Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Flying With Your Telescope to the Edge of Space

Episode Date: August 22, 2011

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Flying to the edge of space with your telescope, 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. Faith Vilas is preparing to turn her telescope on the sky, but she hopes to do this above the sky. We'll talk with her about the Planetary Science Institute's plan to mount a large telescope on XCOR's suborbital space plane. As Faith dreams of observing above the clouds,

our Emily Lakdawalla actually shows us the clouds rolling through the skies of Mars. Emily also introduces a rapper who has made the periodic table his muse. Bill Nye the science and planetary guy is back on board, and we'll wrap up with another tour of the night sky provided by Bruce Betts. Emily, one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on the blog, and I can congratulate you for it because you created it, those Martian clouds. Well, of course, I didn't create it. The clouds were there, and Mars Express high-resolution stereo camera saw them,

and then a UnmannedSpaceFlight.com member noticed them in the archive of HRSC data, and another UnmannedSpaceFlight.com member taught me how to do this video. So it was really a long chain of help. But yeah, I have to admit, I kind of agree. I'm tooting my own horn here, but I think it's pretty awesome looking. And there's going to be a lot more of these videos of Martian clouds, dust storms rolling across the planet to come. So you stand on the shoulders of giants. I don't mind saying that, but it is quite beautiful. I'll say it again. And you were using some new skills?

That's right. You know, the animation is made possible by the fact that the high-resolution stereo camera looks in numerous different directions across its orbit while it's orbiting Mars. And so it images the same spot at slightly different times. So it saw this spot on Mars where these clouds were a total of nine times at different look angles covering about two minutes. I wound up with an animation that had five different frames, and it's five, not nine for reasons too complicated to explain here. That's a pretty jerky animation. So a friend of mine, Ian Regan, taught me how to tween the animation to generate lots of extra frames in between the five that I had to make a very smooth, pretty movie. And I've done a little bit of tweening. And you talk about it was an arduous task, probably largely because it was your first time out. But you're going to post how other folks can do this as well.

Absolutely. It's going to be a two-parter. The first will be on how to find and access the HRSC data. And the second one will be how to make this animation. This is an August 19 entry, if you want to see those beautiful clouds. There are a lot of other great recent entries on the blog, though, but the other one that I think I'd like to talk about with you is a bit of a departure. It's a wrap. You know, I found a link to this on Google+, and I was just, it was awesome, because this guy was inspired by Tom Lehrer's The Elements, or maybe inspired to do something

better, because he'd heard so much about this song. And once he finally heard it, he was kind of disappointed, because it doesn't really teach you anything. It just lists all the elements off. And so he set out to make a rap that not only lists an awful lot of the elements, but teaches you a great deal about the elements and the periodic table. It's really quite wonderful. It's quite brilliant. And we have to show it to our boss, Bill Nye, because he is the world's biggest fan of the periodic table. But we'll go out with a little sample of this periodic table wrap from Ort Kuiper, which makes you hopeful for more? I sure hope he does more planetary-themed raps because he is awesome. Emily, thanks so much.

Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here's a little bit of Hort Kuiper. It's time for group 18, gas is called global They're really unreactive, so these elements are stable Helium's the second lightest on this periodic table And the next one is the gas that gives the neon lights a label And argon is the third most present gas found in our atmosphere With krypton and xenon, they're found in light sources everywhere

But the one to fear is the radioactive radon Giving off energy like Johnny Storm with the flame on Hydrogen, helium, then lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine and neon Thank you. arsenic and selenium, bromine, but it's just krypton. Bill Nye is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society. He's on with me via Skype. And welcome back, sir. It's good to see you and hear you. You're excited about an instrument that's seen some antimatter not far from home. Yes, the payload antimatter exploration light nuclei

astrophysics instrument, PAMELA, has been in orbit for several years. These people believe strongly that they have found a collection of antiprotons. So protons are matter, and antiprotons are antimatter, and the Earth's magnetic field is somehow holding them there, just like the magnetic bottle on Star Trek or what have you. This is antimatter going around the Earth and it's got to be connected

somehow to what people are trying to figure out with respect to dark energy and dark matter and darkons, particles of dark. Very exciting. And this is this idea that you like to talk about. New physics.

And we're starting to get little hints that there really is something far beyond out there. You know, who knows? Maybe a warp drive in your future. Yes, warp drive. But that would be cool. But here's my point. There's something like relativity waiting to be discovered. And I would just be so very excited if it got discovered in our lifetime.

I mean, it would change the world. And speaking of warp drive, you know, the DARPA, the Advanced Projects Research Agency, has this test aircraft that went hypersonic, Mach 20 or something. It would go at astonishing speeds going around the Earth in about an hour. Really be something, skipping off the atmosphere. Very exciting. That's what your tax dollars are at work. And then Matt, speaking of tax dollars at work, you know, NASA reorganized again into the Human Exploration Operations Directorate. So they're going to get people going beyond the space station into deep space, which is what we got to do. You see this as a good sign.

Yeah. Reorganization of that part of NASA after the space shuttle retired. Good, good, good. Making progress. Going to get her done. I hope they work on that antimatter matter drive real soon. Oh, yeah. Well, the longest journey starts with a single step. I mean, this kind of discovery could change the world. This could be like the cosmic background, microwave background explorer, where people discovered and verified that the Big Bang made this microwave background noise that was predicted by theory. So these antiprotons could be real antimatter held in the Earth's magnetic field, and it could be science fiction come true.

It could change the world. This kind of thing is a very exciting time in space exploration, Matt. Very, very exciting. I say we live in the golden age of exploration. I think it's just the start of things. What we want to do is get it where we can integrate human exploration with the extraordinary things that human-built

robots are doing. Very exciting. From your mighty voice to the ears of the people in that new directorate at NASA, thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye is the science and planetary guy and the executive director of the Planetary Society. I'm going to be right back with Faith Vilas,

and we'll hear how she plans to personally take a telescope up into suborbital space. Last month, the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona signed an agreement with XCOR Aerospace. XCOR is building the Lynx suborbital space plane, designed to take humans above almost all of Earth's atmosphere. Some will pay for a ride on Lynx to experience microgravity and see the curvature of our planet from space. But PSI's explorers will be looking up, not down. And they'll eventually be looking through ATSA, a large telescope mounted right on top of the Lynx fuselage. It could be the start of a whole new branch of astronomy.

PSI's Faith Vilas heads the project. She joined me via Skype a few days ago. Faith, great pleasure to have you on the program, and congratulations on this new deal announced with XCOR. Thank you very much. We're very excited about working with XCOR. It is the spacecraft provider that probably best meets our needs as far as having a telescope is concerned in space. I am going to, with your permission and XCOR's too, I hope, we will take an image, it's an artist's conception, of your instrument, ATSA, mounted on the top of XCOR's Lynx, this winged spacecraft that they're getting ready, right?

What the picture is, is a picture of the Lynx Mark II, which is the spacecraft, the down-the-road spacecraft that will fly up into suborbital space and return. Lynx Mark I will fly up to, I believe, 50 kilometers. We will try to participate in that also with what we have called the ATSA armrest camera, and that actually is not the version that you're seeing in that picture, but it is a version of our system where we are going to test, you know,

acquisition and tracking and human intervention with that in preparation for the final version of the telescope, which you see in that picture. And the difference between, among many differences, one of the differences that you see there is that the telescope in the Mark II Lynx is mounted in a pod on top of the spacecraft where it can open up a front part of the pod and expose the telescope directly into deep space. No window, no nothing to interfere with us. It's one of the advantages of the Lynx that the best window is no window. And that means that we can look at any spectral range that we want to look at, from the ultraviolet through to the infrared. Where are you going to be looking with ATSA?

We can look anywhere ATSA can point, the Lynx can point. What's unique about ATSA is that it can point into areas where other space-based assets like the Hubble Space Telescope or Spitzer cannot point as easily. And that's in the region on the Earth toward the sun, anywhere within the Earth's, say, you know, within the Earth's heliocentric distance. Anything that gets into there, most of our space-based robotic telescopes will not look at them in that location because if something went off and they just turned and faced the sun, they'd fry the telescope and that would be a bad day in space. We can do that very uniquely,

or at least uniquely in space. We can turn close to the sun. We're trying to keep our costs low so that if we accidentally fry a CCD, we land, we change it out, we could fly again. We're trying to use off-the-shelf technology. We're trying to keep it to a basic system that we can interchange parts with so that it's possible to observe something such as Mercury, Venus, Earth approaching asteroids, sun grazing comets, maybe searches for other comets, maybe searches for vulcanoids, whatever we can look at in that particular location. That being said, we aren't limited to only that. We can look elsewhere, anywhere else we want to point. And how do you do the pointing?

I mean, is it the Lynx that does most of the work where the pilot will just reorient the spacecraft? Half and half. The Lynx Mark I will have a pointing accuracy of plus or minus two degrees. So they will be able to go up, point in the location that we're going to look at within plus or minus two degrees. And then we're setting up our experiment now, the armrest camera, as we call it, to test how easily can we move into location, find something centered, maintain it. The Lynx Mark II advertises that it can go to plus or minus a half a degree.

Wow. So that's even better pointing. And if we can get the LINX spacecraft itself to do the crude pointing, we probably can do the fine pointing. But that, in fact, that pointing is one of our major issues that we're working on. How critical a part of this effort is the fact that you'll have human operators there working with the instrument in this pretty limited amount of time that you'll have when you're up above most of the atmosphere?

I would argue that this is a very critical component of this particular spacecraft. First, let me say, someital observing from spacecraft is not new. NASA has been doing this for a long time with robotic launches that are suborbital to get data, in particular, data close to the sun, and they've been fairly expensive. In this case, we're talking about having a system that we can use and reuse and reuse

that we don't downlink the data from, that we have a person up there to center and to make a quick decision. Observations using the LINX-2 will be longer in time than the LINX-1 because we're going to a higher altitude. But this person will be able to make essentially any real-time decisions that we need or operate the system and bring it back to Earth, and it just becomes a lot cheaper. And you already said you can go right back up, I suppose. I mean, I know XCOR is talking about being able to make up to four flights in one day. XCOR has talked about four flights in one day, and if we could do that, that would be amazing. That would be amazing.

That's Faith Vilas. She'll tell us more about the ATSA suborbital observatory project when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions.

It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Wouldn't it be great to bring your telescope into space? Not just a robotic scope like the Hubble Space Telescope, but one you could actually operate and observe through in real time.

That's the thinking behind ATSA, a project headed by Faith Filas of the Planetary Science Institute. PSI plans to put telescopes on XCOR's suborbital space plane called Lynx. The first generation of the Lynx is nearing completion in California's Mojave Desert. I got to say, when I first heard about this, taking a telescope up with a human operator, I thought, very clever of these people at the Planetary Science Institute. This is how they're going to get their ride into space. I'm not knocking that at all, because I'm saying, please take me with you. But there really is, as you dive deeper into this, a very good argument for having trained astronomers, trained operators along on

the trip. But you have to be trained just to make this trip as well, right? I mean, hasn't that been a big part of this, the three-day training program that you've put some people through? And have you been through that training? I have been through part of the training, yes. And we all went. We had the first NISTAR training specifically dedicated to one particular experiment when it was dedicated to ATSA.

And we went to do some of the training, partly both to orient ourselves and also because we learned from going through that training what it is that we need to consider during this very short flight. For example, if you've gone up to a certain number of Gs in a certain direction forward, you know, XYZ orientation, then once those Gs let up, how well are you able to function what can you do you know are you going to be disoriented are you going to have to you know shake your head a couple of times then move the telescope over to your object and we expect that anybody going up with the atsa is going to have to as a minimum go through this training in general and i believe

x-cord insists upon that as well. But in addition to that, anything that we send a person up to do, this is a lesson learned from spacecraft observations, human exploration and robotic. It's going to be very tightly scripted time-wise. You know, we're going to have a person practicing essentially with simulators that we have for the ATSA that are very specific to the telescope, practicing again what their observational sequence is going to be during their observations. And so a person can go up that's either a trained astronomer, we'll be happy to provide a person to go with. Or if you're an astronomer and you want to go up with your experiment and use one of our instruments with our telescope or bring your own instrument if it works and we'll

check it out with our telescope then we will put that person through the full training needed in order for them to be able to accompany their spacecraft or if they just don't want to go near a tin can um you can do it for them but we will be scripted and they will have to go through the training and this training the nays training, is related to different profiles for different spacecraft and the different types of g-forces that you would get going up into suborbital space and how to prepare to go through them. And also just some other simple training about flight physiology. I know you talked about the press release I read says that you've been showing people what it's like to lose pressure at 25,000 feet and how well their brain continues to work.

Yep. How well do you do when you are oxygen starved? The signs of how it is that you would respond to being oxygen starved. That's the other major part of this training. this training. We all went through that, and we all particularly considered questions of after you go through a profile that's not dissimilar to what we'd launch with, with XCOR's links, how quickly can we respond and react? And we actually had a bunch of us doing some hand testing of how quickly can we act, how quickly can we respond, how well can we work, almost immediately from the moment the G-forces stop so we know how quickly

we can respond with the telescope system so how far off roughly is this first trip up at least with that first version of astra that i think you called the armrest atsa atsa armrest camera it's it's essentially a very very small telescope um and it's intended like i said to for us to be able to test the the pointing and tracking and making corrections to and how well the interaction goes on a very short timescale. We probably will look for Venus and Mercury, very bright objects, but that are close to the sun. Some of this depends upon when the LINX Mark I is ready, which is what we'd like to fly the ATSA-RMS camera on. One is ready, which is what we'd like to fly the Atza RMS camera on. And once it's up and flying and it's able to go, we would like to plan a sequence of observational tests.

Some of which we're going to come back down and say, whole thing didn't work. You know, we got to certain this out. We didn't do this one right. And some of which will be, hey, we can do it and this is how we do it. We made that correction based on what we learned last time we went up, and the whole thing didn't work. This is a developmental stage that we're coming up with the first time around. We're building into it the armrest camera. We're building into it options for filters and filter wheels so we can try to bring back some tangible science

and show that we can get a first cut but good result from this type of observation in this particular type of spacecraft. A first cut, but good result from this type of observation in this particular type of spacecraft. But no good idea yet of when that Lynx Mark I might be ready to take you up for a ride. The last time I heard the Lynx Mark I was going to make its first flights was around September, October of next year, 2012. So after they have shown that they can go up and come down and fly a few times, then we would like, you know, we'll be standing by in the queue with our system, carrying the system out to the spacecraft and ready to go. And this is my wild guess. Two or three months after they would start flying, if they're flying regularly, I don't know. That's really going to be more up to explore.

We'll be ready to go, but it will be up to explore. Absolutely fascinating and very exciting. And I wish you and your team the best of luck with this really new kind of astronomy, human-operated suborbital flights. Thank you very much. Faith Vilas is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, where we've talked to other folks in the past. She is also the ATSA project scientist. And you know what? Why don't you just, as a little parting shot here, tell people why ATSA? I guess it's not an acronym. ATSA is not an acronym. ATSA is the word from the Navajo Nation for eagle. We chose it because to us it was a very symbolic of a very noble and interesting name for the spacecraft that will fly high.

Very appropriate, Faith. Can we check back with you maybe when you get closer to doing this? Absolutely. We'd be delighted. Thank you so much. And we've got to get back out there to talk to the X-Core folks, too. It's been too long. Anyway, like I said, that's Faith Vilas of the Planetary Science Institute, and we'll look forward to the next chance to talk with her.

We're going to talk with Bruce Betts in just a moment here. He'll have everything that's, well, almost everything that's going on up in the sky for our What's Up segment, and we'll probably give away a T-shirt. Bruce Betts has once again joined us on the Skype line. That must mean that it's time for What's Up in the Night Sky. So we will welcome you once again to close out the program. Hi there. Hey there.

Hi there. How there? Good to talk to you as always. What's up? Well, we've got Jupiter coming up in the late evening, high overhead before dawn. It is super bright, brightest star-like object up these days. We've also got Mars in the pre-dawn. You can check it out over in the east, looking reddish.

And on August 25th, it'll be near the moon. If you're looking for a guide to find where it is, it'll be the reddish kind of dim thing. Looking for a guide to find where it is. It'll be the reddish kind of dim thing. Or just any night, check it out to the right of Castor and Pollux, the Gemini stars. We also have Saturn, very low, but still in the west at dusk, just after sunset. We move on to this week in space history. It was 30 years ago this week, 1981, that Voyager 2 flew past Saturn. And then also this week, eight years later, 1989, it flew past Neptune. Do you remember those, Matt? I'm sorry. Well, I'm not sorry to say I do. I do. I'm sorry about what that says about my age.

But I remember it very well and being quite excited about this, particularly that Saturn flyby. That was exciting. And then the first ever Uranus, only, only Uranus flyby. Yeah, sadly. In 1976, the Soviet Luna 24 returned soil samples from the moon this week. Big deal. Big deal for the Soviets since they had realized they weren't going to get people there ahead of us. But, you know, still quite an accomplishment, right? Not too many of these sample return missions.

Right. It was the first purely robotic sample return or that series of missions. It was actually three different missions. Let us move on, shall we, to random space fact. Random space fact. Gosh, Scooby. That was inspired because Bruce's dogs went nuts when we tried to record this the first time around. It happened just as we were talking about that sample return mission by the Soviets. So are they Russian wolfhounds or something? No, I think they're actually just guarding against any samples, particularly Soviet samples coming from the moon showing up. I think they were walking by the front of the house, but I'm not sure.

They're soil resistant, those dogs. Oh, I didn't know that. It doesn't really explain all the dirt on them. Well, it flies right off anyway. Please tell us. What's the fact? The International Space Station is almost four times as large as the Russian space station Mir and about five times as large as the U.S. Skylab.

Wow. Lots of elbow room up there. Well, at least in a relative sense. Yeah. You know, I've seen them sailing around. It's a mess, as we've already established on this show. But at least they've got room to move around, probably more than I do in my little home office. Probably.

We move on to the trivia contest. We ask, what spacecraft made the first ever direct observation and measurement of the solar wind? How'd we do, Matt? Yeah, I think this stumped a lot of people. We have fewer than usual responses this time around. I need you to confirm this. Most people said that it was, guess what, yet another Soviet mission, Luna 1. It was indeed. It was indeed Luna 1.

So this thing was on its way to the moon. How was it that it happened to discover this stuff flowing out of the sun? The key was they had the right instruments to detect things, and they got out to a place where they could detect them. And you know what? This also became, I learned from a number of listeners, when it was launched back in 1959, it eventually became the first human object to achieve escape velocity from the Earth.

It went into heliocentric orbit. Wow. It was orbiting helio. Yeah. You don't want to do that too close either. And it went through different names. At one point, it was also called Mekta, which I guess means dream. And it was only later that it became Luna 1. That came from Ron Bask, among other people. But Ron was not our 1. That came from Ron Bask, among other people. But Ron was not our winner. That distinction goes to Chris Wilson, I believe a first-time winner, I'm not sure actually, of Oxbridge, Ontario, Canada. So, Chris, congratulations.

We're going to send you a T-shirt. We've got to get more of those made. I think we're running out. Oh, no. Yes, it's crisis time at the Planetary Society. All right, let's go on to the next question. I asked you last week about fastest spacecraft. Now I'm going to ask you about fastest humans.

Who holds the title of fastest human or humans relative to the Earth? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. That's a great question. I wonder if they're, oh, God, I'll be giving away a way to find this, but I would guess that these people or person is or are in the Guinness Book of World Records. They should be. Should be the Guinness Book of Galactic Records in our case, I suppose.

Anyway, you have until the 29th of August at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Monday the 29th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. And I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about melting cheese. Thank you. Good night.

Ooh, yeah. Stick with the green variety. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Phil Plait returns next week with a cosmic rant. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the William T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.