Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Farewell Rosetta!

Episode Date: October 4, 2016

The European Space Agency’s magnificent Rosetta mission ended last week as the spacecraft gently touched down on the comet it has revealed.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Farewell, Rosetta. Job well done. 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. The Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko has taken its place among the greatest voyages of exploration in history. We'll listen as the spacecraft touches down, and then we'll hear from Emily Lakdawalla. Our senior editor was at the European Space Operations Center for the dramatic finish. Later, I'll visit with Bruce Betts for this week's What's Up. This time, we'll begin with Planetary CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy. He was there last week when Elon Musk of SpaceX laid out his plan for colonizing Mars that could have been straight

out of science fiction. Bill, nobody ever accused Elon Musk of thinking small. No, So at the International Astronautical Congress, the IAC, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk presented this amazing, huge picture plan that included building an enormous rocket that would take 100 people at a time and their luggage to Mars. You laugh, but this is his thing. It was the luggage that got to me. He can tell a story. I'm paraphrasing as best I can. But the idea is the thing that I took away from this was the enthusiasm. Now, there were almost, I guess there were over 500. There may have been a thousand Mexican students who got into the Congress that day. Congress is European for a conference.

Got into the Congress that day and just overran the place. They were jumping over chairs, running to the front of the room. They knocked our colleague Erin real hard and she had to give her basketball whistling elbow. It was really impressive how enthusiastic people are for this. And so I believe Mr. Musk's message is that Mars is doable in our lifetime. Whether or not, Matt, you look people in the eye, you listen to people, Whether or not, Matt, you look people in the eye, you listen to people, whether or not he really thinks people want to go to this strange world and live under a dome, I'm not sure.

I know people don't want to go live under a dome in Antarctica. They go there to do science and support scientists and do research, but they don't build swing sets and playgrounds and try to raise a family there. It's too cold. Yeah, I think Elton John wrote a song about this. And they wouldn't be living under a dome. They'd be living in a hole in the ground. So it's even worse. But I think he believes it because I think he wants to go so badly and he thinks we should. Yeah, well, the big thing that I throw this in all the time is, okay, okay, okay. But let's look for signs of life first. We don't want to contaminate the ecosystem where we can't sort out

what we brought accidentally and what was already there, if there's anything there. And I just, I mean, it would be extraordinary, everybody, if we found fossil bacterial mats on Mars. It would be stranger still and extraordinarily extraordinary, if I may, if something's still alive there. It's wild, but it's not out of the question. So I just want to do it carefully. And I'm sure deep down, the SpaceX people feel the same way. But he presented this wild vision with his enormous rockets and

these just expert reuse of the boosters. We put the people into orbit, then send another booster up full of fuel, then take it to Mars in three months, not 11 or seven or 14 months, but three. Then land without a parachute on Mars, 100 people who have an economy and do Martian economics. And so anyway, you laugh, but he really is this huge picture thinker. But as I say, the thing that impressed me was the students and everybody was just hanging on his every word. And isn't it thrilling, no matter what else you may think, to hear somebody who might have a shot at achieving a piece of this thinking so big? Well, two things. First of all, James Cameron, on his own, went back to the bottom of the ocean. First time in 50 years.

Didn't disturb the silt the way the Navy did in 1960. And so they got all this fabulous science information from a private explorer who just wanted to invest his intellect and treasure in this adventure. So that indicates that it's possible. Then the other thing, if SpaceX is able to land a dragon capsule on the surface of Mars, sterilized to planetary protection standards of some sort. That in itself would be an enormous accomplishment. So he presented this big, big vision and people went wild. Think it big. And that's something that I think you've got a little experience with too now and then, Bill. Just trying to change the world, Matt. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt.

CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. He's fun to talk to. Friday morning, September 30th, 2016. It was a terribly early hour here in Southern California. With the realization that I was not going to be able to sleep, I went to my computer and did what some part of my mind insisted I do. In moments, I was watching the live stream from the European Space Agency's Mission Control Room in Darmstadt, Germany. Emily Lakdawalla had flown to the European Space Operations Center a couple of days before.

So, separated by thousands of kilometers, we shared in the collective tension, excitement, and sadness as a spacecraft hundreds of millions of kilometers away ended a spectacular mission. We'll get Emily's thoughts later in the show. What you're about to hear first are excerpts from that live webcast. Time has been compressed from nearly an hour down to about nine minutes. This is the Europe at the best, the Europe we like, the Europe of science, technology, progress. And now the two parts of this mission, Rosetta and Philae, are back together on the comet and are truly becoming part of our universe.

This mission is leaving us with a lot of answers, but many, many more questions. This is science at its best, and we are really looking forward to the continuation of the mission, exploring our incredible solar system and the universe. Rosetta carries a metal plate on board with a message in a thousand languages, hopefully to be found and deciphered by alien missions in the future, just like the Rosetta Stone was deciphered here on Earth. And of course, today the mission comes full circle. And as we get closer to the comet, we can gather even more data. So more highlights in a mission full of highlights.

The signal from the spacecraft down to Earth takes 40 minutes at the speed of light. What we did last night was to do a maneuver to cancel the orbital velocity of Rosetta and direct it towards the comet. Now we are flying towards the comet. We have a most up-to-date estimate of the landing time is 11.19.11. And we are roughly 40 meters away from the target point. So this is an excellent performance of the maneuver. How fast is Rosetta approaching the comet? We'll be landing at 90 centimeters per second and we're close to that speed right now. Half the speed of normal walking speed. Very,

very slow, very slow indeed. This is the amazing view of the local terrain at a good 8 kilometers altitude at close to 7 o'clock this morning. Going a step ahead, ever closer, a good 5.6 kilometers, 8 o'clock, 21 this morning. The first view, we will land here and we just learned from flight dynamics, it's really there. So expect really great stuff coming down. The pits were also in our view. This is the pit D. So we are looking already into this depression and so from five kilometers a lot details of the walls that we are after. And the last image I want to show is this. This is the detail of our PID-D in high resolution from 2,500 meters distant. So it's really great, it's exciting, it's working like a charm. If you think about the Rosetta mission, it was conceived in the middle of the 80s, when we knew very little about comets.

We embarked on a trip of 10 years long in the solar system. We had to fly by planets to gain velocity to reach this comet with the right velocity. We flew by asteroids. We had to hibernate the spacecraft because we were flying so far away from the sun. Already the trip there was an adventure and a masterpiece of technology and engineering from all sides. All this for science. And this is an achievement not only for ESA, but for mankind. We can do something like this. And this is what we have to continue doing for the coming years. We have to go the next step. We have to go for sample return missions. If we want to protect our planets from asteroids, then this is what we have to be able to do. Of all the data that you

and your team received, what was the most surprising finding? That's a tough one to pick what we've been doing in the last couple of years. I think one of the big surprises was the shape of our duck. We've seen comets like that before, but this duck was striking. It was formed by two smaller comets colliding at low velocity. We then started to look deeper into it, this dark object covered in dust, full of organics. The implications are all over the place. The fact that we found water there, but it wasn't the same as Earth. But fundamentally important,

going back to the organics again, this stuff could have been delivered by comets to the Earth and formed the ingredients for life and how that started. It's brilliant. Matt Taylor, Rosetta's project scientist at ESA. What does all this mean? Has any of the data really changed our understanding

of how the solar system came about? Next to me is Lawrence Uruk. He's been the search coordinator for FEEL in the past two years. It was your persistence, I said earlier, that made it possible to find FEEL. Tell us about it. Indeed, it wasn't an easy job. I mean, already, but already after the landing, we had a very good idea where it actually had finally landed. It bounced, landed in an area which was in an area which had a lot of rocks, very full of ice and very dark and not much illumination. And in the end, as we started getting closer this year, we managed to find some candidates, some locations which looked like the lander. And you can see this in the image which we're showing now, hopefully, which is a blue one and a red one. And which one was it?

It was the red one. And the red one was already identified as our favourite. It was defined as the best candidate from June of last year. And we spent a lot of time this year trying to get images of this red candidate. But the problem is it's between a rock and a hard place. It's got a cliff on one side. It's got an angled rock on the other side.

Part of the rock, the highest point, is the height of a 20-storey building. You're trying to look over this to try to get the lander. And in May and June, we managed to acquire some images to see the light shining in the darkness. We got something which certainly gave us confidence. We had the lander, but also a lot of ice in the area, and we needed to get a really good image to confirm it.

And the confirmation came on September 2nd, not that long ago. Absolutely, and what a beautiful image it is. It's so rewarding for the team. It was a big team across many projects, across many, across the Rosetta project, but across many teams and it was so great. But what's important is the fact we found it. We found it and it gives context, it gives a local context for the science that was the fabulous science produced by Philae. I was delighted and it's really great to have found it before the end of the mission.

I just wanted to say, Lorenzo Ruggs, thank you so much to you and your team that you did find Philae. Made us all very happy. Thank you. Well, talking of images, we just saw great images. Of course, this is the moment where we want to go back to Holger Sirks, who has his serious camera, to Holger Sirks, who has his Sirius camera, the eye of the camera on the comet as Rosetta is approaching it fast. Holger, what's the exact altitude now? How do we know that? Well, we are already at about a thousand meters, so closer than ever.

With less than six minutes to go, I think this is a very good moment to stop commenting on anything and just remain silent and let you and the teams watch the touchdown unfold. The Rosetta Stone was originally located in Saïs, and we shall name the impact point as such,

so that we can finally say that Rosetta has come home to size. Farewell, Rosetta. You've done the job. That was space science at its best. The end of the triumphant Rosetta mission as it was covered live from the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. When we return, Emily Lakdawalla will tell us what it was like to be there as history was made. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society.

We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom.

As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye.org.steamteam. That's planetary.org.steamteam. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye.

Bye. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

We just heard highlights from the end of the Rosetta mission to Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Many of you may have joined me in following the live coverage on Friday, September 30th. That coverage included my colleague Emily Lachtwala's live tweeting from ESOC, the European Space Operations Center. She had only just returned to Southern California when I talked with her via Skype. Emily, great to have you around for a little bit longer conversation than we normally have time for, but certainly Rosetta is well worth it. I take note of the tweet that you posted hours before we have this conversation,

that you are in a Rosetta funk. I hope you're coming out of that. Not yet, Matt. I have to say I'm legitimately sad about the end of this mission, And it's not lifting yet, but hopefully it will in a day or two. So even in spite of its glorious success and all that science out there, you still wish the little spacecraft was circling the comet? Well, you know, it's a little spacecraft in comparison to the comet, but this was a big, big mission. This was a flagship mission. And so it's a major change to have this mission be done. But of course, it did accomplish way more science than was initially proposed for it. And there is still a huge amount of data that has yet to be analyzed. And so there's going to be a lot of news coming

out from Rosetta for years to come. But I'm still sad about the death of the spacecraft. I don't blame you. This makes me wonder, has the European Space Agency had a bigger success than Rosetta? I can't think of any. Well, the European Space Agency really spreads itself out all over the solar system, all over different scientific endeavors. It's not just planetary science. They do some pretty amazing things with astrometry, like the Gaia mission we talked about just a couple weeks ago. They're not as big as NASA, but they really do an amazing amount of science with their smaller budget. And I always get a new appreciation for that every time I visit the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt. Which, of course, is where you were as you followed the countdown to the end of this mission. And you got there a day early.

And because of that, you were able to post on September 29th at planetary.org this terrific review, top-level review of some, at least, of the science done by Rosetta. And I'm hoping we can review that a little bit. The very first one that you heard, I love this phrase, magical landscapes. It really is kind of amazing. And the spacecraft managed to get close enough to the comet that it had these kind of oblique views on a lot of the comet's landscapes. It really is kind of amazing. And the spacecraft managed to get close enough to the comet that it had these kind of oblique views on a lot of the comet's landscapes. So they feel more human scale, and yet it's this comet that has very low gravity. So there's these fantastic and strange landscapes, and yet there are planes and there are mountains. So it's

simultaneously familiar and strange. It really looks like the cover of a good pulp 70s science fiction novel. Really, kind of a fairyland, but one with some evil characters too, I think. I'm putting my subjective spin on it. How about the porosity of the comet? This was one of the big revelations? Yeah, you know, I think we know that small worlds in the solar system tend to be rather porous. They're made up of fairly loosely attached jumbles of material that often have quite a lot of space in between them. You have to get to a pretty big size of a body, a couple hundred

kilometers in diameter or more before they start self-packing and squeezing out all that interior space. But still, I have a hard time imagining something that is 70% pore space. I mean, that's more like a sponge. It's way more space than it is stuff. So there's a lot of openings. There's a lot of empty space in the interior of this comet. You described it as having a sort of hard rind or crust. Made me think of really good Italian bread that's crusty on the outside and full of holes on the inside. Yeah, that's sort of what they think may be the case.

Because after all, I mean, it looks solid when you look at it from the outside. And filet, when it touched down a couple of times and then finally touched down for good, it had several different ways of measuring the hardness of the surface and how porous it was. At the very surface, it seems like it's a little less porous, more like 40 or 50%. But I was talking with the concert scientist, concert's the instrument on both Philae and Rosetta that used radar sounding to get at the interior structure of the comet. And she said they can't be 100% certain that it really is rindy like that everywhere, but it may be. And it may even be fractal, which is to say that it's made of lots of smaller objects that have kind of a harder rind and a more porous interior. But we don't really know that for sure. As always after these missions, much, much more to learn.

How about the similarities between at least this comet, if not all comets, and Old Faithful? Yeah, well, this one does seem to have a regular water cycle activity, though maybe not quite like Old Faithful. It's really hard to say. There are these active pits that do show repeating activity over time as they come into some light. And then the stuff that gets jetted out of these active sites often recondenses back on the comet as a frost overnight. The cycle doesn't precisely repeat itself because, after all, the stuff that frosts on a surface doesn't get back down into the interior. The comet is slowly losing mass over time. One of the more interesting things that I learned is that we have sort of this conception of a comet as a snowball that as it goes around close to the Sun on every orbit,

that it kind of loses a little bit of its diameter. It shrinks maybe by a couple of meters with all of that stuff blasting off of its surface. But observing the comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, how it was behaving during its perihelion, the whole thing didn't shrink. It seemed to be shrinking more from what they call scarp retreat, where you have a steep cliff of some kind that seems to be eroding back instead of kind of eroding entirely in its diameter. It's sort of a different way of falling apart than people had previously imagined for comets. How about the chemistry? Turns out a good piece of the periodic chart on this comet and a lot of interesting compounds. A lot of interesting compounds, a lot of interesting hydrocarbon compounds of all different shapes and sizes. Only one amino acid, which the scientists

say makes sense because you need liquid water to make all the rest of them. But with the huge variety and complexity of organic material, they said, just imagine dumping a comet like this in an early primordial Earth ocean and having all of this rich organic material available for chemistry to happen. And it does seem plausible that comets could have been the source of a lot of the material that might have made up the very first life forms on Earth. Periodic table, not chart. I don't want to get a nasty note from my boss who has the periodic table on the back of his business card. We'll leave the science there, although you've got much more of it in the September 29th blog post that we mentioned at planetary.org. But turning to the next day, the 30th, I was up and following along with you.

I don't want to send you into a deeper funk, but what was the sense that you got from the people who, some of whom have been part of this mission for over a decade? I have to say personally, when I first arrived for the morning of the end of the mission, I was feeling a little punchy. You know, I didn't really know how to feel. And then as the time approached for the end of the mission, everything kind of fell quiet. And the ESA broadcast spent the last five minutes just staring at the chart on the big screen in the wall of the control room that just had this it was this green line with a big spike indicating the strength of the spacecraft signal and we were just waiting for that spike to disappear and it did and I and several other people in the room saw that, and we just said, oh.

Yeah, yeah. I thought it was a nice touch that they fell silent during those last few minutes, and we all just watched for the disappearance of that radio signal. But as you said, this mission is far from over in terms of the science. It will continue to deliver for years. It will. And, of course, the spacecraft is still there and maybe one day it'll be visited again as the European Space Agency put out another one of their adorable little cartoons about the mission and implied that would happen in the distant future.

But they did show this cartoon of poor Rosetta sitting on the comet's surface with a sleeping filet in the background. Rosetta's solar panels were all crumpled from the impact. And when we saw that, me and Chris Lintott, who's a space journalist from the UK, we just turned to each other. We both needed a hug at that moment. It was sad. And people really should see that cartoon. It's in that September 30th blog post at planetary.org.

It is quite touching. Emily, thank you so much. We're far from done with reporting on Rosetta on this show. We will, I'm sure, talk to one or more of the scientists before too long. But it sure is good to catch you right after the end of this spectacular mission. It has been great. That's Emily. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society,

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She'll be back next week with her regular contribution to the show. In the meantime, we're going to get ready to talk to Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, sitting in the Planetary Society studio with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Once again, welcome. Hey, good to be here, Matt.

We got this message from Christopher Midden, longtime listener, Carbondale, Illinois. He says, thanks, as always, for the excellent job you do. Not sure I could go on without Planetary Radio. Wow, that's a lot of pressure. Should I tell him that we're going to start charging 20 bucks for each listen? Yes, at least to everyone in Carbondale. Well, before we charge him, give him one more free look at the night sky. All right. You can look at Venus and Mercury for free. Check out Venus in the west shortly after sunset, looking super bright.

Mercury, tough to see, but very low. You can see it in the pre-dawn east. Those are the planetary highlights. We move on to this week in space history. Of course, it was 1957 that Sputnik 1 was launched, successfully launching us into the space age. I always think it's fascinating that the space age started pretty much at the same time as rock and roll. Coincidence? You be the judge. No, I don't think so. All right, we move on to random space fact. That did not rock. I think we need to be a little more serious and sedate.

If you say so, that ought to last about five seconds. The ESA Rosetta mission, which, of course, just ended its mission, setting down on Comet 67P on September 30th. During its 12-year mission, it did three Earth flybys, two asteroid flybys, one Mars flyby, one comet rendezvous and accompaniment. It dropped a lander onto a comet and then at the end set itself down on a comet. That is a bargain. And, you know, the only thing that lasted longer, there are two things that have lasted longer than Rosetta. One is Cassini still in orbit at Saturn and the other is planetary radio. It's not true.

It's not true. There are other things. I'm just saying stuff. There are even other things in space. planetary radio. It's not true. It's not true. There are other things. I'm just saying stuff. There are even other things in space. There are. There are. Yeah.

We got Voyagers. We got, yeah. Don't write about that. Sorry. Chris Bidden just wrote to say, I take it all back. Oh, okay. I guess we'll continue to offer the shows for free there. All right. We move on to the trivia contest.

I ask you, where are the three NASA Deep Space Network antenna facilities? How'd we do? I told you before we started recording, we did great. We had a huge response to this. I mean, it was a pretty easy one. A lot of people did get it off the top of their head, like we talked about a couple of shows ago, where the ice cream cones go. And we've got a winner.

You'd forgotten, hadn't you? For anyone who didn't hear the show, that just sounds so bizarre. You know, where the ice cream cones go. It's free. They should go back two weeks and listen. There you go. For now. Tim Armstrong is our winner this week, chosenbyrandom.org.

He's in Wilmington, North Carolina. He said, Goldstone, outside of our own Barstow, California. Be sure to visit the restaurant row there. Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia. And he says, I really appreciate all the work that goes into producing this show. Can you confirm he was correct with this? Yes, there is a lot of work that goes into producing this show. Can you confirm he was correct with this? Yes, there is a lot of work that goes into this show. Congratulations, Tim.

You have won yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. Worth a couple hundred bucks American to use that nonprofit network of telescopes all over the sky. I do have more I almost forgot. Martin Hajoski in Houston, Texas. Goldstone is named after a gold mining ghost town. Canberra is part of the gold triangle of gold mining towns, and Madrid was referred to as the Golden City by Conquistadors, an AU-auspicious piece of connecting trivia. All right. Bravo. Bravissimo. All around. We had a whole bunch of people among them.

Earl Green in Arkansas, Caleb Johnston in Florida, Sander Elvick in the Netherlands, and Vicky Knorr in Kentucky, who brought up, neither of us had heard of this, JPL's Deep Space Network Now website, where you can kind of monitor what the DSN is doing, what spacecraft it's communicating with at that moment. Yeah, that's pretty cool. See where they're doing their long-distance calls. Okay, let's go on to the next one. Reflecting on the Rosetta mission once more,

what are the names of the two asteroids that Rosetta flew by as well as the name of the comet it studied and eventually was set down upon? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 11th, that's October 11th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to answer this one. And you got that prize package that we already talked about. So I think that wraps it up. All right, everybody.

Go out there. Look up the night sky and think about the strangest chair you've ever sat in. I think I'm looking at one of them right here that fits that for me. That's the boomerang chair here, the one that looks like a pitch return chair. I don't know. The one you're in is pretty weird, too. This would be a pretty standard office chair. It is orange, though.

It used to be mine, and I can tell you it is not standard. It's left over from the Spanish Inquisition, I think. Ew. Ew, you used to sit in this? He's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society who joins us here every week on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and is made possible by its proud members in Europe and around the world. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.