Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Flying High on SOFIA

Episode Date: September 8, 2015

Planetary Radio returns to SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, but this time we fly in the giant 747 turned telescope platform. It was a night to remember.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flying high with SOFIA, 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. Come with us aboard SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. I'll never take a more thrilling flight, That's unless I make it to orbit someday. Bruce Batts joined me aboard this very special 747, as you'll hear in this week's What's Up segment. Bill Nye and I got a great tour of SOFIA back in December of 2010, but we never left the ground. Before we check in with the science guy, we'll hear from senior editor Emily Lakdawalla

as she prepares us for a journey far beyond Pluto. Emily, it may be slightly old news now, but it's new for us here on Planetary Radio. Talk to us about what you know of New Horizons heading for another target. They've finally officially chosen the target of the extended mission. It's a little world currently known as 2014 MU69, although we can expect that it'll get a more mellifluous name sometime in the very near future. But it's pretty small and it's pretty far away and it's going to take New Horizons a lot longer to get there. It'll be January of 2019 before the flyby happens. So this is written up in a really nice article, co-written by you

and our colleague Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. We'll get to that portion of it in a moment. But what do we know about this object right now? Not much, right? Not very much at all. As a matter of fact, we had hoped to know more about the extended mission target back when New Horizons launched. They had this search campaign going with a lot of Earth-based telescopes to try to find an object in the Quaper Belt that they could fly by. And what they found was that there were fewer objects out on the Quaper Belt than they predicted.

And so they didn't find anything with Earth-based telescopes. And the long and the short of it is that pretty much Hubble is the only telescope that can be relied upon to get us any information about this object before New Horizons flies past it. And you don't get very much Hubble time even when you win Hubble time. So we only have a couple of observations. They're largely designed to fix the orbit so that we know where it is and can steer New Horizons towards it. We know it's very faint. That's why you can't see it with most Earth-based telescopes. That means it's probably pretty small, about 30 to 45 kilometers in diameter, which is what they were going for. They had some really large Kuiper belt objects in Pluto and Charon during the Pluto-Charon flyby. And now they wanted to go explore a much smaller

member of the Kuiper belt that's sort of like one of the ingredients, one of the building blocks for the rest of the Kuiper belt. And that's what they'll get with this object. Now, I'm going to ask you to jump into Casey's realm for a moment here. Is there much of a chance that New Horizons might be cut off from the funding that it will take to take us out to this object. Well, it is true that NASA has not officially approved the extended mission for New Horizons. And the reason for that is because any spacecraft that goes into an extended mission has to win approval from NASA to do that from a limited pot of money. And it will be competing along with things like Curiosity, and God willing, let's hope they're still alive, Opportunity, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,

and all of those. It is a limited pot of money, and they can't take it for granted. However, this mission was originally justified as a tour of the Kuiper Belt. If they didn't do an extended mission flyby, then they would kind of be going against the decadal survey that said this kind of mission, a tour of more than one Kuiper Belt system, was necessary. So it's not really very likely, but they can't take it for granted. They have to be quite serious in their extended mission proposal, and that's due next year. Besides, it's kind of chicken feed as missions around our solar system go, and they don't go farther out in the solar system, at least looking at objects than this one. Emily, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt.

There is so much more to this story, and you can read about it in her September 1st blog entry at planetary.org. On to the CEO of the Planetary Society now, Bill Nye. Bill, in just a few moments, we're going to be going to SOFIA in flight with our colleagues Bruce Betts and Merck Boyan. Some great stuff that we got last week. But do you realize it was nearly five years ago that you and I visited that beautiful plane? It just doesn't seem possible. I have to say that it was five years ago. But that is, you know, the plane that I worked on or did calculations for when I was an engineer at Boeing

about the speed of the hydraulic systems and whether or not it worked fine. I mean, it's fine. Yeah, we were safe. We were safe. Yeah. But I'm glad that you guys had a good flight. It must have been exciting. They opened the big door and then like, that's my own impression. You know what, as they pointed out to us, it is so well designed. The aerodynamics around the door are so good. You cannot tell when the door opens. Now, it's pretty noisy in the plane, as people are going to hear.

But there's no change when the big door opens. You wouldn't know except you could see it on the computer monitor. It was a thrilling experience, as I hope people will be able to tell from what we heard. Cool. What did you all see in the sky? I guess stay tuned is what I would say to our podcast listeners. But Matt, let's talk about something else. Five years ago this week, five years ago, I accepted the position as CEO, as your fearful leader of this amazing organization. And it's been one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me. I have to say I was under encouragement.

Can you be under encouragement? I was strongly encouraged. You were strong-armed. Yes, by my fellow board members. Your Dan Juracys, your Lon Levins, your Neil deGrasse Tyson's, really wanted me to take this job and turned out to be a pretty good thing. You know, the society has grown. We flew a light sail spacecraft. We're going to get a mission to Europa. And we were part of the outreach of the New Horizons mission and the fantastic images that came back from Pluto.

Amazon's mission and the fantastic images that came back from Pluto. Matt, your show has grown quite a bit in the last few years. Every week you have amazing guests on Planetary Radio. I learn so much about the missions and what's going on out there and up there. It's exciting, Matt. Keep it going. Thank you. I certainly hope to, and it is a blast.

Space and radio, as I always say. Very much look forward to the 35th anniversary, which is coming up this October 24th. And I'm very excited about the future. It's a deep scratch, but you only scratch the surface of what we have accomplished and will accomplish. And I guess that's enough self-patting on the back. But it has been wonderful. And thank you for your service, sir. Oh, no, no, no, Matt. It is I who must thank you. No, really, it is the staff. I'm just some guy. So the staff's amazing. So everybody, we want to get a mission to Europa and look for signs of life. We want the Mars 2020 rover to have a microphone for crying out loud. It should have a microphone. We want the Mars 2020 rover to really have an astrobiological focus. As I like to say, some of my best friends are geologists, but I want to find life.

I want to look for life on Mars, rather. So, Matt, big fun. Let's change the world. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you. That's the CEO of the Planetary Society for five years this week, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Let's go take a flight on a 747 with a big hole in the side. Tuesday morning, September 1st.

Bruce Betts and I are driving with Merck Boyan, the Planetary Society's video producer, to California's Mojave Desert. We arrive at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale. This is the home of SOFIA, the greatest flying astronomical observatory in the world. Turning the 747SP into a stable telescope platform was no small task. It took years longer than expected. But SOFIA has now been enabling scientists to do infrared astronomy above most of Earth's atmosphere for five years.

Hundreds of flights have taken it around the world, including two trips to New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere. Tonight, it will attempt to observe several distant targets, doing science with an exquisitely sensitive spectrograph called X-Ease. Walking across the tarmac now, out to Sophia, the sound you can hear in the background, other than the wind, is the APU, the auxiliary power unit, the small jet engine or turbine in the rear. That means the plane is under its own power right now even without the main engine started. So we're good to go. Doors are closed. Yes. Doors are closed and armed. Ready to go. Excellent. Put this plane in the air.

Okay, so let's try to make the safety brief nice and quick. Welcome to Flight 235. Hopefully we get this airplane off the ground. I'm Sal. Your safety tech is Carrie. Mission director is Nancy. In case of an emergency, we will be the first ones to open them. In case we cannot, everyone has been trained for egress.

Just look out the window. Open the door, do not hold on to the handle. It will take you out with it. No sharp objects. You know, take your pencils, pens, stuff out of your pockets before you jump on the slide. There's an EPOS bag. That's your emergency oxygen. Please carry that on you when you're walking around in flight. And we are in the air.

Our takeoff has been delayed by, of all things, a burned out wing light. It means that a carefully prepared flight plan, critical to accomplishing tonight's mission, has to be recalculated and redrawn. critical to accomplishing tonight's mission, has to be recalculated and redrawn. This work and all other activity on SOFIA is overseen by Mission Director Nancy McCown. Looking comfortable in her SOFIA flight suit, Nancy joins me for a few moments during a break from her duties. I'm here to make sure the mission is successful, at least as much as I can, and actually that everybody on board is safe, and everybody on board gets what they want.

So, I mean, I'm here for you, too, because there's a lot of other, there's teachers on board tonight. There are other guests that are on board besides just you, and so I'm trying to make sure everybody gets what they need. How did you end up in this job? That's a very long story. I got a minute. I have more time than you. Let me think. The way I ended up on this job, on SOFIA, was that I used to work on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. I loved my job there so much that I wanted to work on SOFIA.

that I wanted to work on Sophia. What are the most important skills for the person who's in charge of everything that's going on up here? One thing actually is to be able to remain very calm despite everything going on and to make everybody else feel at ease or at least not get too excited, not get upset about things. A lot of people are looking to you for the answers. You seem to like the job.

I do. I like it a lot. It is an honor to be up here as a part of this mission that you are leading. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Nancy. Good. I'm glad you could come. SOFIA Mission Director Nancy McCown. There are a lot of scientists on board tonight. Some are just observing as they prepare for future flights that will carry their instruments. But the science contingent is dominated by the team that built and is operating a spectrograph.

Like Nancy and the regular SOFIA crew, they sit at consoles full of flat-screen monitors. Each of these monitors displays a crowded collection of images, graphs, code, readings, all being updated moment to moment. You could easily mistake it for a rocket launch control room. That's if it weren't for the seatbelts, the portholes, and the constant deafening noise. Everyone was wearing ear protection. I've posted a gallery of SOFIA images. You can get to them from this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. My name is Mark McKelvey. I'm a co-investigator for the X-Ease instrument for SOFIA.

Which is sort of the star here tonight. It's your instrument that is hanging on the back of the telescope, this side of the bulkhead, the side with air. How's it going this evening? So far, we are having a challenging evening. This is a very complicated machine if you count the aircraft and our spectrograph as a unit. We're grappling a bit, but we are seeing right now signal on a fairly faint source for us. It's on the order of 20, 30 Jansky's, which is, for a high-resolution spectrograph, is challenging.

We know a little bit about spectrographs on this program, but tell us what is special about your instrument, your piece of the entire machine, as you called it here. X-Ease is basically a molecule machine. It basically is designed to identify and tease out structural details of all kinds of things in space. So X-Ease is an echelon cross-a-shell spectrograph, hence the acronym. We are a cross-dispersed spectrograph working in the mid-infrared. This instrument is really unique for SOFIA. So it has a resolving power of 100,000, a typical wavelength that we work at,

that's very high for astronomy in general, I think. It is really a unique platform here. We work in a spectral range that is really inaccessible from the ground, inaccessible. So if we're not in this aircraft, we really can see nothing at these wavelengths. And there is really no other instrument that has this kind of resolving power. So the fact that we can separate very closely spaced wavelengths lets us look deep into molecular structures, velocities of clouds. We can resolve things and identify isotopes that on previous things like ISO, which has spectrographic in a similar wavelength range, just really didn't have any hope of determining.

So we can identify isotopes that really just can't be done otherwise. When proposals come in, obviously, if it can be done from the ground, we'd rather have it done from the ground. We look for proposals that really need to be up above the atmosphere and really need the kind of resolving power we can provide. This spectrograph is really for SOFIA. It was identified as a really key element among the suite of eight instruments that we have.

This one is the spectrograph from the mid-infrared. And that's a key factor with SOFIA, right? That you can take a complex, large instrument like this and change it out, put another one in its place, which is pretty amazing flexibility. Right. We try to be a cross between a regular ground-based observatory, which have interchangeable instruments designed for different kinds of science. We have that same capability for SOFIA. But our instruments are relatively narrowly focused on those things that really need to be above the atmosphere to work.

Obviously, in a space-based observatory, you have the ultimate sensitivity because you have no atmospheric background, whatever, no seeing limitations. But, of course, it's hugely expensive. You cannot change the instruments out as you get new scientific ideas to pursue. And this observatory also can move anywhere on the globe, which you don't have that kind of flexibility, even in some space-based observatories and certainly not in ground-based observatories. XC's co-investigator Mark McKelvey of NASA Ames.

More from SOFIA, including a conversation with the telescope operator, is moments away. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk 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, Merk.

Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's 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 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 planetary society. 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 and more of our all-night astronomy flight on SOFIA,

the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're well into the mission now. I've worked my way to the rear of the heavily modified 747SP. Sitting at yet another console is Mission Operations Specialist Gabrielle Sarage. at yet another console is mission operations specialist gabrielle sarage about eight meters or 25 feet separate her workstation from the bulkhead that divides our cabin from the telescope compartment it is frigidly cold and dry on the other side of that bulkhead a human would have only a few seconds before losing consciousness it's a busy night isn't it it is well yeah it's pretty normal and we are about as

close as we're going to get on this flight i'm about as close anyway to the telescope itself i mean there is this big open space in front of us it's just it's like holy land we can't go there well it's yeah it's spooky spooky spooky zone because we don't want anybody tumbling over there and falling in. And we've got to do this using the headsets because it's really noisy. It is very noisy. I mean, if you've taken them off for a little while, you see after a while, you kind of get that ringing in your ears.

So tell me about your job. You're the operator. The telescope operator. It's very descriptive. Exactly that. You've got a lot to look at here with all these displays. We do. And some of them are cryptic, and they certainly could be displayed in a more vivid way. But you get used to it.

It's like looking at the Matrix after a while. At first, it looks like a bunch of jumble, and after a while, you start seeing things in it. That's a great comparison. Well, especially this scrolling, you know, you kind of could be numb to it. And then after a while, things actually start jumping out. Every leg, we set everything up and then hand over to the science team and they start their observations. Sometimes there's a lot more involvement. Like right now, they're doing lots of different moves and we're confirming each one all the way. And so we're monitoring basically most of the hardware, and we also are doing all the acquisitions.

We know what they want to look at, and we set up the telescope in order for them to observe it with their instrument. So they don't know what's going on with the telescope exactly. They're not directly connected to it inasmuch as they don't have all the feedback that we do. Yeah. So we're paused here for a moment as the telescope slews around, or the plane slews around, getting us back to where we're supposed to be looking. Okay, now I'm a space geek. I couldn't help but notice one little piece of your display is showing this star field,

and it's centered on an object that we've talked about on our show, Vesta. An asteroid, yeah. Yeah, we're actually observing an asteroid right now. These three imagers, it's kind of the papa bear, mama bear, baby bear thing. This is the wide field imager, right? And then the fine field imager is that box. And then the focal plane imager, that box, is this one. So keep going down.

That's like with my telescope when I move from the wide-angle eyepiece into the one. Exactly. Same thing. So this is obviously our rough acquisition and moving it down until we get our target on their boresight for the scientists. So how do you actually maneuver the telescope? And because the telescope can't do it all, how do you maneuver the plane or talk to the pilot? Yeah, those are good questions. So unlike a ground-based observatory, which can move in azimuth, azimuth is our plane

heading with 90 degrees difference because we're looking out the side, right? So our building is moving, and all we mostly move in is in elevation. Because we're just going up and down, looking outside the side, right? In a traditional ground-based telescope, when we would move the dome around to point to different azimuth, instead that's our heading, so that's all been pre-planned, and that's our flight plan. Our flight plan is like all of the azimuth places that we would look through the night. And then our elevations are based on where we are in the sky at that time.

Hold on, he's talking to us. Listen carefully now as things get a little crazy. I'm in the midst of my conversation with Gabrielle when she gets word from the scientist that something is not as it should be. I should mention to the less geeky in our audience that a GUI, or G-U-I, is a graphical user interface. You never want one to go haywire, and especially not when you're doing astronomy above 40,000 feet. We're as on-board side as possible.

All right, we're going to go back to peaking up. Okay, what do you want to see? A peak-up nod, one, two pairs or something? Just one pair. I'm seeing some of my guis are behaving funny, which I don't like. The velocity files. Yes, I just got an invalid destination error. This is usually preliminary to a crash.

I can't start tracking. Okay, so we'll end our pickup. Ending our pickup. So this is part of the battle of being an operator even on a ground-based telescope. Sometimes your computer systems crash, and this is

I think it's about to crash. You've got a lot of computers, an awful lot of technology here. We do. Hold on. Recover from this. It's timing out, Mike, because it can't connect. It's off the FCCS. Yeah. Crashed.

Yeah, we got an MCCS crash. You've hit stop already. What that means is that we're probably going to have to reboot. Yeah. It finishes in a little while. That's okay.'re probably going to have to reboot. That's going to take us out for 20 minutes. This happens. This is part of the deal. Mission Director Nancy McCowan recapped some of the night's challenges and put them in perspective.

Well, we had a lot of problems, as you saw. We had problems getting off the ground. That was the first problem. There are other things that we had that you wouldn't have been, you wouldn't have noticed, but problems that we had. We had our computer that takes all our data and translates all our data for us went down right in the middle of one of the observations. Issues with our flight plan, all different things tonight. It's been a little bit crazy. So it's one of those nights. Yes, one of those nights.

On the other hand, you've had some absolutely terrific nights with some wonderful science that has gotten a great deal of attention from the scientific community. Yes, we have. We've done some really good stuff. One of the last flights I was on was actually in New Zealand, and that was a Pluto occultation flight down out of Christchurch, and that was fantastic. That was a very, very exciting flight to be on and to be a part of. The timing of that, with New Horizons actually reaching Pluto, was also pretty special, wasn't it?

Yes, yes. That was pretty neat. We had an in-flight update. Actually, I think we had two in-flight updates that told us as we got closer exactly where this occultation was going to occur. So we had to change the flight plan a couple of times to get closer to where we were needed to be. We did everything just right. At one point, we were a little bit off what our heading was supposed to be, and I struggled with the airplane, again, telling the pilots what to do. One right, one left, and got it back on. It's because you predict the winds, but you're never sure what to do. One right, one left, and got it back on. It was because you predict the winds, but you're never sure what they are. So the winds were a little bit different, and at that point, we were just being blown. So I needed to try and get us back. And we got so close to, you

know, perfection on that. That was really neat. Really threading a needle. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. They did recover, and the science continued. Two teams of very lucky educators were watching the action from farther back in the cabin. I'm Samantha Thompson. I'm the curator at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and I'm an astronomy airborne ambassador with SOFIA. Hi, my name is Rich Kruger, junior high and senior high science teacher at Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy.

How do your students feel about this? Yeah, they're pretty jazzed. In fact, I'm coming up with a lesson plan tonight that I'm going to ship off to them tomorrow that they'll use on Wednesday to help me out afterwards to get the community excited about the work that we're doing here. It's a big mission, and there's a lot of people involved. It's fun to watch everybody kind of run around the plane and get everybody on the same wavelength. It's incredible how much coordination, how much planning went into this, don't you think?

I can't believe it, especially since we took off, what, two hours late, and they're creating new flight paths literally on the fly. It's amazing, but these guys have been doing it for a long time. This is the 235th flight, they said. So these are pros, and they know exactly what they're doing, and they make it work for the scientists. From something like 42,000 or 43,000 feet up in the air above the United States, it's time for What's Up from the Sophia

Aircraft, and I'm here with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. We are on headset, which is how most of the people here are talking to each other. The other people I spoke to, we went up way up into the front of the airplane. That's the technical term, the front, and it's kind of quiet there. I was quiet enough to do the interviews that people have been listening to earlier in this show. But I just thought it'd be fun for us to be on headset. Well, yeah. Headset

Ralston on the River Prowl Suet. That was so close. It started so well. Congrats. I went downhill in a hurry. So, listen, what's up? Other than us. Us.

We got planets in the evening sky. We got Saturn over in the south, or if it's the middle of the night like it is for us right now, Saturn's over in the west looking yellowish. And then in the pre-dawn, we've got Venus and Mars. Venus much, much brighter and a little bit lower down. Both of them you'll have to catch shortly before sunrise, but they'll get easier and easier to see as the

months go along. And that's the party in the night sky. Go ahead and do random space fact. I think for the first time in our history, I won't even have to add echo or reverb behind you. Random space fact. Seriously, it would have just been gilding the lily.

We'll talk about SOFIA, oddly enough. So the question is, how do you keep a big giant telescope in the back of a 747 pointed where it's supposed to be pointing without shaking all around in turbulence? And the way you do it, the first main way you do it is you mount it on a bearing that is filled with pressurized oil. That keeps it staying pretty much in one place as the plane moves around it. There are also wind blocks and other more subtle things going on to keep it pointed in the right place. Very, very impressive technology. It's fun just to watch it rocking a little

bit left, a little right, a little up, a little down. And we're the ones who are moving. Are we? Are we really? That's all relative. Yeah. It's a frame of reference thing. So we move on to the trivia contest, and I asked you what Mars landers were actually imaged while under parachute descending to the surface of Mars. How did we

do, Matt? We got a very nice response to this one, and it was Eric Bruner, who was chosen by random.org. Past winner, but it's been a couple of years since he got in on one of these. He says that it was Phoenix and Curiosity that were imaged by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, specifically that amazing high-rise camera, on their way down to the surface. Is he correct? That is correct. and just amazing.

Amazing they could do it once, much less twice. They've got the spacecraft moving in orbit one direction and the lander and repair chute going a different direction, and it's just, it's cool. Congratulations, Eric. You have picked up a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a light sail patch, which I think is the last one of those we have to give away for a little while.

All right. So next time out, right now, we're going to give away a Planetary Radio t-shirt. You know what? I think we can also give away is a great Chop Shop poster, one of those terrific posters designed by Thomas Romer, and you can learn more about them at chopshop.com. They're beautiful. It'll be one of those Planetary Mission posters that he's done, and we'll figure out which one later.com. They're beautiful. It'll be one of those planetary mission posters that he's done, and we'll figure out which one later. Okay. Get us your answer to this question. We'll stick with

SOFIA. SOFIA telescope has an effective diameter of 2.5 meters, two and a half meters, but it actually is slightly somewhat larger than that due to vignetting. You don't actually use the entire mirror. So tell us, tell us how large is the mirror? Not what is effectively used, but the actual entire mirror. How do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You got until the 15th.

That would be September 15th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. That's a Tuesday, as always. To get us the answer to this one and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a Chop Shop poster. And I think we're done. Doesn't it sound like we ought to be doing traffic reports?

There's a slow edge on I-5. Say good morning, Bruce. All right, everybody. go out there and look up in the night sky, and think about flying astronomy. Thank you, and good morning. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary

Society, and you'll be able to catch some random space fact videos and other stuff that he's been doing up here as we also shoot video with our video producer, Merck. Watch for all of that at planetary.org. 6.18 in the morning, and after eight hours of infrared astronomy on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA,

we are back on the ground. for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, we are back on the ground. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its high-flying members.

Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.