Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Falcon 9 Launch, Another Jupiter Smackdown, IKAROS...and a Surprise

Episode Date: June 7, 2010

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New rockets, a solar sail, and a surprise, 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 of the Planetary Society. What a week. An impact on Jupiter caught by amateur telescopes, a solar sail about to spread its wings in space, a brilliant success for a new commercial rocket, and that surprise I've already mentioned. It's all coming up on today's show, beginning with this audio clip that may sound like it's from NASA, but it's not. Four, three, two, one.

Liftoff. We have MLS. Liftoff of the Falcon 9. Falcon 9 has cleared the towers. And engine shutdown. Falcon 9 Stage 2 and the Dragon capsule are now in orbit around the Earth. That was a heavily compressed version of what many of us heard as the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida for the very first time.

Does anyone still believe commercial launch vehicles can't put what we need into low Earth orbit? We'll bring you more coverage in the next few weeks. Still to come is Lou Friedman reporting to us from Japan, but first we'll check in with Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it has been a very big week in space exploration, what with Icarus and Falcon 9, which we'll be hearing about more in the rest of the program. And you've covered, of course, on the blog,

but there is one other very, very interesting story in planetary science out at Jupiter. It was a huge coincidence, actually. The Hubble Space Telescope team this week released with some fanfare some glorious images they took of the dark impact scar on Jupiter that happened with the impact last year, last July. And on the very same day, the Australian astronomer who discovered that July 2009 impact in the first place said, wait a minute, I just saw another one. And he posted initially just a single frame of Jupiter showing a bright flash. So he actually

witnessed something striking Jupiter, which is quite different to the original that he saw last year, where he just saw the scar of something that had hit Jupiter hours before. This time, he actually saw a bright flash. And he had a photograph of that bright flash, which was cool. But I think a lot of people kind of doubted what he saw, because it was just one bright spot. But then another amateur astronomer, Christopher Goh from the Philippines, posted his own image and video of the impact. And so it was corroborated by two guys in two completely different places. It wasn't an instrument artifact. It really was something that flashed in Jupiter's atmosphere. So pretty, pretty amazing. And it was amazing to watch the story develop over about 20 hours overnight from Thursday to Friday. Yeah, and you track it very well in the blog,

and you've got these images there as well. Of course, we will link to those from the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. Once again, I am floored by the work of these amateurs. There were images there of Jupiter, which not too many years ago, I would have expected to see only from something orbiting that planet. Well, you know, one key to the great imaging they do was also the key to how he managed to capture the photo of the flash. And that's that instead of recording still images, all these amateurs take video. And the reason they take video is not to see things like flashes, but it's because when they take photos at very high frame rates, they get a chance for the atmosphere to still for a split second and make an unusually

sharp view of what it is that they're looking at. And so they have hundreds and hundreds of images they can stack together and make a much sharper view than was possible in looking at. And so they have hundreds and hundreds of images that they can stack together and make a much sharper view than was possible in the past. And it's all thanks to these high sensitivity, high speed digital detectors that they put on video cameras on the back of their telescopes now.

And that also enabled both of these astronomers to get video of the impact happening, which is pretty cool. One more thing that I know you want to mention, the return of one forlorn little spacecraft. Yes, the Peregrine Falcon Hayabusa is returning June 13th. Hayabusa is going to make its fateful fiery entry into Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft is going to burn up and die, ending its long journey, which is very sad for a lot of people.

But hopefully, in doing so, it's going to leave its sample capsule behind in the Woomera prohibited desert in southern Australia. And I'll be following that story very closely next weekend. Well, of course you will be, and we'll be keeping an eye on the blog. Emily, once again, thank you very much. Thanks, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She joins us every week right here with the best of the Planetary Society blog.

Up next, coming to us from Japan, where he hoped to watch the deployment of IKAROS, the Japanese solar sail. Lou Friedman, that's just moments away. Icaros is the interplanetary kite craft accelerated by radiation of the sun. Many hoped the Japanese solar sail testbed would fully deploy itself last weekend. One of those hoping was Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society and a solar sail pioneer. executive director of the Planetary Society and a solar sail pioneer. Lou flew to the headquarters of JAXA, the Japanese space agency, to observe this historic event. I got him on a none-too-great Skype connection just before he returned to the U.S.

Lou, thanks for joining us. From a lounge at an airport, where are you? Yes, Matt, I'm at the Narita Airport in Tokyo, having been over here to try to observe the Icarus solar sail deployment. I have read your blog entry that I think you created on Friday of last week. It basically said, well, not quite. You didn't get to see a full deployment? Oh, that's right. They have a very interesting deployment scheme. In fact, I urge all the listeners on the show here to go to the website where Emily has done a nice description of the deployment sequence. It's a very complex one. They spin the sail and they use centrifugal force to have the sail deploy.

And they do it in a series of steps. And they got more than halfway through, but they're concerned about some of the numerical data. If it doesn't come out quite symmetrical, they could have some imbalances that could give some bad torques to the whole deployment thing and not be good for the sail. So they decided to take a very cautionary approach and delay a couple of days to do more simulations of their exact condition. While I did get over to the operations center for two nights of the deployment work, it seems like it's going to take longer than that. It'll probably be tomorrow or the next day or perhaps even a couple more days before they finish the deployment.

and a couple more days before they finish the deployment. What was your sense of how the Japanese are regarding this solar sail project? Are people excited about it? I'm talking about more than just the IKROS team. I'm incredibly impressed by the attention they're getting and the courage of what they're doing. They're able to piggyback on an interplanetary mission with a technology test on a relatively low-cost project, not as low-cost as the planetary societies, I might say. It's still more than 10 times the amount.

But it's still something that they've very cleverly done with partnerships and industry, with teams of students and professionals working together. And I think it is getting a lot of interest, both the technology aspects of it and the eventual use of it as a hybrid propulsion system to go through the solar system using both ion engines and solar sails in the future. Do we stand to learn something from this mission that will help assure the success of LightSail, the Planetary Society's solar sail?

Well, I'm glad you asked that question because I was very, even in the middle of operations, while they were clearly working very hard on their issues and on their sequencing and all the things they had to do as they were in direct communication with the spacecraft, the project manager turned to me and started asking questions about LightSail. The project manager turned to me and started asking questions about LightSail. He wanted to know why we did something this way and what was our deployment system like. He wanted to know why the material we selected. He was quite interested in it. What they went through in their deployment sequence is analogous to a debate we're having on our LightSail project

about the sequencing of our deployment, whether we should do it quick and early at the beginning of the mission, or whether we should take it in steps like they're doing. And we've had the pros and cons debate about that. And we have a very different system. It's a much simpler system. After all, our spacecraft is only four and a half kilograms, and theirs is 100 times more than that. Well, almost 100 times more than that. It's upwards of 300 kilograms. We're having a very, very different concept of an ultralight sail spacecraft.

But at the same time, I think we do have a lot to learn from each other. And I might say I think we have a lot to learn not just on the And I might say, I think we have a lot to learn, not just on the technical end, but on the project end as well. I really admire the way the Japanese approach this project with a very, very nimble attitude, and they're able to do a lot. They have three missions underway right now. Icarus was only one of them. They also have Bahia Busa returning to Earth, and they did a successful trajectory correction maneuver while that was going on. And of course, they have their Venus mission, which Icarus piggybacked on. And it's just beginning its interplanetary voyage. So here's a center of the Japanese Space Agency with only 400 people working in the whole center. They're able to operate three

planetary missions at once, and two of the most adventuresome ones that I've ever heard of. This Hayabusa return to Earth is really an exciting venture, and I urge everybody to watch what happens in the next couple of weeks when that spacecraft returns to Earth, lands in the Woomera Desert in Australia, perhaps brings back the first sample from a planetary surface in more than 40 years. And, Lou, while you've been over there, there has been some good traditional rocketry success going on back here in the States. I wondered if you wanted to comment on Falcon 9.

Yes, well, I actually did make a statement of great support and great admiration to Elon Musk. And congratulations to him and his SpaceX team. Falcon 9 worked its first time. That's almost unheard of in rocketry. And I think it emphasizes something I see here in Japan, by the way, and that is commercial government partnerships can do great jobs. And I think that's going to start happening more in the United States. We should stop making it us versus them. We should start making teamwork in the United States with commercial industry helping and picking up space transportation activity.

Lou, I guess we'll let you catch a plane and talk to you again soon here on Planetary Radio. Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you, Matt. Lou Friedman is the executive director of the Planetary Society. Okay. Thank you, Matt. Lou Friedman is the executive director of the Planetary Society, and we're going to be talking to Bill Nye in just a moment, who has a related surprise to announce.

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The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. As you may have noticed, we skipped Bill Nye's commentary this week. Bill was up in San Jose, California to receive an award when I called him via Skype. Just a few hours later, he'd be getting on another plane headed for Washington, D.C.,

where a meeting of the Planetary Society Board of Directors would decide who will become the Society's new executive director in a few months. Now, normally the science guy would be attending to fulfill his duties as vice president of the organization, but there was a different reason for him to be there this time. Bill, I think I have the distinct honor of being the first person to congratulate you on becoming the new executive director of the Planetary Society. Indeed, Matt, indeed you are the first person, and thank you very much. It is a new and exciting thing for me. I'm going to be only the second director of the Planetary Society in lo these 30 years. It's quite a thing. The board of directors will be voting shortly after our recording year. And my understanding is

I'm in. It's not going to be multiple ballots. Apparently not. No, people have been petitioning me to take this job for several months. It's very exciting. I'm personally quite thrilled. And I am very happy to be talking to you about, I think we're at a crossroads. I think this is maybe a turning point for the space program, which kind of harkens back to the beginnings of the Planetary Society, doesn't it? Oh, that's a big, it's a big theme with me, Matt, that you've crystallized my thoughts.

When the Planetary Society was founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning popularizer of science Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, the admiral of the solar system, head of the Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, and Lou Friedman, who in his own right is an accomplished author and space explorer, in his own right, is an accomplished author and space explorer. These guys founded the society because they felt that public interest in space was still very high, especially among young people. But government interest in space around the world was falling off or flagging because the Cold War had wound down. So we're at another point where the space shuttle program is finally being retired.

It's an old spacecraft or old program, and it's a little, if you're an astronaut, it's a little bit dangerous. And it can't take us to new and exciting places. Yet people still want to know what's out there. When they see images from the Hubble Space Telescope, when they hear about insights and that there are more stars than ever suspected before, people are excited, yet they don't have a direct way to be engaged. And that, of course, is what the Planetary Society does, is engage people around the world. And as we like to say, we get it done. And there is an awful lot going on, both within the society and without.

I mean, this is kind of an auspicious time to take on this job just because of recent accomplishments in the last few days. Oh, my goodness. First of all, congratulations to Elon Musk, one of our board members, put the Falcon 9, his own privately funded rocket, as the spokeswoman said, hit a bullseye. The Falcon 9 launched on a perfect flight, simulating putting a capsule that could contain humans in a pretty high orbit, and it worked perfectly. Furthermore, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, has a solar sail that's deploying. These two sort of new things are happening at the same time, private access to space and harnessing the photons from the sun for propulsion of a spacecraft.

It's never been done. And here we are. This is another turning point or milestone or kilometer marker in space exploration. There are a lot of projects underway within the Planetary Society. And I guess, will it be your job to sort of shepherd those or cheerlead those? Well, it's management. So, you know, I worked in engineering for a long time. I mean, you decide which projects are being productive and which aren't,

and you emphasize the productive ones. There's ones you want to do that aren't so revved up yet. I very, very much want to engage young people, elementary age kids, get them directly excited about space because this really is rocket science. And it's how we make discoveries that have changed the world. We discovered the rings of Saturn. We discovered there are moons around other planets. We discovered the sun is the center of the solar system, not us.

If we discover life on another world by any means, we will change this one. And you got to get kids excited. When people say, why do you want to explore space? Why do you want to spend tax dollars on space? I tell them, ask your kids. Ask kids. They'll tell you why. It's exciting. That's something you've had, oh, I don't know, a small amount of experience with in the past, making science appealing to kids. Your mentor at Cornell, and somewhat since then, you just mentioned him, one of the founders, Carl Sagan. You're not exactly stepping into his shoes, but these are mighty big shoes that you're stepping into for all three of these founders. Oh, my goodness, man. I mean, Carl Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize. He changed the world. He produced Cosmos, wrote the book Cosmos, Dragons of Eden. That's a book title. He was so influential. Bruce Murray was the head of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and he's the guy that said, you've got to

put cameras on these spacecraft. Their scientific value in pictures. And that was controversial, can you imagine? Now, whenever we see a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, it's everybody's. I own that. I'm a taxpayer. I'm a world citizen. The Hubble was mine.

You can't turn off the Hubble. And Lou Friedman has run the whole thing, and he wrote a book on solar sailing. These people have led the way in the peaceful exploration of other worlds, which has led to enlightenment for all humankind. It's a big deal. It's a big thing to be taken on. Nice mantle to be assuming there. Bill, thank you so much, and the best of luck with this new era for you and for the Planetary Society. And the best of luck with this new era for you and for the Planetary Society.

Yes, thank you very much. And so those of you who are inclined, we invite you to learn about the Planetary Society. We engage people around the world in the exploration of space. Thank you very much, Matt. Bill Nye, the science, and we know him as the planetary guy. And I certainly hope those commentaries are going to continue. Well, I'll assign the new executive director to do that every week. Hey, you. Huh? And so on. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, and now the executive director pro tem of the Planetary Society.

Bill will actually take over the reins from Lou Friedman in a few months. Lou, you may remember, was in Japan for the Icarus deployment. I asked him how he feels about his replacement. Matt, I'd just like to say that I am very excited about Bill Nye becoming the executive director of the Planetary Society. I not only pledge to work with him informally and formally in any way he wants, but I think it's going to be great for the Society to have new energy and a new vision to engage a new generation in space exploration. Lou Friedman, the founding director of the Planetary Society.

I'll be right back with Bruce Betts and What's Up on Planetary Radio. Sitting with Bruce Betts in the library at the new headquarters of the Planetary Society. And I think he's going to tell us what's up in the night sky. And later on, we have a really cool prize. So stay tuned for the trivia contest this week. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Good to be back. You have not seen the video.

I'll put up the link to this for our loyal listeners. It's sort of a float-through, a walk-through of the International Space Station, and it's really cool. Lou Friedman posted this for people on staff to take a look at. You've not seen it. I have not seen it. I learned two things. Actually, it confirmed two things for me. People are actually living up there, first.

Second, and this is the disturbing one, which I always suspected, but this was the total confirmation because we went through almost every inch of the ISS. It's full of crap. It's a mess. It's just, my God, there's just junk everywhere. I wonder if they can get like one of those storage containers that they deliver to your house. They really should. There should be one just like floating next to it, you know, because it's just awful. I mean, it's so different from the sterile like 2001 spaceships that just look, you know, clean and cool. I hear they're going to, once they retire the shuttle, they're going to leave one on blocks outside.

You know what? If HAL 9000 was on the ISS, he're going to leave one on blocks outside. You know what? If HAL 9000 was on the ISS, he'd have gone nuts a lot sooner. Dave. Clean up, Dave. I can't stand the clutter, Dave. I think they're just trying to make it look like my house. We'll give you a run for that. I'm honored.

So up in the sky, besides the ISS you know you should always try to check out go see because it's really bright and looks really clean from a distance uh there's also some nice planet star action going on in the sky so in the evening sky we got uh venus looking extremely bright over in the west just after sunset and if you look right around now it's lined up or close to it depending on what day you look with Castor and Pollux the bright stars of Gemini though much dimmer makes for a very nice little picture there and Mars to its upper left is snuggling up with Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. And they're actually very similar in brightness but have very different colors. Mars reddish and Regulus looking kind of bluish.

And so that's also a good, cool thing to check out. And then Saturn, I should mention Saturn, farther to the upper left of Mars. And all those guys are getting closer together over the coming weeks and months. Pre-dawn sky, we've got Jupiter. Can't really see this particularly well with the naked eye, but with binoculars or a telescope. Ooh, foreshadowing. You can check out Uranus is very close to Jupiter.

Jupiter, much, much, much, much, much brighter. In the pre-dawn sky, can't miss Jupiter anyway over in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history. Way back in 2003, Spirit was launched, headed to Mars.

That's incredible. On to Random Space Fact! Very nice. Just lovely. Oh, thank you. That big thing up there. The moon is the second densest satellite, moon, natural satellite, behind Io. I was going to say the Death Star, maybe.

But, okay, that makes sense. Well, I modified it to natural satellite. Okay. Yeah, and I don't know how it compares to Endor, the moon of Endor. Yeah. On to the trivia contest. And we asked you last time around, what are the meteorites that we think are from the asteroid Vesta? What are those three classes of, we think, Vesta meteorites called?

How did we do, Matt? We did well. So did the listeners. I'm going to jump right into this. Turns out what you were looking for is known as the head group. Indeed. H-E-D. Yeah.

Howardites, Eukrites, and Diogenites. Right? Yeah. I got it. Okay. I like the Diogenites because Diogenes, you know, I guess he was doing stuff other than, you know, looking for an honest man. He's looking for an honest meteorite. We found an honest listener.

Edwin Devers is our winner for the week. Edwin, who is out of Rio Negro, Colombia. Cool. Down in South America. He came up with those answers, and we're going to send him a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And we also got a response from Peter Carr and several other people who gave us lots of detail. And, you know, the Diogenes connection. Howardites, he says, named after Edward Howard, a British chemist,

who had been described as the first chemical engineer of any eminence, which is a great disappointment to me because I could have sworn it was Moe Howard, but apparently not. Apparently not. I've got to mention one other thing before you go on. We did have that obscure comment, was it a week ago, about bad dates? That's not obscure. You're right.

It's not all that obscure. Maybe a little obscure. Bad dates, yes. Well, we had a couple of listeners who chose to comment on it, including Joseph from Columbia, Maryland. And Joseph said, yeah, good thing the double agent monkey ate the dates before Indy did. Indiana Jones, of course, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Raiders of the Lost Ark. Thank you.

But here's why Joseph gets mentioned on the show, because he says, I'd eat the dates for you guys. Wow. That's really cool. Thank you, Joseph. Well, hopefully you won't have to. So we've got a different prize this week and some type of large machine outside. Yeah, they're going to run a chipper outside. So you better hurry because in a minute they're going to feed trees into that.

Ooh, ooh, maybe I can do my chipper impersonation if they don't. I've got a good one. All right, so the question here, I'll tell them the question. A very nice binocular object to look at through binoculars is the Copernicus crater on the moon. Fairly recent as moon age goes, lots of rays spread out from it. How big in diameter, approximately, is the Copernicus crater? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter to get your chance at winning

what, Matt? I will tell them what we're going to give them, but first I'll mention that they need to get us that entry by the 14th, June 14th at 2pm Pacific time. So you know our friends at Celestron, the guys who make real nice telescopes,

and they make other stuff as well. One of the things they make is binoculars. They sent us a box full of stuff to give away on the show, including a couple of pairs of binoculars. And these are not like the low-end things. These are monsters. You played with them, right? Oh, yeah. Very, very cool. Yeah. 25-power binoculars, and they come with a little tripod mount, which you're going to want to have with these because it's really two telescopes bolted together. So you can do a lot. I'm sure you could check out Copernicus and maybe Uranus like you were talking about.

And that's going to be the prize. So allow us to give you one if you have the right answer, and you get it to us, and random.org says uh you're the you're the lucky winner i think we're done all right everybody go out there look up the night sky and think about tree chippers kind of like the one outside you know the things that make this noise it didn't have it didn't have the resonance sort of the attack, you know, when the thing first goes in. That's more like it now. So we'll revisit this next week.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Keep practicing. The director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant

from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова