 100 tons of material hits the Earth every single day. That sounds like a lot, but it's not. It's actually enough to fill, I think, this room in about a month. It's number something like that. I can't remember off the top of my head. But the point is whenever you look up and see a shooting star, that is debris hitting us.

It's a little tiny piece. But there are bigger pieces out there. Something the size of a beach ball or a sofa will burn up harmless in the atmosphere. But when you start to get to be about the size of this room or bigger, it actually can blow up high in the Earth's atmosphere, create a flash of heat and a shock wave that can start fires and knock down buildings.

And by the time you get to something that's roughly 30 to 40 meters across, 50 meters across, you're talking about 10 to 20 megaton yield explosions, something like the largest nuclear weapons we've ever blown up. And as they get bigger, you can do the math. So the point is we don't want these things to hit. So you have to know they're out there, which we do. We have to find them, which we're working on.

We have to understand how to prevent them from hitting us, which is something we're also working on. And then we have to do it. And it's the doing it part. It's this part that we're having some trouble with. It is possible. I won't go into details because there's not enough time. But there are a myriad of ways of getting these things out of the way.

You can smack them with a space probe. You hit them, and that pushes them out of the way. Land a probe near it. Like here's a probe, here's an asteroid, and then the gravity of the probe can actually tug the asteroid out of the way. Don't land it, put it near. Yeah. These things are spinning, they're tumbling, and so if you land on it, it's really hard. There are a lot of ways to do it. It's not hugely expensive, it'd probably be a billion dollars, something like that, less than the cost

overruns on James Webb Space Telescope. I'll put it that way. That's probably a bad analogy. But the point is, we can do this if we have the will to do it. And I don't want to have to say, gee, I wish we had done that before that thing was in our sky. And the Dawn mission just totally proved we have the technology to do this. We went out. We caught up. This was the most awesome orbital insertion ever. The mission goes out, and it's creeping up, gets up on Vesta, and they're matched in their orbital speeds.

And then they try trying to orbit something that has that little gravity is a bitch. So they sneak up on it and then try to orbit something that has that little gravity is a bitch. So they sneak up on it and then try to orbit it. And they had the plan of, well, if we miss this time, we can just try in a few more days. So just the fact that you have to sneak up on it, match its speed, and then very carefully trying to get into orbit around it, we've proven we can do that. So we know we can get something near it and pull it gravitationally. Now, you see pictures of Beringer Crater. You hear death of the dinosaurs. But it's hard to really understand what asteroid impacts do until you really start studying craters. And I've been working on a

project with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to look for all sorts of features in lunar images. And the image that brought it all home to me was one of boulders on the moon. To get a boulder on the moon, you throw a giant rock asteroid at the moon. It digs into the bedrock and hurls chunks of bedrock. So giant asteroid came in,

threw a chunk of bedrock, hit. Later, another one comes along, repeats the process, through a second boulder that lands, starts rolling down a hill, hits the first boulder, and split. The universe plays pool with boulders on the moon by hurling asteroids at its surface. I will never forget DragonCon three or four years ago,

Phil talking about asteroids hitting the Earth and showing the artist's rendering, and a small child bursting into tears in the back of the room thinking it was real. Thank you for reminding me of that, too. That was an awesome moment in my life. It was a life lesson for all of us. Phil played in Pamela Gay on the near-Earth object that may ruin our whole day. But wait! The 2011 DragonCon session began with a special treat. Podcast host and musician George Rab teamed up with Phil to present this not-quite-cheery tune about the ways the world will end.

We bring it to you now with their compliments. These are the ways the world will end. These are the ways the world will end. We bring it to you now with their compliments. Odds of dying by asteroid impact, 1 in 700,000. The overall risk of dying from an impact in your lifetime is 1 in 700,000, somewhat less than being killed by a fireworks accident, but still more probable than being killed on an amusement park ride or by an act of terrorism. Odds of dying by supernova explosion. One in ten million. Supernovae happen about once per century, and I'm glad you like that too, in any given galaxy.

Assuming the event could cause a mass extinction killing everyone on Earth, the odds of you specifically dying from one during your lifetime are about one in ten million. Odds of dying by solar flare or coronal mass ejection. Zero, but with an asterisk. While a whopping big solar event can seriously impair or destroy a nation's infrastructure and economy, in general, it would not directly cause deaths. We have to rate this as zero chance for human fatality, but with an asterisk as a nod to the destructive power it has in other ways. These are the ways the world will end.

These are the ways the world will end. These are the ways. These are of dying by gamma ray burst, one in 14 million. Gamma ray bursts are dangerous from distances of more than 7,000 light years. You would have to be in the path of relatively narrow beam to get hurt. Your odds of being killed by a GRB are then 1 in 14 million. You're about as likely to be killed by a shark attack. Eventual odds of dying by galactic doom inevitable eventual odds of dying by death of the universe. Inevitable.

Correct. These are the ways the world will end. These are the ways, these are the ways, these are the ways the world will end. George Robb, everybody. George Robb and BAD astronomer Phil Plait singing us out of the 2011 DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia. By the way, DragonCon is also where Planetary Radio won its Parsec Award for Best Podcast

with the facts behind the fiction. Back in a moment with Bruce. Bruce Betts is here. Time for What's Up? Connecting via Skype once again this week. I have yet another present for you, but I'm not going to even mention it until I can show it to you in person because I just know we're going to get a great reaction. I'm still so excited from the last one, the little tiny Saturn V. Yes, and how appropriate for the trivia question answer that we will be providing this week. What's up?

Well, we've got Jupiter dominating the evening sky coming up in the early to mid-evening in the east. And then it's this super bright star-like object over in the east through the rest of the evening. And we've got Mars, still kind of dim, but up there in the pre-dawn rising after midnight and high in the east and before dawn itself. But there's other good stuff coming up in the weeks to come, so stay tuned. Just a tease. Tease. I'll give a little something more. I like when the pretty pictures of the moon next to a planet.

So you can see the moon next to Jupiter on September 16th and the moon near Mars on September 23rd. Okay. Hopefully plenty of warning there. There you go. This week in space history, we had another debut. I know we just talked about Star Trek last week, but in 1965, this one you can probably get it this time. Yeah, because I guessed it the last time, right? Lost in Space.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson. It actually preceded Star Trek by a year. Amazing. And Robbie the Robot, you know, the robot that you were just quoting from Lost in Space, I think he was that robot's uncle. Just by accident, I caught Forbidden Planet a couple of weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies, and there was Robbie. What a great robot.

He is a fine, fine robot. It was also in 1976, the first rollout of the shuttle Enterprise, the glide test shuttle. Oh, yes, right. I think I was there. Really? And Saturn's moon

Mimas was discovered in 1789. We'll come back to that. I wasn't there. I don't believe you. Let us now go on and I hear you've recorded some fabulous guests for us. Yeah, you can rest the vocal cords this week. One of the things that happened

at DragonCon that we were reporting on earlier in the show was a Get This Space Trivia Contest. Only the second year that they've done it. Guess where they got the idea. No, actually I didn't ask if they stole it from us. But it was pretty fun. Kind of a game show format. I got the four finalists together afterward to do this. What is your name, sir? Alexander. And you beat out last year's champion.

You got in on this just because you're the returning champ, right? I did. I was the only champion. Now we're the only two winners ever of the track, so we'll take it. And your name is? I'm Andy Dykes. Yeah. And how about you?

Julia Naylor. Corey Greenwald. Well, congratulations to all of you. To what do you owe your incredible vast knowledge of space trivia? Wikipedia. Two degrees in aerospace engineering. I worked at NASA for five years. I worked at Space Camp for three years,

and I now work at Intelsat flying commercial satellites. What's your excuse? Space Camp. Woo, space camp. Sirius XM radio. 40 years of Star Trek. Live long and prosper. Okay, you know what I want you to do now.

You ready? On three. One, two, three. Random space fact. There you go, Bruce. And they didn't win a T-shirt. Wow. That was nice.

Yeah, they were good sports. Thanks to them, oh trivia winners. Here's a random space fact. The sun is a nearly perfect sphere. Its polar diameter differs from its equatorial diameter by only 10 kilometers. This is much different than, say, the gas giant planets that are quite flattened due to rotation and spinning and such. And even better than our own planet, right? It is. We don't have much, but we do have some. So yes, it is.

It's so spherical. It's just beautiful. We move on to the trivia contest. And as we teased, we talked about the Saturn V rocket. I asked you what mission was the first flight of the Saturn V rocket. How did we do, Matt? Quite well. Big reaction to this one. Go ahead and give us the answer, and then I'll tell about the guy who's won a T-shirt this week. It is the unmanned Apollo 4 mission launched November 9th,

1967. And what a mission it was. I mean, there really had never been anything like that launched. We heard from John Gallant, who quoted some interesting stuff here, that it was, you know, the full-on rocket, the vibration, the shockwave set up by that mighty first stage with its five big engines shook the CBS broadcast booth so badly that ceiling tiles were falling on Walter Cronkite. He actually had to brace the big picture window looking toward the launch because he was afraid it was going to shatter. You'd think they'd have some flunky do that, not the world's most trusted anchor person. Jack of all trades, he was. I guess. So David Moussa is our winner this week.

David Moussa of Huntington, West Virginia. First time winner, I believe. And congratulations, David. We'll send you a shirt. Congratulations. Congratulations. And for your chance at winning a shirt, a Planetary Radio fabulous shirt, tell us who discovered Saturn's moon Mimas. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to

enter. And you have until September 19. That's Monday the 19th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there. Look up the night sky sky, think about shock waves of all different kinds. Thank you, and good night. I'm shocked, shocked to learn that there is a trivia question going on in this program. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. Next time, a young scientist who builds galaxies for a living. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.