Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Exploring the Seas of Earth and Other Worlds

Episode Date: June 23, 2015

We return to the beautiful Aquarium of the Pacific in southern California for a fascinating conversation about ocean science. What we learn down here is furthering our research around the solar system. William Patzert, Jerry Schubel and Steven Vance join Mat Kaplan on stage. Emily Lakdawalla tells us what Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, has been doing lately. Bruce Betts is keeping his eye on converging Jupiter and Venus.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oceans, down here and up there, 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. It's back to the Aquarium of the Pacific this week, as we present a special conversation about the importance of learning more about the seas of Earth and the increasing number of oceans, past and present, that we are finding almost everywhere in our solar system. We'll also check in with Bruce Betts as the space trivia contest gets underway again.

We'll begin with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla's latest update from the once very wet surface of the Red Planet. Emily, another terrific report on the progress of Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Let's start with this wonderful topo map that you've created with help from some others. You know, it's funny, with all those wonderful images taken by Curiosity, this one is doing a better job, at least for me, of making me feel like I could be walking right there among these hills and valleys and buttes and so on. This topo map was really fun to work on. Of course, when you're

a geologist exploring a landscape, you do it, you do your mapping on a base topography map. And usually Mars landers, they land in places that are so flat that topography isn't really all that important. But Curiosity has driven far enough that she's started getting into some really serious topography. It's made driving a little bit challenging, but it's all part of the fun. And now she's climbing between buttes and up valleys and getting up to geologic contacts. It's really getting to be a lot of fun on this mission. All right, tell us about this pass that she has reached. This really looks like a geologist's paradise. It's so beautiful. We have here in this pass called Maria's Pass, we have a contact between two geologic units. Curiosity has been exploring for a while the Parump unit, which is a very light colored, very fine grained rock that likely formed

in rather still water. You can see from orbital images that the character of the rock changes very sharply. And we're getting to that new kind of rock. We've been calling it the washboard unit, but recently it looks like the team has switched to calling it the Stimson unit. And it erodes very differently. It looks like it's this cross-bedded sandstone. It could be from a river environment. It could be from a windblown environment.

We don't know yet. Curiosity has explored a couple different rock types in the past, but she's never really had a chance to explore the contact between them. And the contact can tell us a lot about the story of Mars. Does one grade into the other? Are we talking about an environment that shifted and changed very slowly? Or is there an unconformity in between them where there was erosion in between the deposition of the two different kinds of rocks? Is there a missing slice of Mars's history there? And while it would be sad to be missing some history, it would tell us that the geologic history of water in this place on Mars was very long. So it's a really exciting place to be

exploring for Curiosity. Curiosity hasn't quite gotten to the contact. They'll have to do that after Mars Conjunction is over. You mentioned very briefly some new technology you've used here to give us 360 degree views from Curiosity. Oh yeah, I've been trying to explore different ways of presenting the panoramic views that the rovers have. I've never really been satisfied because the panoramic views, they should wrap all the way around your head and give you a sense of being on Mars. Well, I found an app called RoundMe that combines with Google Cardboard. You can actually hold up a little viewer to your face like you're looking through a Viewmaster and turn your head and actually turn yourself around Mars. It's really cool.

Just one last thing. We're in a bonus time here because it's everybody's favorite ray gun on Mars. How is ChemCam doing? Oh, it's so exciting that ChemCam is really back in action. ChemCam is the frickin freaking laser beam on Curiosity's head and they use it to vaporize rocks and look at the composition. Well, unfortunately, the autofocus laser died some time ago and it's made it more difficult to use ChemCam. But they finally developed a new software patch that has enabled them to use their camera to actually figure out

what the best focus distance is and use that to focus the laser. And now they're back in action shooting rasters where they can go pew, pew, pew in a number of different locations. And that's really great for the kinds of rocks that Curiosity is exploring right now because they're pebbly. They have different compositions in different places. And with ChemCam back in action, they can now really explore that. Emily, we will talk with you again. It might be a couple of weeks, but when that happens, it'll be shortly before the New Horizons close encounter with Pluto, and we'll do an extended conversation,

and you'll tell us how that's going to work and what we should be watching for. Thank you so much, and looking forward to that. Me too. I can't wait for the Pluto flyby. That's Emily Lakdawalla. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Out to the Aquarium in the Pacific next for a conversation about oceans down here and up there. We live on a watery world, and ours isn't the only one in the neighborhood. NASA's solar system exploration motto used to be, follow the water.

They did, and we've found it almost everywhere. So with the recent announcement of a mission to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, Planetary Radio was invited back to the Aquarium of the Pacific. It's a beautiful and very popular destination on the edge of our planet's largest ocean. Here's how the evening got underway. Now in spite of loving Earth and loving the Aquarium, my day job, as you've heard, has a lot to do with talking to experts who work on, or at least with their robots on, or looking at other worlds, you know, much more exotic places that may not contain any life at all,

or at least not life as we know it, that phrase that I love to say. Then again, I think one of the things that is going to come out of the discussion tonight is how much many of those worlds have in common with what one of the founders of the Planetary Society, Carl Sagan, called our little pale blue dot. You're going to hear tonight about moons with oceans that are right in our solar backyard, and at least one other planet that once had vast seas of its own. And there's yet another that has seas and rivers and rain and storms and everything just like we have, except it's not water. And I'm sure that one's going to come up tonight as well. We're also going to learn about how improving our knowledge of Earth's seas

is enabling us to learn more about those on distant worlds. And I think we may also hear that the reverse is true as well, vice versa. The first of our special guests was William Patzert. Many of us in Southern California hear from him so regularly that he has been dubbed the prophet of California climate. Bill has been a scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab since 1983. His research there is focused on improving our understanding of Earth's climate and other environmental problems and challenges.

Bill was recently named one of the West's most influential experts on water issues. I can honestly say that I have sailed every ocean. I've dove under every ocean. And to make it even better, I've surf under every ocean and to make it even better I've surfed every ocean all right so you got a real expert here this evening we have neighbors if we look to our left the second planet from the Sun is a red planet it's a fiery planet it's a little closer to the Sun than we are and that planet of course is Venus look at some of the

facts about Venus. It's about the same size as the Earth. It has about 90% of our gravity. It's very similar in some ways, except the temperature on Venus is off scale. It's 462 degrees C. That is one hot planet. And it has an atmosphere. We have an atmosphere. The atmosphere is so heavy on Venus that the pressure is 92 times the atmospheric pressure here on Earth. And that atmosphere is mostly made up of CO2, about 96%. You know, some scientists speculate that the climate of Venus at one time was much more benign than we see today. It sort of replicates Dante's Inferno today. And so there has been a lot of speculation at one time that there were ancient oceans, maybe a billion years ago, two billion

years ago, on Venus. What probably happened to them is it evaporated. This is a perfect example. We all heard about greenhouse gases and greenhouse gas warming. This is it. This is greenhouse warming to the max. This is what happened when greenhouse warming goes totally off scale. Now if we look to the right, the fourth planet from the sun, interesting little planet.

It's about half the diameter of Earth. It has about a third of Earth's gravity. The surface temperature actually can be quite benign, 20 degrees C. That's about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, about what it is here in Long Beach in the evening. But the poles and the rest of the planet can get exceptionally cold. And so in contrast with Venus, this is a cold planet. It has a very thin atmosphere. So it's about one one-hundredths of Earth in contrast with Venus,

remember, which was 100 times greater. But the interesting thing about Mars, its thin little atmosphere, a lot like Venus, is about 96% CO2. So CO2 is going to be a big player in this talk. It's highly likely there were ancient oceans on Mars, which again, probably evaporated. This is what I would call greenhouse warming to the minimum.

And we sit right in between. And so there is a cautionary tale to be told about us in relation to our two neighbors. Let's add two more special guests to the conversation. The first was our host for the evening. Oceanographer Jerry Schubel has been president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific for 13 years. Before coming to California, he led the of the Aquarium of the Pacific for 13 years. Before coming to California, he led the New England Aquarium and headed Stony Brook University's Marine Sciences Research Center for 20 years. Steve Vance leads the habitability team of JPL's Icy Worlds Astrobiology Group, part of NASA's amazing Astrobiology Institute.

Steve studies the interiors of icy bodies, including Europa, and he's part of the team that will send a probe there in the 2020s. He also builds instruments for detecting signs of life, or biomarkers, along with complex computer models. We'll hear first from Jerry Schubel. We have failed to excite the public about the importance of exploring our own ocean. In spite of efforts like you have underway here at the Aquarium. In spite of that. We're going to change it all, Matt.

I'm glad. Happy to be a little piece of that. Steve, when you hear this, this talk about the imbalance, I mean, you're a space guy, I'm a space guy, but what comes to mind? What comes to mind is I know so little about Earth's ocean. It's my main inspiration for Europa, and I wonder why that is, despite having gone on a couple of oceanographic cruises. I've heard this complaint from some of my oceanographic colleagues that it's difficult for them to get funded to go and explore somewhere they haven't been before. So I was flying home from a trip recently and looking at the map of where I was going.

I was surprised to learn that there are a bunch of seamounts off the coast of Alaska. And I was wondering, gee, are there seamounts on Europa? And what does that mean for possible life there? And why don't I know more about those seamounts? Good point. And there are lots more seamounts in our own ocean that we have never identified. And when you have a Navy ship run into one not too long ago, you realize how little we know about our own. So they said, oops, we ran into a mountain?

Bill, your talk primarily focused on one element of ocean research, and it's extremely vital relevance to climate change. There's much more to the story, though, that you just began to touch on. Yeah, before I answer that question, let me go back to the question that Jerry asked.

Oh, please. First of all, there's too little money being spent on science in general in this country and throughout the world. Here, here. Because the return from good scientific research is phenomenal. And picking on poor Steve here about his mission to Europa, just to be cynical, because I am cynical, is that most of the money is not going to Steve.

It's going to the aerospace companies, all right, that are building the instruments and the spacecraft. So don't think Steve's getting $2 billion, all right? You know, one of my favorite things is I love to dive, and I've been diving on coral reefs all over the world. Next to the rainforest, they have the greatest biodiversity of any ecosystems. Next to the rainforest, they have the greatest biodiversity of any ecosystems. And what we're finding is that these reefs are really the pharmacies of the future. We're finding so many fantastic chemical compounds on these reefs that are being translated into cancer drugs, sunscreen, etc.

drugs, sunscreen, etc. And so I think we've just begun to tap the potential of the marine ecosystems in comparison with the Earth's rainforest in terms of their potential for so many beneficial things. The frontier really has just been touched when it comes to the oceans. Bill, we've got to accelerate getting to that frontier. We've lost a third of our coral reefs, another third are threatened, and we know that we're losing many organisms that produce these biologically active compounds, some of which have the potential to cure human diseases. We're losing things more rapidly than we ever anticipated as recently as a decade or two ago. More from our ocean celebration is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right?

Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute, Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it, they're all going to be online, you can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV.

Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he?

I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week we're bringing you excerpts from our June 8th public event at the Aquarium of the Pacific. I was talking oceans, both earthbound and those we're finding around the solar system, with Bill Patzert and Steve Vance of JPL, and the aquarium's leader, Jerry Schubel.

You won't be surprised to hear that deep-sea hydrothermal vents were a big part of the conversation. Linda Spilker told us last week about the good evidence for them found recently at Saturn's moon Enceladus. Around the time that I started graduate school, I'm going to date myself, in 2001, we had just gotten really firm evidence for an ocean on Europa. By the time that I started college before that, we had just discovered the Lost City hydrothermal system. And this is a hydrothermal system

fed entirely by geochemistry off the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This is the first firm discovery that there could be organisms that can live independent from the sun. Since then, there's been a lot of thinking that, well, gee, there were all these impacts and different disasters and hazards that happened early in Earth's history. What if the safest place for life to have started was deep within the Earth's interior?

It's entirely possible, and it's certainly something that appeals to me, because it could play out just as easily somewhere like Europa. There are unbelievable ecosystems that you can have this diversity of life live in the high temperatures and the conditions that are there. So they are very important. The so-called extremophiles, these organisms, you heard, I think it was you, Steve,

who mentioned the tardigrades, a rather large organism. But, you know, the more we learn about life on Earth, the more we learn that life finds a way, that life can exist in almost any environment on our planet. I imagine that must give some hope for finding life elsewhere. Oh, absolutely. You know, in my lifetime, in Jerry's lifetime, the discovery of the hydrothermal vents, their chemistry, you know, it was a revelation that nobody had anticipated.

And of course, the beneficiary are young guys like Steve now. And so he's applying that knowledge from Earth and speculating what might happen out in the rest of the solar system. So it's an excellent example of how science propagates throughout the universe. New ideas, new discoveries, new explorations. We also talked at the Aquarium about how ocean research here directly benefits how we are learning about the seas of other worlds.

Here's Steve Vance of the upcoming mission to Europa, followed again by Jerry Schubel. There's a back and forth. I mean, one of the most exciting innovations on the Europa Clipper is going to be taking a radar and trying to peer through the ice. And we figured out, based on application of radar at the Antarctic on Earth, which, by the way, has revealed unprecedented insight into the outflow of fluids from under glaciers, we figured out that we could use that same technology to see through the ice on Europa and possibly into the ocean.

So certainly that investment in developing that radar is going to feed back into developing better radars for looking at the Antarctic. Some of the satellites that look back at Earth, they gave us views of the Earth and the ocean we never could have had from ships. They give you a synoptic view of much of the Earth. I think something like half almost of JPL's total budget is for satellites that look back at Earth. That's very important in our understanding of the Earth. Bill Patzert and Steve Vance work with powerful computers to develop complex models of Earth's climate and the ocean under Europa's ice.

Where do you start? I mean, how do you, what are the basic principles you use to build that? And aren't those largely based on what we've learned here? Sure. The models that I build are very simple, first of all. But you consider, well, gee, there's some heat coming from the interior, there's some heat coming from tides. Let's figure out the mass of water and how that transports that heat. And you step that model forward through time. Or in the case of this Dagwood sandwich model, you consider what is the equilibrium temperature profile if you know that the ocean is convecting. And that's all basic physics and it's all basic geophysics that's informed by Earth.

I want to comment on someone else's model because there's a colleague of mine who's taken the MIT GCM. So this is a publicly available global climate model. That's what GCM stands for. It's made for simulating the Earth, for doing these complex simulations of climate. But it turns out you can actually turn air into water. That's the magic of modeling. You just change the density and the compressibility. And they've used that to simulate Europa's ocean

and how the ocean circulates in three dimensions. And they've come up with these beautiful movies showing the different global circulation patterns that might exist on Europa. That's assuming there are no sea mounts or other topography that would influence that. So that is an example of a crossover from Earth science to planetary science. So there's a good example of why you should pay more taxes for education, so we can generate more guys like Steve. I'll say it. And you. Bill, how good are our models of the ocean today,

the ones that tell us what's happening with the ocean, salinity, temperature, ocean rise, and so on? Well, of course, the advantage we have in modeling the ocean is we have data that we can test the models against. And our understanding is not complete. And so our forecasts are not necessarily always as accurate as they could be. But with increased computing power and more and more young guys to prop me up, they're getting better and better. It's remarkable how far we've come just in the lifetime of my career. and more and more young guys to prop me up. They're getting better and better. It's remarkable how far we've come just in the lifetime of my career. Our Ocean's Evening at the Aquarium of the Pacific ended with great questions from the audience, including this one.

Hi, I'm Rachel Martin, Department of Chemistry, UC Irvine. My question is for Steve. So your mission to Europa, what signatures of life are you looking for specifically, and what chemical instrumentation are you going to have on this probe? Thanks for that. Well, we're not necessarily looking for chemical signatures of life. We'll be happy if we find good signs of habitability,

but selected instruments that could sample material directly from the plumes include a neutral mass spectrometer. So it's a miniaturized mass spectrometer similar to what are used around the world to look at environmental change and to countless other problems. The other one is a dust analyzer, which would look at the dust that's coming up from Europa and could look at the plume materials themselves.

So that's not quite a dodge. But so the first question for me is, is the ocean composition similar to Earth's? That's along the lines of habitability. There was a requirement stipulated in the model payload that I had a small part in helping to develop that was to get up to atomic masses that are high enough that you could see amino acids. So we would look for signs of the building blocks of life. That was the minimum criteria. Now, that instrument selection was just announced,

and I haven't seen what the actual instruments are, and so part of the invitation of the announcement of opportunity was, propose to us your instrument that would meet our objectives, and you're certainly free to propose additional things. I'm excited to learn what those are. You can watch the entire celebration of ocean research on the Aquarium of the Pacific's website, where you'll also find a treasury of other great ocean resources.

The link is on this week's show page, reached from planetary.org slash radio. We're grateful to Bill Patzert and Steve Vance of JPL, and to Jerry Schubel and his aquarium staff. Thank you, Matt, for bringing your radio program here, and thank everybody for coming. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Matt, for bringing your radio program here, and thank everybody for coming. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

I'm sitting with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, which is interesting because this week I'm in the UK. It's the magic of radio. Hello, Matt. Hello. Shouting across the pond here. Now I know why they call it a pond. It's a lot smaller than I thought.

Like a cup of water. While you're across the pond, you really need to go out and look at the night sky. That is, if you get any clear skies. And check out Venus and Jupiter. They're so close now, Matt. They're so close. They're so bright. Look in the early evening in the west.

You cannot miss them. early evening in the West. You cannot miss them. And they will be coming super close together on June 30th, July 1st in the night sky, looking really cool. Venus, the brighter one.

I'll be back home by then. So hoping for clear Southern California skies and leaving you Brits to your gray, cold evenings. Any of there's other stuff they won't be able to see too, like Saturn over in the south in the early evening and mercury uh still still hanging out for a little bit longer in the pre-dawn east near reddish aldebaran the star on to this week in space history in this week in 1997 the near spacecraft later named shoemaker near flew past the asteroid Matilda on its way to the asteroid Eros that it would later orbit.

Named after the hit musical on Broadway, no doubt. Shoemaker? No, NEAR. Matilda? Yes. Don't you watch the Tonys? I think that was last year, actually. Someday I will.

When there isn't a basketball championship. My sons are still in high school. Yeah, Matilda. You should have had daughters. Then you'd know Matilda. It's just better for the world that I had sons. Your daughters are delightful. Thank you.

But I'm sure, you know. All right, get on with it. Right. On to. Spit it out, boy. On to random space fact. How'd you know I was in Scotland? I just thought.

I just had a hint. That'd be great. I actually didn't tell him. My spies. hint i think that'd be great i actually didn't tell him my spies so as i mentioned on june 30th july 1st 2015 when jupiter and venus are less than 0.3 degrees apart in the sky jupiter is more than 13 times farther away than venus in you know three-dimensional space yeah they're close in the sky more than 13 times away so no chance of collision no no they're good it's all good all right moving right along thankfully we we go to the trivia contest we're going to not award anything because you're in the uk but we're going to ask people a question no winners but no losers but in the UK. But we're going to ask people a question. No winners, but no losers. But in the

future, winners and losers with this question. Solar sailing. I can't talk enough about it. So I've got a quote for people to identify who said this. Wow, it sounds like it should be funny. It's not funny. It's profound. Who said, approximately, provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void. I have heard that profound quote, and I cannot remember who said it. Then you are not going to win. No, and I look forward to someone else telling me what it was and winning this week's prize. And I think we can go back to giving away an itelescope.net account, a 200 point or roughly the value

of $200 US account for that worldwide non-profit network of telescopes and may I add, a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Cool. You're going all out. Making up with guilt for not having them for a couple weeks?

Do I say it now that they have to get their entry by Tuesday the 30th? That would be Tuesday, June 30th at 8 a.m. Pacific? Yes, that's when you would say it. And how do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. See, I've forgotten. It's been so long. How would I possibly remember? But I did. Planetary.org slash radio contest.

Alright, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about fish and chips. Wait, no, haggis! You know, I'm ready for it. I'm ready for you, haggis. I want to hear about your haggis experience when you're here where you're not in the future. Yeah, that makes

perfect sense. He'suce betts the director of science and technology for the planetary society looking forward to me surviving my experience with haggis when we return for another what's up next week asteroid day is june 30 2015 it's the 107th anniversary of the tonguska impact in Russia. We'll mark the occasion with special asteroid and near-Earth object content next week. You can check it out right now at asteroidday.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by the Society's buoyant members. Danielle Gunn is the associate producer. Josh Doyle created our theme. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.