Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Exploring the Latest Planetary Science Discoveries With Emily Lakdawalla

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

A holiday edition of Planetary Radio welcomes the Planetary Society’s Senior Editor back from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Emily reports on amazing developments in planetary science she discovered at the huge conference.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A long talk with Emily Lakdawalla, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Happy Holidays, you dear PlanRad listeners, you! A special, slightly simplified but no less informative show in these days of Christmas and so many other celebrations, we'll spend most of it with one of your favorites. Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla has just returned from one of the biggest planetary science conferences of the year, and she has lots of news to share from around our cheery little solar system.

Later, we'll enjoy a what's up visit with Bruce Betts that could win you your very own model of the light sail solar sail CubeSat. Bruce and I will also welcome a surprise visitor. Let's get at it with Emily. Emily, welcome back to the show and welcome back from AGU. Big, big show as usual. That's right. AGU is the American Geophysical Union Meeting. It's a union of a wide variety of scientific disciplines, mostly focused on Earth. So that means it's larger than most of the meetings I go to.

There's usually around 24,000 geophysicists or geoscientists of different kinds attending this meeting. It is just vast. That is a lot of scientists in one place at one time. It really is. It's kind of overwhelming. And for that reason, I'll be honest, it's not one of my favorite meetings. There's just too much going on. Although one of my absolute favorite things about AGU is the fact that because there's so much science going on, practically every science journalist shows up. And so it's a real great reunion for those of

us in the press room. Yeah, now you're making me feel bad that I wasn't able to make it this year. But you include in a post that you've already put up, the first of the posts that you may be doing to cover what you heard about at AGU. This was from December 13th, and we're going to get to the actual topic in a moment. But you've got a photo of just the poster session room, which is cavernous. It was so large. How large was it? I don't have a joke prepared for that, but it was, I wanted a razor scooter, honestly. The conference was held in New Orleans and they have a uniquely long and one-dimensional conference hall, and I really wanted a scooter to get around. A linear hall, it sounds like. Okay. Well, about this post, this December 13th post,

new findings from Io, courtesy of an instrument carried by Juno. And this was especially cool because I didn't expect to see any particularly good science on the moons of Jupiter from Juno's instrument package. But this is an imager on Juno. It's not JunoCam, which was included for outreach purposes. It's an instrument called JIRAM. It's a infrared imager. It sees in wavelengths, infrared wavelengths, about one to five microns, which is the wavelength at which Jupiter's interior shines in thermal energy. So it's cool for imaging Jupiter storms because Jupiter's heat shines in thermal energy. So it's cool for imaging Jupiter storms because Jupiter's heat glows from the inside and it kind of backlights some of the

storms and things on the exterior of Jupiter. Well, it just so happens that there's another thing in the Jupiter system that has a lot of radiant heat, and that's the volcanic moon Io. And JIRAM's images of Io were really cool. It doesn't get a huge number of pixels across Io. Io is a fairly small and distant target, and it's not easy for them to get very many images. There may only be like half a dozen opportunities in the whole mission. But what you can see are brilliant spots shining from Io's actively erupting volcanoes. And like everything else with Juno, this imager gets a unique polar view that we can't get from Earth. And I talked with several Io scientists, including my friends,

Rosalie Lopez and Julie Rathbun, who are going to be so thrilled to be able to add this data into their analyses, but they hadn't seen it yet either and weren't at the talks. So they were filled with jealousy as I was telling them about these cool pictures. You know, I was going to ask you about that because you mentioned in the post that none of the other, none of the IO scientists that you ran into knew about this. And I guess that's part of the problem you were talking about, about this being such a big show. Yeah, it's just really hard to find things.

And so, you know, that's okay. They missed their opportunity to see them this time, but the images will become public before long. In fact, for all I know, they could already be public. I checked and that particular instrument has released data to the planetary data system. And I dug in and I pulled out one picture at random and it's really cool, but I haven't had a chance to dig any deeper into the data set. And I'm sure that after my post, there are various IO scientists who are going to be going and trying to do that now. I don't know if this particular data is public yet. There is a proprietary period, as with all data, but it's not very long.

So within a year for certain, all the Io scientists who want to will be able to get their hands on this data. All right. Well, learning about Io is just more gravy delivered by Juno. But its main target, Jupiter, there was a good deal of data returned from that big planet as well, right? Yes, there was. And, you know, the Juno mission is focused on the deep interior of Jupiter. And I saw some really cool results from AGU. They're unfortunately a little bit hard to explain because in order to get at the interior of Jupiter, you have to do a lot of physics and you have to deal with gravity and the magnetic field.

I'm currently working on a post that I hope will be up before most people listen to this podcast, but we'll see. It's a tough topic to explain, but I am working on a post explaining how gravity data enabled Juno scientists to figure out how deep the motion of the clouds goes into Jupiter's interior? And the answer is about 2,000 or 3,000 kilometers, which is an interesting number because it's pretty deep. I mean, if you think about it, 3,000 kilometers, that's roughly the diameter of the moon. And so that's how deep that cloud motion goes into Jupiter. And if you're an atmospheric scientist, 3,000 kilometers is also a large number. You're talking about 1% of the mass of Jupiter participating in that

dynamic flow of the atmosphere. But if you're a physicist, 3,000 kilometers is hardly anything in the diameter of a planet that's 150,000 kilometers across. And so you can almost just kind of wave it away and deal with the rest of Jupiter's interior as a solid ball. So it's an interesting piece of news for a lot of different Jupiter disciplines. Yeah, I mean, just compare that figure, 3,000 kilometers, to the depth of the atmosphere, the thickness of our own atmosphere on Earth. As in all other things, Jupiter dwarfs what's happening down here. We'll just mention in passing, there was a story out of AGU about the Great Red Spot

and work done by Juno that it extends at least, I think the figure was 300 kilometers down. But I know that's not something that you actually got to look into while you were at the show. Yes, that's right. I didn't actually see any of the talks on that, but it had to do with results from a different instrument, not gravity science, not magnetometer. That was from the microwave radiometer, which has a set of antennae that can see to different depths in Jupiter's atmosphere. You know, one interesting thing that was coming out of the meeting about that particular instrument is that the amount of ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere varies from place to place. And that's a problem for the microwave radiometer team because ammonia is a strong absorber of radio radiation. So wherever there's more ammonia, the microwave radiometer can't see as deep.

And so it makes their ability to analyze the clouds with depth. It doesn't make it unable to analyze it, but it makes it a heck of a lot more complicated. So that story was kind of an interesting one to get the beginning of. I think we'll be hearing more about that later. Complicated planet. How about JunoCam, that camera that was supposedly up there just for the rest of us, but has actually ended up doing a lot of great science? Well, as Planetary Society co-founder Bruce Murray always argued, you know, you have to put cameras on planetary missions, because they engage the public, but also because it really reinforces science. If nothing else, it provides context, but then camera images can give you unexpected science all the time.

And so the JunoCam images are just stunning to look at. And they've revealed really interesting things about the poles. Both of Jupiter's poles have what are called circumpolar cyclones. So it's this cluster of storms, little round whirly storms that aren't directly at the pole, but are marching in a circle around the pole. In the North Pole, there are eight of these. So they kind of form an octagonal shape around the pole. Although Candy Hansen pointed out, she's a scientist who's the head of JunoCam. She pointed out that every alternate one is a little closer to the pole. And the next one's a little farther from the pole. They sort of zig and zag back and forth, which she called it two embedded squares. One person's two embedded squares, another person octagon. I'm not really

sure what it is. But anyway, it's these eight things marching around the pole. You can't actually see the pole right now, but not the North Pole, because Jupiter does have a tiny bit of axial tilt and it's winter at the North Pole right now. At the South, there are five circumpolar storms forming a pentagon or maybe a pentacle. And if you can imagine this, they're marching around the pole doing their arcane dark ritual calling forth who knows what. I tend to think of it as a polar conga line. I think, Matt, I'll give you that in the North Pole because of the zigging and the zagging and we'll have the dark ritual at the South Pole. Okay. The dark side and the light side.

Okay. That's right. A little Star Wars reference to work in here. Going back to gravity, how about Saturn, where you also learned some things about gravity? That's right. It's been really cool to have Juno orbiting Jupiter in its polar orbit doing gravity and magnetic field science and other things at the same time that Cassini was doing many of the same things. And I saw a few of the Cassini talks, and there were people working on both Juno and

Cassini gravity teams at the same time. And both of them, it was interesting, were finding signatures of the east-west winds on the giant planets in the gravity data. And I had no idea that you could actually detect winds in gravity data, but a scientist on Twitter, when I asked this question on Twitter, helped answer my failure to understand this particular question. It has to do with when you have winds blowing east in the same direction that the planet rotates, then they're moving faster than other stuff. And centrifugal force kind of makes those winds puff out that part of the planet, de-densifying that part of the planet a little bit, which shows up in gravity data. part of the planet, de-densifying that part of the planet a little bit, which shows up in gravity data. And so you can tell where the winds are and how deep they flow based upon the gravity data. That's amazing. Was this expected or was this a surprising conclusion? It turns out to have been expected. It's just something that I didn't know about from gravity data. And so the problem is that you have to get quite close to the planet to be able

to be sensitive to those differences. And Cassini wasn't sufficiently close until near the end of the mission, not right those final orbits, but the ones that were orbiting just outside the F ring and the final orbits allowed them to finally be sensitive enough to begin to pick up these differences. And Juno, of course, always had an orbit that was close enough to the planet to check it out. So it was just really interesting to compare Saturn and Jupiter. And I don't think that the final results are out yet. But what I can say is that it's generally consistent with Jupiter and Saturn, both being these gas giant planets with these deep winds.

But Jupiter is definitely a bigger planet than Saturn, and its interior is clearly behaving differently. Emily Lackawalla has more revelations from the annual meeting of the AGU, including the latest from the Curiosity rover on Mars. We'll see you after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. And I wanted to let you know that right now, Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now.

We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition2017. Thank you. You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the Planetary Society, this holiday season or any time of year. Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space.

Because, come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We continue a special conversation with Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily paid a quick but jam-packed visit to this year's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans. She was joined there by well over 20,000 geoscientists and scientists who devote their professional lives to learning about other worlds. and scientists who devote their professional lives to learning about other worlds. With the recent spectacular end of the Cassini mission, it's no surprise that there were many presentations devoted to Saturn.

Did you hear any evidence that we are closer to knowing how long a day lasts on Saturn? Sadly, no. I did go to that talk. Michelle Doherty is the woman you want to talk to. She's the head of the magnetometer instrument on Cassini. And they still have not been able to tell the difference between the tilt of Saturn's magnetic field and the tilt of its polar axis. They are, for all intents and purposes, identical. And they shouldn't be, according to our understanding of how magnetic fields are generated in the first place. So that's a real head scratcher. And it's one of those things that's like, it's on one hand, it's frustrating. And on the other hand, it's amazing. You know, nature keeps on surprising us. And it's what makes science so much fun. You know, it's a puzzle that's really fun to be puzzled about it.

It would be nice to finally make that measurement and say, okay, yes, we've put the nail in this coffin. But, but nope, more data is needed. Another mission is needed. And we still don't understand what makes Saturn's magnetic field. You told me before we started to record that talking about the gravity of Saturn would give you a nice segue into talking about the dust that surrounds that planet and is also, of course, makes up a good part of the rings. That's right. Because in order to get the spacecraft close enough to this kind of gravity study, they had to send the spacecraft between the rings and the planet, which was wholly uncharted territory.

No spacecraft has ever passed so close to a planet in between the rings and the planet. One of the pieces of information they were looking to get was the mass of the rings. And I didn't get a final answer on that from AGU. They're still working on it. But it's definitely less than two times that of Mimas. Estimating what the mass of the rings, they're full of uncertainty. There are big uncertainty bars, but they all come out with the same number, which is 0.4 times the mass of Mimas, which I think is, yeah, it's smaller than people expected. And it generally

suggests that the rings are relatively young. Take us back through the current thinking about how the rings were formed in the first place. I know that we used to think that they were possibly a moon that was broken up by getting too close to the planet. That definitely could be. I think the relatively young age, what that means in planetary formation speak is that the rings did not form with Saturn. They are a later invention by Saturn one way or another, quite likely by the breakup of a moon somehow. But those details are not what you can get out of the last Cassini data, but you can tell if this mass holds up that the rings probably did not form when Saturn did. How about the structure of the rings? When you and I were joined by Linda Spilker and others on stage not long ago, just a couple of

days after the end of the Cassini mission, one of the things Linda talked about were those so-called ring propellers. Yeah, those are really cool, aren't they? I saw a lot of really neat images of the propellers taken close to the end of the mission. And one of the things that I learned is that the very largest propellers, which the team has nicknamed after various famous aviators like Blériot and Earhart, they are probably at their centers is a moonlet that's just too small to keep a gap open. And so we're talking about moons that are about one to one and a half kilometers in diameter. So in a way, what makes a moon at Saturn? Well, it has to clear its orbit.

So Pan and Atlas are moons and Blariariot and Earhart are not. And we just won't talk about Janus Nepometheus, which share an orbit. So maybe it's a bad joke. But the point is that these things, they're not small objects. I mean, they're a kilometer in size. They're as wide as the New Orleans Convention Center is long. But they're small enough to – they're really not moons. They're right on the cusp of just being gigantic ring particles. They aren't able to clear out a gap in the rings. And instead they build these really cool looking propeller

structures. Maybe they can start a club with Pluto. Maybe they should. Let's turn to the red planet. And I want to give a little program note. Next week, we'll be talking to your colleague Colin Dundas on the work that's been done on those recurring slope lineae, which sadly probably don't contain the amount of surface water that we thought. But you learned some other things. And I know, of course, that you are continuing to keep track of what's going on with Curiosity. Your book will be coming out before too long. Yes, it will. And there's a second book in the works on the science of the mission. So I'm still following the science very intently. The Curiosity sessions at AGU were incremental, as most of these science talks are. And there were a couple of negative results, by which I mean that they didn't get a lot of new discoveries out of it, just more head scratching. So for instance, I saw a talk on the methane measurements being

made by Curiosity. Curiosity, before another previous AGU, had recently detected a huge burst of methane that persisted over several measurements and then vanished again. And so they've been checking for methane periodically. They found that there's a seasonal signal in the very small but detectable amount of methane in the atmosphere. And they haven't quite figured out why that is. But they haven't seen another one of these big bursts again. So they're not really sure what made it. They were throwing out some kind of ad hoc hypotheses like there is some kind of reservoir underground and some new fissure or something just released some methane to the surface and then it blew away. It's not very satisfying, but it may well turn out to be the truth.

So nothing necessarily related to biological activity, I guess. Absolutely not. And, you know, of course, you should keep an open mind. not. So, and you know, it's, of course, you should keep an open mind. It's certainly possible that it's related to biological activity in the subsurface, but it is absolutely not necessary to explain it. So it's one of those extraordinary claims things. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so not the water we expected, and probably maybe not the methane either, but we'll keep looking. What about just looking at the structure of Mars as Curiosity climbs higher and higher in those hills? Yeah, so Curiosity has recently reached this feature that used to be

known as Hematite Ridge and is now known as Vera Rubin Ridge for the astronomer. And it's this thing that is really obvious from orbit. It's erosionally resistant. It's high standing. There's a signature of hematite in its rocks, which is an iron oxide that's generally thought to form in association with liquid water. And so Curiosity climbed on top of it. Everybody was really excited. The rocks look quite different. They have a very different appearance to them. The landscapes are gorgeous from Curiosity's cameras. But frustratingly, the chemistry instruments on Curiosity haven't been able to actually detect why these things appear so different from the rocks that Curiosity has been driving on through 300 meters of vertical climb to date. They have the same pinstripe layering, very thin layering that suggests that they formed at the bottom of a basin, a lake basin with very still water.

They have the same general elemental composition. It's not totally clear why it should be more resistant to erosion or what makes their different appearance from space. It would be really nice if Curiosity could drill. Curiosity can't drill right now. Instead, one thing Curiosity can do is keep driving. And so they're going to keep driving, keep adding topography, keep doing their elemental composition surveys, and hopefully they'll get the drill back in action. And when they do, they can then maybe circle back and get at some of this stuff with the mineralogical analysis. There is some optimism about getting that drill going again, isn't there? drill going again, isn't there? Absolutely, there is. The problem with the drill is that the feed mechanism is stalled. So usually Curiosity braces its arm against a rock and then uses a mechanism inside the turret on the drill to just push the drill forward into the ground. That mechanism

is bulky. It's not clear that they can make it move, but it's not clear that you know they can keep they can make it move but it's not clear if by trying to make it move it's going to wind up just failing in some bad position so they've fed it all the way out and are preparing to use the drill by just using the arm to push the drill into the rock and so i think they're fairly far forward on getting that ready to work the problem is that they also also needed the drill feed mechanism to align the drill sample chamber with the part of the turret that sieves and portions out sample for delivery to the other instruments. And without being able to do that, it's going to be a lot harder to deliver to the instruments. We're actually talking about holding the drill bit

over one of the openings and reverse augering directly from the drill into the instrument, which is, again, a totally doable thing. But there's an awful lot of testing they're going to have to do on Earth and especially on Mars before they're ready to actually proceed with doing this operationally. So even if they were 100% certain now that all of that was going to work, we're still looking at months of testing before they'll be ready to actually use it for science. And hopefully we will have months and even years more of this mighty rover exploring Mars. But if tomorrow we suddenly were to stop hearing back from Curiosity,

would the mission scientists and engineers be able to say, yes, this was an unqualified success? Oh, yes. They met their mission success requirements a long time ago. I think that NASA missions, Mars missions have set kind of an impossible standard for mission longevity. You're always going to be measuring Curiosity against Opportunity, which is after all still going on Mars. Although one of the reasons that Opportunity is as nimble as it is, is because it's lost a couple of its instruments. So they only have a couple to use. It makes planning it really easy. And I think by the same token, Curiosity has been moving right along for a while, except with occasional weeks of trouble, because they haven't been drilling. They'll get what they can out of this mission. Anything that we get out of it is a bonus

now. I don't think they're, it's certainly not over by a long shot. Even if the drill never returns to service, we've still got at least another five years of roving and doing elemental analyses and climbing the mountains. So there's still a lot more to look at. And I hope they get the drill back because it's real frustrating to be looking at these rocks and not be able to deliver to the sample chamber. But JPL scientists, the mission, they'll always press to get more science out of whatever capabilities the rover has, and we'll be happy for all of it. Godspeed curiosity. Before we go, something that we've talked about in the past, but it bears repeating,

is the importance of attending sessions like AGU, where so many scientists are able to get together. Talk about the value and why you enjoy it so much. There's so many reasons. For one thing, it's interesting to be able to look at the science and process and see how conclusions get built up over time. Quite often, I actually have an opportunity to see scientists go off in a direction that they later decide wasn't the right one. And then they change course before the next meeting and come up with a different interpretation. It's also just really important for this kind of cross-pollination between disciplines where you can have atmospheric scientists talking with the Mars surface scientists and all this other interdisciplinary mixing that happens not only at the sessions, but also at all the social events that happen around the sessions.

And at those social events, one of the things that I thought was most powerful this time was I witnessed a good friend of mine who's a senior scientist giving some career advice to a much younger person where they were worried about the younger person's, shall we say, political environment in terms of the departmental politics. shall we say, political environment in terms of the departmental politics. And so this kind of mentoring, face-to-face mentoring that maybe you don't want an email record of, that kind of thing happens at these meetings too, where mentors and leaders can help reinforce the younger people who are coming forward and help them have positive careers. So there's so many good reasons. And I should take this

opportunity. I'm so grateful to the members of the Planetary Society for the financial support that enables me and others to go to these conferences, to witness these discussions, to see the science being built, and to participate as a member of the community. It's incredibly valuable, and we couldn't do it without member support. Absolutely. Thank you for adding that, Emily. And I hope I can join you there next year when AGU once again convenes to gather some of the best in planetary science. When does that book come out? It comes out in early March, I think. I don't have a firm date, but yeah, you can pre-order it now. And it's called, what's the title again? The Design and Engineering of Curiosity.

Okay. We will talk about that more with Emily Lakdawalla, but we'll have opportunities to talk with her, I'm sure, many times before that book actually appears at your local bookstore and all the other usual places. Emily, thanks so much. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Matt. She is the Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, just back from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Emily Lakdawalla. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

As usual, we are joined by the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts, who will tell us about the night sky. And we've got something cool to give away, which you have a lot to do with, a light sail. We're not giving away a light sail. What? What? Wait a second. Well, we figured we could loan it to somebody while it's waiting to be loaded on the Falcon Heavy.

No? All right. Well, maybe we'll give away a model. Okay. All right. All right. That's maybe we'll give away a model. Okay. All right. All right. That's okay. But not our engineering model.

No, not the engineering model. That's too cool. That's going to my house. No! You're so confused today. Well, set me straight. What's up in the night sky? Pre-dawn planet land.

That's a technical term. We've got Jupiter in the pre-dawn east looking super bright, getting higher. And we've got Mars looking reddish, much dimmer above it. That's the planets going on in the night sky. Everyone else is hiding pretty much at this point. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was 1968 that Apollo 8 went into orbit around the moon. First humans hanging out near the went into orbit around the moon. First humans hanging out near the moon, orbiting around the moon. And then 2003, all those years ago, Mars Express, the European Space Agency orbiter, went into orbit around Mars.

And it's still working, 14 years later. Very cool. I don't know if you remember, but we have a special Random Space Fact intro for you. Oh, I do remember now. Let's intro the intro. But everybody knows who he is. So here he is. Happy holiday greetings, everyone. I'm Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society. And from the entire staff here, we would like to wish you a happy Random Space Fact! That was fun. So for Random Space Fact, we continue our journey into what's happened in space exploration since the beginning of planetary radio in November of 2002. We moved to the inner solar system at Venus.

We had a successful messenger flyby and two successful orbiters, ESA's Venus Express and JAXA's Akatsuki orbiter. And then going a step farther, Mercury. We had only the second spacecraft ever to visit Mercury. The entire Messenger mission occurred during the course of planetary radio, including their three flybys and their period in orbit. I would say that this has been the greatestys and their period in orbit. I would say that this has been the greatest decade and a half in the history of space exploration, but I'd be lying because there were some pretty cool things that happened

in the 60s. There were, but in terms of exploration and especially getting to that next level of exploration. So we'd done the flybys, but we've introduced a lot more orbiters, a lot more detailed science and exploration. And Mercury, a reminder, we didn't know what half of Mercury looked like before Messenger got there because Mariner 10 only saw roughly one half of the planet back in the 70s.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. That has made for a great decade and a half review. And it's all because of you, Matt. And we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you how many spacecraft have either flown by or orbited Jupiter. How'd we do, Matt? We had lots of people come up with the correct answer for this one. Among them, Steve Peterson of Clayton, North Carolina, a longtime listener, but get this,

he has not won in nearly five years, but I believe he has. He says nine spacecraft have either stuck around or made a quick visit to the King of Planets. That is indeed true. You want to identify them for us? I would love to. We had a Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and then we brought the orbiter Galileo and the sun studying spacecraft Ulysses that use Jupiter flyby to change its inclination of its orbit. And then Cassini-Huygens, which I've counted as one because they were together when they flew by Jupiter. New Horizons on its way to Pluto. And then Juno, a second orbiter that's there working right now.

Good rundown. And keep those names in mind because they're going to come up in one of the humorous entries that we have this week. A lot of people pointed out that people forget about Ulysses, possibly because it didn't have a camera, but also because it really was a solar mission. It was, and I find it fascinating that for a solar mission, they went out to Jupiter, but it was to do this massive inclination change so that they could fly over the poles of the sun rather than in the equatorial plane. So here are some of the others that we got. Andrew Kerr in Bethesda, Maryland, who we hear from pretty frequently, he says that number of nine will hopefully climb to 12

following the 2020s launch of JUICE from the European Space Agency, an India probe, which I did not know about, and of course, the Europa Clipper from NASA that we're all waiting for. Yeah, I'm juiced. Chris White, obviously a bit younger than me. I don't know about you.

He says, nice to see that we've been visiting Jupiter my whole life. Yeah, well, you're really old. True enough. Gabriel Eggers of Atlanta, Georgia. He says, despite not being a dedicated Jupiter mission, the short video New Horizons took of the plume erupting from Tavashtar Patare on Io is one of the coolest pieces of space imagery. I bet you agree. Yeah, no, it's amazing what some of these flybys did, and particularly New Horizons, but also the orbiters. It's just a lot of good stuff going on in the Jupiter system.

orbiters. There's just a lot of good stuff going on in the Jupiter system. Bjorn Getta says one should also not forget the odyssey that Discovery 1 made in roughly 2001, and the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov that followed it in 2010. I'm sure most of our audience gets the Kubrick references there. Finally, this from Martin Hajoski. He says this is a pioneering question. Like Galileo at his telescope, I was a voyager researching this issue. It opened up new horizons. Though, Junot, it was easier than the Ulysses Trails.

It caused my absence, but now that I've answered, my wife Cassini again. Ha ha ha! I was so curious what he was going to do with Cassini. All right. Well, thank you, Martin. And thank you, everybody else, for writing in.

Oh, by the way, the winner that we have this week, Steve Peterson, he said that thanks for saying that a previous winner had donated her itelescope.net account to a school because he said he didn't enter some of the previous contests because he didn't think he'd be able to use the prize. So now everybody knows that they'll be able to donate that 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, which we will once again be offering this week. Stephen also won that Chop Shop robots in space poster, the one that's designed for kids but really is fun for everybody and glows in the dark. We're going to give him his choice of the three posters in that set from chopshopstore.com, which you can see in the Planetary Society store at the Chop Shop store. I know it's confusing.

It's like nesting Russian dolls, but we're in there. We are ready, I believe, for the next contest. All right. Here's your question. What two orbiters are part of the next Mercury mission, BepiColombo? What two orbiters are part of BepiColombo? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And you've got until Wednesday, December 27th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us

the answer for this one. And if you have it right and are chosen by random.org, you'll get that 200-point itelescope.net account for doing astronomy all over the world through that nonprofit network. And you will get a half-scale of light sail, light sail two. That will, with any luck, will not be too long before it sets out for low Earth orbit and unfurls its wings. And it's not, like Bruce said, it's not the engineering model. This is sort of made of paper and fiberboard. But it's a pretty cool model.

And I have a quarter scale one sitting in front of me right now. Well, aren't you special? So you want to give us an update on what's going on with LightSail? Just a minute or two? Sure. We are in storage. The spacecraft's in storage right now at Ecliptic Enterprises. And we are awaiting word on timing, which all tracks backwards from the launch. The launch keeps slipping of the new SpaceX Falcon heavy. The first one conceptually will launch in the next month or two, and then we'll see where our launch is. But once,

once we have the timing worked out, then we will top off the batteries, put the spacecraft inside the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo provided P-Pod. That's the kind of jack-in-the-box deployer mechanism. Then it'll go to Air Force Research Lab in New Mexico to be integrated into the Georgia Tech Prox-1 spacecraft and given more testing in that configuration and then eventually integrated into the Falcon Heavy. But we're still working exciting stuff like regulatory applications and things like that and working on ground software. But in terms of the actual spacecraft, it is closed up and ready to go.

All right. Thank you for that. Can hardly wait. And I think we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky And think about squid, preferably somewhere in space. Thank you. And good night.

You did say squid? Space squid? Space squid. Of course. I wonder what they would do with their ink. I mean, is that where nebulas come from? Really big space squid. You don't want to meet him.

That's Bruce. Bruce, happy holidays. Happy holidays, Matt to meet him. That's Bruce. Bruce, happy holidays. Happy holidays, Matt, and to all of our listeners. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena,

California, and is made possible by its joyful members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Will you do us a favor? Take a moment to give the show a rating or review, or if you're hearing us on your wonderful local public radio station, let them know how much you enjoy Planetary Radio. Thanks, and one more time, happy holidays.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.