Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Era of Solar Sailing Begins

Episode Date: May 23, 2005

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Humanity enters the era of solar sailing, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. We may be less than a month from making space exploration history. The Cosmos 1 spacecraft is packed and ready to go. We'll get a status report from the father of the first ever solar sail, Lou Friedman. Then we'll turn to Ann Druyan, widow and former collaborator of Carl Sagan and the head of Cosmos Studios, for which the pioneering probe was named.

A quick look at space headlines first. On the second attempt, space shuttle Discovery passed a test fueling of its external tank. NASA says it's a go for the return to flight as soon as July. It looks a little like an ancient mosaic from a Roman ruin, you know, with a few pieces missing. What it is is a remarkable assembly of images the Huygens lander took as it descended to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan last January. Check it out at planetary.org and you may see what scientists believe are drainage channels carved by liquid methane. We'll end our micro newscast with this little story just so you

can join us in saying, How cool is that? In the crowded skies over the red planet, the Mars Global Surveyor has tipped its hat and taken a snapshot or two of its European colleague, Mars Express, and an even closer picture of Mars Odyssey. The opportunity arose when the two orbiters recently passed within about 90 kilometers, or less than 60 miles of each other. You can see Mars Odyssey blowing a kiss at planetary.org.

Back in a minute with Lou Friedman and Ann Druyan. But first, even Emily has caught solar sail fever. Here she is. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Why does a solar sail have to be so thin if there's no weight in space? It seems like it should only be the surface area that matters, not the thickness. Solar sailing is a technique of spaceship propulsion that would only work in the weightlessness of space. Solar sailing involves the spreading of a large, reflective sail before sunlight. Photons, the particles that carry solar energy, strike the sail and bounce off.

The solar sail recoils from this bounce, accelerating away from the sun. The amount of force generated by the reflection of photons is incredibly tiny, but it is enough to accelerate a spacecraft. The bigger your sail, the more photons will hit it and the more thrust you will generate. Therefore, it does seem that the only important factor to a solar sail is surface area, not thickness. Why then are engineers so concerned about making solar sails thin? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Yes, he's also the executive director and one of the founders of the Planetary Society.

But long before the Society existed, Lou Friedman was speculating about how we might one day sail on the light of the sun, even writing the definitive book on the subject. NASA put aside plans to build a sail years ago, but the Planetary Society, with support from many dedicated partners and supporters, picked up that ball and ran with it. It has not been an easy or brief journey, but the goal is finally in sight. Lou, we've been waiting for this day when we could make an announcement for quite a long time. And I guess as a lot of people are listening to this, that announcement may have already been made.

Well, we're very close. We're waiting for the spacecraft to be shipped from Moscow or from the Moscow area at Lavashkin Space Center to the Murmansk area, from the Moscow area at Lavashkin Space Center to the Murmansk area, really to the port of Severmosk, which is right outside of Murmansk on the Barents Sea, where our submarine will take it out to sea and launch it to space. The spacecraft work is all done. It's all packed, ready to go, and it's been tested. It's passed all of its tests.

It's got all the approvals. And now we just have to get it to the launch site and get it on the rocket and get that rocket into space successfully. I liked how you said our submarine. That's right. It's our submarine. It belongs to the Russian Navy. And we do have an incredible got the idea for this project and only came into existence and put up the principal sponsorship afterwards.

Two very, very mature Russian space organizations working on it, the Lavishkin Association, which has probably built more spacecraft than any other industry in the world, and the Space Research Institute in Russia, which is responsible for all the great Russian planetary missions, including the Halley's Comet mission and the Mars missions and the Venus missions, which they've done. And then we have the small organizations like the Russian Navy, which we mentioned a few minutes ago, which is conducting the launch, the McKay of Rocket Design Bureau, and a number of American groups working with us as well, including the University of California, Berkeley,

and the NOAA people are going to help track the spacecraft. So we really do have a remarkable international project. And on a shoestring budget. Yes, our budget is under $4 million, and don't ask me to break that down because I won't. It's so small that it could be paying for anything on the project, except my salary. It's not that much. But it includes two launches, actually, not just the launch that we're going to do of the spacecraft,

but a launch of a test flight that we attempted back in 2001. God, has it been four years? Yeah, that's right. That's hard to believe. And it includes the spacecraft development, includes the tracking, includes American participation. Yes, it is on a shoestring budget. To be honest with you and to all the members of the Planetary Society who have also supported this mission, and I've got to mention that we've had some terrific support from large

donors like Peter Lewis and from the many members of the society have contributed their amounts ranging from $5 up to thousands of dollars. But I have to be honest with all of you in saying I wish the budget was bigger. There are shortcuts we had to make. We hope not that will affect the mission reliability. But let's not kid ourselves. Space is tough, and being able to have a good, decent-sized budget for projects is important. One of the great stories about how this has been accomplished at the price that it's been accomplished at, and something, of course, that the Russians are so good at, is using whatever works.

I know there was a story about a rolling pin and a vacuum cleaner. Well, let's not overdo it. In fact, as we're sitting here at the Pasadena Office of the Planetary Society, what we call Project Operations Pasadena, which is POP, and the Russians are working in Mission Operations Moscow, which is MOM. We can overdo the MOM and POP stories a little bit. I'm looking at an antenna, which we have sitting here, and I like to kid people and tell them this is the antenna that's on the spare antenna that's on the spacecraft. It's made of cardboard and wood.

It's actually one we use in a ground test. And the story you're referring to with the rolling pin in the vacuum cleaner is also stuff that was used on the ground, not, of course, in the spacecraft. But a meticulous way of folding the sail by evacuating those tubes as much as possible. An ordinary vacuum cleaner motor was just fine for evacuating the tubes and also had the advantage of being able to use that same shop vac to keep the room clean where they were working in. It's a dual use of technology. And then also the rolling pin as a way of flattening out the sail,

because you basically have to hand-fold the sail. There are elaborate machines one could devise for doing it. I watched a NASA folding of a solar sail in technology, but it was actually by hand. It was a more elaborate machine, and they ended up only using five people. We used about 30 people the way we folded it but it is a hand procedure yes the rolling pin and the vacuum cleaner were very helpful and very important because if you had any little bubbles of air in there at sea level I guess that could be a real problem once you got up to orbit that is true if the sail has some bubbles of air

you open up that package of space it could it would basically explode but not explode in a catastrophic explosion but explode with this jet of air coming out that could rip the sail material. But we will have bubbles of air, Matt. And that brings me to explaining a little bit about this mission. We'll launch probably on June 21st or within a few days of that, having nothing to do with the summer solstice, but it'll still be nice to launch on the longest day of the year. And then when it gets to space, after it's inserted into orbit, the sails will not be deployed for four days. That's the minimum amount of time that we think the outgassing,

all the residual air that might be in any of the packages, not just the sails, but primarily the sails, will be allowed to get out into the vacuum of space. And then we think it'll be safe to deploy the sails, but primarily the sails, will be allowed to get out into the vacuum of space. And then we think it'll be safe to deploy the sails. So you wouldn't want to deploy the sails right away, and we won't. We'll be waiting four days. It'll be a very tense and exciting four days if our spacecraft is in the correct orbit. And, of course, that's a big, tall order. If it gets in the right orbit, we'll be monitoring and testing it

and then waiting those four days for deployment. Just getting up into orbit is quite a milestone in the history of spaceflight. Well, that's right. I don't think a space interest group has ever put an object into orbit, and that'll be quite an achievement for us just to do that. Working spacecraft, already getting to this fact of completing our spacecraft, delivering it to the launch area, I feel very proud of our team. Everything will be a great milestone all the way up until the sail deploys and we can control it on solar sail flight. I like to say space is not

about the 100,000 things that go right. It's about the one thing that doesn't go right, and then it somehow messes up the mission. And of course, we've had great failures that we've all been part of, the Mars mission which crashed on the surface of Mars. And certainly we're mindful of all the difficulties in space, no matter what size the project. If it's a $4 billion project in a shuttle, or whether it's a $4 million project by a private space interest group working out of its small building in Pasadena, these projects all have the same degree of difficulties and concerns that we have to deal with. We're just about out of time.

You've been waiting decades for this. You literally wrote the book on solar sailing. Now it is about to happen, at least this attempt, roughly June 21st. I'm going to ask you a question that folks are going to hear me ask Annie Druyan in a few minutes. You've got to feel anxious, but also very excited. There's a lot of emotions. Certainly, I'm very proud of having gotten this far, putting this team together and this great stories we've had in getting to this point, international stories, some of them very bureaucratic, some of them very complicated internationally,

even arranging some of the quick flights back and forth to and from Russia so that we could look at the, get equipment back and forth on the project. But also the really challenging technical ones. This is a very much more complicated spacecraft than we ever planned for. This is going to be quite a machine when it gets up into orbit. And some of the technical challenges that were solved. So I feel very proud of our team. I feel very proud of the people that have financed the project, the Cosmos Studios and Andrian's loyal support, the early support by Joe Firmage, the generous donation of Peter Lewis, the members of the Planetary Society who several times have come in with their really strong, powerful support, wanting us to take the risk, even though I think many of them think it may not work.

They even wanted us to take the risk, no matter what was involved in that. So I'm feeling very proud of the team. I'm feeling very anxious. Yes, I'm thinking about what's the one thing we didn't think of among those hundred thousand things we did. And I'm thinking about our Russian colleagues who've worked tirelessly, many of them without pay for extra hours in extraordinarily loyal and supportive ways. It's going to be a terrific effort. I'm very anxious to see it go. I'd going to be a terrific effort. I'm very anxious to see it go. I'd like to take a little vacation. I haven't had one in a few years, but I'm really anxious to

sit back and watch our craft in orbit fly overhead. So I hope that all the listeners here will be doing the same thing, looking overhead and watching that sail go by. We look forward to it. And this is far from the last time we're going to spend time on Planetary Radio talking about Cosmos 1, the solar sail. Thanks very much. We'll have you back soon. You're welcome, and I want to come back and talk to the members and talk to our many listeners about it. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to come back with, well, we talked about mom and pop.

If you're pop, she must be mom. Well, we talked about mom and pop. If you're pop, she must be mom. Ann Druyan of Cosmos Studios. As we continue this special consideration of the imminent launch of Cosmos 1, the solar sail. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars.

We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits.

You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. Those words from Carl Sagan may have been in Annie Druyan's mind as she committed her new venture, Cosmos Studios, to support of the solar sail project. She recently joined us from her headquarters in upstate New York.

Annie, you, at least as much as anybody else that I can think of, are responsible for Cosmos One. Reaching this stage with the launch of the first solar sail really imminent as we speak. This has got to have you pretty excited. Oh, my heart is pounding. You know, when you have a project that has a five-year lead time, you have plenty of time to fantasize about the outcome. And so, of course, now that we're coming into the stretch, I'm just so tremendously

excited. I have to just take exception with one thing you said, though, and that is the indispensable person. I think that if there's any one such individual on this project, it would have to be Louis Friedman, the director and project manager, who really has had this dream for 30-odd years, wrote the textbook on solar sailing, and really is the guiding light behind the mission. Why did Cosmos Studios go in this direction? Why are you underwriting really a pioneering space mission? I know that you can also speak eloquently for your husband and collaborator, Carl Sagan, and have on many occasions, but as a business, was there a business model behind this?

Well, it was a kind of, like most things in life, it was a happy, fortuitous set of circumstances that were probably completely unrelated. of circumstances that were probably completely unrelated. But it was in 2000, of course, the Internet bubble had yet to burst, and we were able to raise some serious money from that community to found Cosmos Studios. And so the question of an advertising campaign to launch the enterprise came up. At the same moment, Lou Friedman mentioned to me that because of this capability of converting these intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Russian submarine fleet into buses for spacecraft at a very cost-effective rate,

it was possible for us to attempt a first in the history of space exploration for less than $4 million. Now, I remember thinking to myself that an advertising campaign to launch Cosmos Studios, which would be a disposable thing that few people would remember and certainly wouldn't make any difference to anyone years from now, was about the same cost. make any difference to anyone years from now, was about the same cost. And so it seemed logical to me that if we were going to launch Cosmos Studios, we should do it with something that was meaningful and that beautifully symbolized not only the turning of a real weapon of mass destruction as opposed to the imaginary kind, not only the transformation of a weapon of mass destruction into a means for advancing our ability to explore the cosmos,

it seemed to me that this was pure Carl Sagan. I remember thinking there was just no question that's how we'd go. Whether or not we could monetize this remained to be seen. But that wasn't really the point. The point is, we wanted to awaken the largest number of people on the planet Earth to the possibilities that would unfold were we to turn our cleverness, our science, our technology to humane purposes, as opposed to using it as a gun aimed at our children's heads. So there was just no question from that moment.

I was almost ashamed to bring up such a practical concept as a business plan in connection with something that is such a beautiful and, dare I say, romantic concept. There is something about just the description of a solar sail, this idea of sailing on the light of the sun, which certainly has a romance to it. It is romantic. I mean, learning how to ride the light. I don't think there's anything more elegant on Earth than a sailboat being driven across the oceans of the planet by the winds, leaving nothing in its wake. It's just such a magnificent way of traveling. And so the idea of translating that beauty and gracefulness into a means of space exploration was just irresistible.

And whether or not we'll make any money on this remains to be seen. We haven't yet, but we've certainly had a kind of spiritual nourishment from this enterprise, a pride in the people we work with on their part for being associated with something which is so forward-looking and so bold and audacious that I think we've already gotten our money's worth in terms of the rewards that we've reaped from it. We only have a minute left for this just preliminary conversation as we lead up to the launch of Cosmos One. What is your role now, and where do you think you will be when the launch takes place?

I have been given the lofty title of program director, which I cherish. And my role has been really to listen to lose frequent reports from Russia and elsewhere about the progress of the mission. The most important thing I've done, I think, is just to be patient and to say, you know, whatever is most likely to lead to a successful outcome is really what we're about. You know, we're just very proud of the fact that we've stood by and been willing to wait through the kinds of delays and sometimes disappointments that are, you know, really just part and parcel of being in the space business. And at the cutting edge.

Yes, and to answer your other question, I'll be at Mission Control in Pasadena at the Planetary Society. You know that this is a two-stage experience. First, there's the launch, which is suspenseful enough, but then four days later, we deploy the massive 50-meter triangular highly reflective sails as the spacecraft opens up something like a massive 110-foot-across flower and becomes, we hope, a naked eye object the world over. Yeah, we'll be watching for that new highly mobile light in the sky.

Andrian, thank you so much for having this initial brief conversation with us. I know we're going to be talking to you again over the next few weeks, and we sure look forward to seeing you both for the launch and for that magnificent unfurling of the first solar sail. Thank you so much. Andruyan, the head of Cosmos Studios and underwriter of the Cosmos 1 solar sail project, has been our guest. She will, as we said, return to Planetary Radio as we approach that first ever launch of a solar sail. We're going to return with Bruce Betts

and this week's edition of What's Up right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. Solar sails must have large surface area in order to generate enough thrust to accelerate a spacecraft. But why must they also be thin? The answer lies in Newton's second law. That law states that the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the amount of force being applied to it,

but is inversely proportional to the object's mass. In other words, the more massive an object, the slower it will accelerate under the same amount of force. Because solar sails have to have a very large surface area in order to generate any amount of thrust, it is tough to make their mass low enough for their thrust to have any effect. A sail made of regular aluminum foil would have 10 times the mass of the Planetary Society's Mylar sail and would consequently accelerate 10 times slower. Any sail designed to propel

a spacecraft to the outer solar system or beyond will have to be much thinner than that. Materials that are thin enough, light enough, reflective enough, and cheap enough don't exist yet, but engineers are working hard to develop them. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We finished the first of our shows leading up to the launch of Cosmos 1, the solar sail, with Bruce Betts. So we have a bit of tradition here. Well, we heard from Emily, too, but she talked about solar sails. So you must be excited about this, too. I am, but a lot of us are feeling the light pressure.

How about I tell you what's up in the sky? Yeah. Well, at some point, solar sail will be up. And don't forget to come to planetary.org and read our solar sail watch pages, where you can learn how to see it in the night sky. And you will see predictions of where it will be once we get to launch time. In terms of what you can see right now, go out and look at some bright planets. We've got Jupiter looking really bright, pretty much overhead, just after sunset, very bright.

We've also got Venus in the west, just following the sun, but getting easier and easier to see as the days go by, getting higher and higher. But low in the west, Venus, brightest star-like object in the sky, Jupiter just behind it. And we also have Saturn in the west, which will be closing towards Venus over the next few weeks. It is getting lower in the sky. And in fact, stay tuned, in about a month, we've got a very compact trio of planets when Saturn, Venus, and Mercury all get really, really close and snuggle up next to each other. Ooh.

But not yet. So for now, go out in the pre-dawn sky and check out Mars hanging out over there in the east before dawn. All right. What else is happening up there and out there? Random Space Fact! Neptune's rings were originally thought to be ring arcs because they actually have large variations in density along some of the rings.

So they're much thicker in some places than in others in these thin rings that go around the planet. And it turns out these density variations are held in place by shepherding moons, little moons on each side that work to keep the mass more on one side of the ring than on the other. So kind of funky and kind of unique in the solar system. I just saw a cool image of a little tiny moon just discovered by Cassini that was keeping one of those rings in line, but was giving it kind of a wavy edge, kind of a scalloped edge. It was very cool. Yes, there's some very cool things Cassini's been seeing of the way the little moons have been interacting,

causing these wavy areas and all sorts of neat stuff. On to trivia. Okay, on to trivia. We asked you before. I don't know what we asked them before. Farthest naked eye object. Okay. Okay, we asked you before what the farthest naked eye object was.

The farthest object you can see with your naked eye. How'd we do, Matt? Lots of answers. And everybody had what we are taking as the right answer. There was one person who wrote in with a response that was much more complex, must have been a serious amateur astronomer. I'm ashamed to say, wouldn't have been the winner, but I'm ashamed to say I don't remember his name and I couldn't find the entry. I'm sorry, I never lose these. But he said that there may actually be something farther than what most people told us is the farthest naked eye object.

Our winner this week, Ernest G. Cook from Lanette, Alabama. Ernest, like a lot of other people said, the Andromeda Galaxy, a little more than 2 million light years away. Indeed, kind of profound that you can look out there, see it just looks like a fuzzy patch to the sky if you know where you're looking. But that fuzzy patch, the light left it about two and a half million years ago. And I'm sure you can imagine other things. Perhaps you can, but certainly see them, but certainly for the average viewer, Andromeda Galaxy. And so that's what we're taking. And you probably got to be someplace pretty dark, wouldn't? Yeah, probably like, I don't know, the far side of the moon. Yeah, that'd be a good spot.

Oh, you mean the Andromeda Galaxy. Yes, to see the Andromeda Galaxy, you're not going to do it from here or any other major metropolitan area because it will blend in with all the other fuzz that's all over the sky. But if you're in a dark site, if you get out your star charts, you can indeed see this with your naked eye and see it even better as an even better-looking fuzzy patch if you use a telescope or binoculars. Ernest Cook, you're going to get a solar sail poster. We're going to put it in the mail to you soon.

And here is another chance to win a Cosmos 1 solar sail poster. To win, answer the following question. Tell me why sunspots look dark. Why do sunspots look dark when you observe them in visible light? Get us your answer by writing to... Planetary.org slash radio. Go to that website. It'll tell you how to enter.

And do it by the 30th, May 30th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's where we live. May 30th, 2 p.m. Pacific time to get your entry in for this newest space trivia contest, part of What's Up. Faboo, fabulosa. All right, everybody, we done? We're done. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about poppies. Thank you, and good night.

Poppies. Poppies, we'll put them to... Sorry. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week. He and his little dog, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week. He and his little dog, too! He and his little dog, here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society.

We'll be back next week with more from the Final Frontier. We hope you'll join us.