Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Genesis Rises From The Ashes With a Piece of the Sun

Episode Date: April 4, 2005

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The Genesis spacecraft rises from the ashes, 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. Genesis team member Roger Wiens returns to our show with a progress report. We also spoke to Roger last September, just a day after the probe hit the Utah desert at 200 miles per hour, shattering its delicate collectors and their thin films of solar wind, quite literally bits of the sun.

The news is surprisingly good. Toward the end of our time together today, we'll check in with Bruce Betts for another What's Up preview of the sky and this week's space trivia contest. Let's get started with this faster-than-light review of headlines from out there beyond our small blue planet. Space shuttle Discovery has been mated to its external tank and solid rocket boosters. Now it's ready for the slow roll out to the launch pad from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA still hopes for a May 15 liftoff, but that's not going to happen unless the Return to Space Task Force is satisfied with improvements made since the loss of Columbia. Still lots happening out at Saturn, where the Cassini orbiter has had its fifth close encounter with Titan. This time, the spacecraft took a look at a part of the big moon that hadn't yet been imaged in detail,

at least with a camera. The probe's radar instrument has done a great job of mapping much of the surface. You can see samples of these radar images and a host of other pictures at planetary.org. And here's a story we at first thought might be an April Fool's joke. There are reports that a European team has taken the first actual photo of an extrasolar planet. You may remember that we've talked about the recent announcement that light from one of these bodies had been detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. But that's a long way from getting a snapshot.

We'll follow developments and give you an update next week. By the way, we expect David Charbonneau to be our guest for that show. David is lead author of one of two papers regarding the Spitzer Scopes discovery. I'll be back with Roger Wiens right after this Q&A from Emily about another mysterious moon of Titan and the black and white question it poses. See you in a minute. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

How come Iapetus is dark on one side and light on the other? The short answer to this question is that we just don't know yet, and Cassini observations have only made the question murkier. Here are a few facts. One side of Iapetus is mostly covered with a dark brown gunk about as dark as asphalt. Iapetus, like almost all of Saturn's moons, is locked into spin-orbit resonance, so one hemisphere always faces forward along its path around Saturn. This leading hemisphere is also where most of the dark material is.

Because most of the dark stuff is on the leading hemisphere, scientists theorize that the dark stuff came from somewhere else, and Iapetus has swept it up during its travels. Now, beyond Iapetus is a tiny dark moon named Phoebe. Scientists have long suspected that Phoebe was the source of the Iapetus gunk, but new Cassini measurements are casting doubt on this idea. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more.

There was no shortage of excitement on September 8, 2004. After more than three years in space, the Genesis probe was about to return home with a piece of the sun. At the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, helicopter pilots had spent weeks learning to pluck the spacecraft out of the air as it descended under a parachute. A cheer went up when long-range cameras found their target. Moments later, people began to realize something was very wrong. And Mission Manager MTC be advised, our vantage point we do not see a broke chute, negative broke. Copy.

Pretty good, Mark. It looks like we have a no chute, sir. Vector 2-0-0. Mission Manager MTC, negative broke, negative chute. Copy. Receive a visual. Impact. Impact at 585.

We have an impact bearing 2008 miles. Up here, Lance. Do you have an altitude? That's impact, sir, ground level. Seven months ago, I described the result of that impact as looking like a small flying saucer half-embedded in the desert. Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Lab was watching too. As the flight payload lead and a science co-investigator, he had put years into this unprecedented mission. Elation had turned to devastation in a matter of seconds. But as ground crews crept up to the spacecraft and began to peer inside. What they saw gave them some small reason for

hope. We decided it was time to check on the recovery of Genesis and its priceless bits of the solar wind. Roger, when we last talked to you, you were out in the Utah desert. You said that you were cautiously optimistic. After all these months have gone by, did that cautious optimism prove to be well-founded? Well, so far it has, Matt. We still are not at the point where we are really getting the meat of the science out, but we are going about this rather slowly, and what we've seen so far is that we do very much have reason to still be optimistic,

and we're on the path. It's just that the path is definitely taking longer because of the fact that we've got many more samples and smaller pieces than we expected to and a little bit of cleanup on some of them. Could you recap for us briefly what took place out there in the desert on September 8th? Well, the capsule was supposed to come in with a parachute. This is the first sample return since Apollo 30 years ago. So it was going to be quite an event. This is a robotic return, and the capsule was going to come into the atmosphere. There was going to be a drogue chute deployed, and then several minutes later, a main parachute. There was going to be a lifting chute, which would be snagged by a helicopter in order to avoid having a thing hit the ground and potentially tumbling

or whatever would happen if it was windy. What happened instead was that the parachutes never came out. The sequence that was supposed to start the parachutes going never happened due to some problems with the avionics unit. And because of that, the thing just kept coming down and coming down and coming down, falling to the ground. And it eventually hit the ground at almost 200 miles an hour. Fortunately, in a nice flat area that was relatively soft mud,

it looked pretty smashed up at that point. Soft mud, maybe, and pretty smashed up, but were you maybe a little bit surprised at how well this spacecraft survived? Well, on the surface of it, it looked pretty badly bashed up, but the samples themselves were inside of a canister that was inside of the capsule in turn. The unfortunate thing is many of our samples were a fragile material, brittle silicon wafers and sapphire wafers, so they did get fairly smashed up. But I don't know, it was not a worst-case scenario by any means,

partly because it crashed on Earth where we could pick up the pieces. We did have contingency measures in place that allowed us to really be able to put the samples back in sort of perspective as to what kind of solar wind they should have in them. So we're looking good after that crash. Has this been, in a sense, a bit of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle, trying to reassemble these wafers and figure out what went where? Well, one thing that we decided to do, oh, maybe eight, ten years ago, was we are collecting different types of solar wind. The sun actually sends out different types of solar wind. They are accelerated off of the sun slightly differently, and that affects their properties. Because of that, we wanted to collect these three different types of wind

in order to back out what the real solar composition is. But that means that we have to figure out which of these samples now have which kind of solar wind. There's one thing we did that was smart, and that is that each separate array that collects a particular type of solar wind has a unique thickness to all of the wafers on that particular array. And so we had basically three different thicknesses for those three arrays, and then we had one collector that is out all the time,

and so that had a fourth different thickness to those collectors. And so we merely have to measure the thickness of each shard or piece. No matter how small, we can figure out what array it belonged to and what kind of solar wind it has in it. Tell us, how many wafers did you start out with, and how many fragments have now been collected and are being analyzed at the Houston curation facility? Yeah, this is like the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. We had a little over 300 wafers when we started out,

and we were expecting to curate and be able to analyze those. We would have to break them up into small pieces at some point in order to send them to the different science laboratories. But what we have now is somewhere in the neighborhood of almost 15,000 pieces. So it's a huge number relative to what we expected. They are broken up for us, so that is taken care of. On the other hand, we have to sort through them and figure out which ones are relatively clean and which ones are the most usable.

It's not, as you said, just a matter of collecting these pieces and deciding which ones are which, but there was a lot of concern at the time about contamination. Now there's talk about Dugway dirt, and what is this brown stain, somewhat mysterious brown stain that is talked about on the Genesis website? Okay, even before the crash, Matt, one of the things that we had to consider was if these samples would get contamination out in space. And that's even a lot more insidious in some ways than dugway dirt. When you're considering that you have only a few micrograms of sample, of course, contamination is a real issue.

What can happen out in space is if we got a contamination layer out in space that was any thicker or almost as thick as the layer that the solar wind implants itself into, and the solar wind would actually go into that layer on top of our nice clean substrates. The solar wind wouldn't get collected in the collectors that we wanted them to. And then, for example, if we washed them off, that contamination layer might go away and there would go our solar wind. Terrible tragedy. So one of the things that we set out to do right away in the fall, besides, you know, in the middle of collecting all these pieces and cataloging them,

was to try to figure out whether we got contamination in space. Now, the way this works is spacecraft on a molecular level tend to be very dirty. If you think about your automobiles and everything that we have that has moving parts, everything needs lubricants, whether it's your car door or whatever. And on Earth, that's not a problem. Well, out in space, we know that nature abhors a vacuum. And lubricants are one of the things that try to get out and around when you're in a vacuum in a way that they don't do on the Earth.

And so these lubricants tend to creep along surfaces and just produce a film over everything. You can't do without lubricants, and so we did our best on Genesis to make as clean of a spacecraft as possible, especially inside the sample canister. But even in there, we had moving parts. We had the O-ring that had to seal it shut for launch and seal it shut for the reentry. And if that were to freeze up or stick together after the launch and before we actually opened it up, we'd never get solar wind samples. So we had to have some small amount of lubricants.

And what we found was that we did, in fact, have a thin film of gunk on our solar wind sample. Now, you have to realize that the solar wind is implanted into about a millionth of an inch, a layer about a millionth of an inch thick. So it doesn't take a lot of gunk. What we found so far is very reassuring, that although there is a slight amount of film on our samples, it's only about a tenth to less than a tenth, much less than a tenth, of the thickness that it would need to be to actually prevent the solar wind from going into our collectors.

Roger, let me stop you there for a moment so we can take a quick break and then come back and pick up this conversation about genesis and uh the bits of the sun the genesis team which you are part of are are recovering from that uh very unlost spacecraft we'll be right back this is buzz aldrin when i walked on the moon i knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system that's why i'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting

new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

Roger Weems is our guest on Planetary Radio this week. He is the flight payload lead from the Los Alamos National Laboratory dealing with the Genesis mission. lead from the Los Alamos National Laboratory dealing with the Genesis mission, significant portions of which are now being teased apart at a curation facility at the Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas. Roger, before the break, you were saying that we're talking about a layer about a millionth of, I think you said an inch thick, and we're talking about the actual bits of the sun or the solar wind, same thing really, that were collected. I found on the website the figure 10 to the 20th ions, which may sound like a lot, but in total about four-tenths of a milligram of solar wind particles.

That's right. Not a whole lot to work with. That's right. So we are now at the point where we're really trying to do some, we've done some reconnaissance to figure out and verify that the solar wind is in there. And I believe the next step really will be some of the first science results. What we've done recently is to do some analyses by mass spectrometry at several different laboratories, and also by secondary ion mass spectrometry to verify that the samples are actually in there.

Two or three things that we've done in specific. One is that we had a measure of the helium in the solar wind from a spectrometer that was flying on Genesis. It's called the Genesis Ion Monitor, or GIM, and it's something we built here. We just have that measure, and recently, mass spectrometers on the ground, measuring the helium that was extracted from some of the collectors, have found just about exactly the same amount of helium as we predicted from our measurements in space. So that verifies that we have found the solar wind in there.

Another measurement was made by the PI, principal investigator, Professor Don Burnett. He looked into a wafer in a way that can give a depth profile of the solar wind ions. He was looking specifically at the magnesium ions, and he found that the profile that he measured matched almost exactly what we predicted based on the energy of the solar wind particles going between the surface and about 2,000 angstroms in. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Don Burnett.

He was also a past guest on the program a few weeks before the landing took place. I'm sure that we will be talking with him again as more of these real science results come out. But he looked like a very happy guy just a couple of weeks ago at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, where he was saying,

we're in business, we have solar wind, and he was inviting scientists to put in their applications to get their own little sample. That's right. And so we're looking forward to, like I said, the next phase should really be to be getting science results out of that. One other thing that's happening in the very near future, and that is that the solar Concentrator, which had a target that had concentrated SolarWinds ions into it, is still sitting in its assembly holder at Johnson Space Center. We're sending a couple of people down there in a week and a half to remove it from that target assembly so that the targets will be free and then ready for people to take to the laboratories and analyze.

That addresses one of the highest priorities of the mission, and that is to measure the oxygen isotope composition of the sun and the solar wind. Let me come back to the contamination we were talking about, because I don't think I really let you establish the nature of this mystery stain, the brown stain. Were you saying that this brown stain is now thought to have been this contamination from the spacecraft itself? It is most likely a lubricant. It looks like we've found the elements fluorine and silicon, and that is fairly indicative of the type of lubricants that can be used with the spacecraft.

So that's a pretty good fingerprint. Yep, that's right. We are almost out of time, Roger. I guess it's safe to say, though, that you are now, six months after this rather frightening and depressing impact, more than cautiously optimistic about this mission. Oh, yeah. We're going to get some definite results out of this, and it's just a matter of how far we go and how long it takes. We've got a long time.

This is not the kind of thing that has to be done before a spacecraft dies, because we have the samples here on the ground. You should know that with the Apollo missions, we're still analyzing samples from those 30 years later, and we're still learning some new things from the moon. And we expect that this will be similar, where it's not necessarily an immediate blockbuster, but it's kind of a slowly growing thing. And we're going to be getting more and more results in the next year, but also years after that as well. Well, Roger, thank you for hanging in there and also for making this return visit to Planetary Radio

and giving us a progress report on the Genesis spacecraft. And as I said, we'll look forward to talking with Principal Investigator Don Burnett of Caltech as soon as he's prepared to talk about some of the science that is coming from this mission that has brought back bits of the sun. Thanks again. Okay, and thank you, Matt. And Planetary Radio will continue with Dr. Bruce Batts and What's Up right after this return visit from Emily.

I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. A little moon named Phoebe has always been blamed for the dark gunk coating one side of Iapetus. However, now that Cassini has fingerprinted the composition of Phoebe and Iapetus, it's clear that the two just don't match. If Phoebe is acquitted of littering, where did the Iapetus gunk come from? It's looking more and more like Iapetus dirtied itself. Iapetus has the longest days of any moon in the Saturn system, 80 Earth days long. During these long days, Iapetus gets warm enough that ice molecules can sometimes jump off Iapetus, float around for a while, and then freeze back to the surface.

Ice molecules are more likely to evaporate from the equator, where it's warmer, and stick near the poles, where it's colder. Therefore, the gunk on Iapetus may be a lot like the layer of ugly black soot that's left behind on melting snow banks beside roads here on Earth. This explanation fits the Cassini measurements, but it doesn't explain why Iapetus is dirty only on its leading hemisphere. Cassini will get a good look at the other side of Iapetus in 2007. Maybe we'll find out the answer then. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Dr. Bruce Betts is here. He's the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Bruce. Thank you very much. What do you got for us? Well, we've got, for our listeners who pick this up right after it goes on air, there's still time to see the April 8th solar eclipse.

That's been haunting us for four or five weeks now. I'm done. This is my last haunt. A total eclipse, hybrid eclipse. It's actually a hybrid eclipse with some total, some annular, some partial. Go out there if you're in the South Pacific, if you're in South America, Central America, Mexico, the eastern United States, and it's not April 8th yet. Then go on the web. Find a link, including on our site, to find out how to see it.

I was going to make an obscure gas-electric hybrid solar eclipse joke, but it really would be too obscure, so I'm not going to do it. We thank you. Saturn is up in the south right after sunset. It is then in the southwest in the early evening. It's near Castor and Pollux. It is yellowish, and its rings are very open and friendly. So if you look at it with a telescope, you will see them very distinctly. Jupiter is rising in the east at sunset. In fact, opposition for Jupiter was April 3rd, meaning it's on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun,

also meaning that it rises around sunset, sets around dawn. Brightest star-like object out there. Cannot miss it. Mars is up in the predawn sky low in the southeast and looking kind of reddish. And if you dig finding these things for the first time by looking near the moon, look for Saturn near the moon on April 15th, and look for Jupiter, although it's hard to miss Jupiter, near the moon on April 20th and 21st. So something positive to look for on tax day here in the U.S.? Yes, indeedy-do.

On to this week in space history, speaking in positive, April 7, 2001. Just four years ago, Mars Odyssey was launched, and it's been partying in Mars orbit for most of those three years, four years, excuse me, and giving us fabulous data. Still doing it. On to Rattlespace Night! The solar wind, which is a bunch of charged particles coming out from the sun, The solar wind, which is a bunch of charged particles coming out from the sun,

has a velocity, a mean speed of mean speed, meaning an average speed, of about 400 kilometers per second as it goes whipping out from the sun. Still a little bit slower than the light coming from the sun, but pretty fast compared to what we're able to get up to in space, right? Yeah, yeah. Much slower than the light, much faster than us, and we'll come back in the trivia contest and see how much faster it is than our planet. Oh! Let's talk about the last

trivia contest, however. I asked you, what was the second Earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik being the first? How'd we do, Matt? You know, a lot of people this time said Explorer 1, the first American satellite. That's what I was trying to trick them with. Yeah, well, you did a good job, because I'd say, you know, maybe a third to

half of folks wrote in, very confident people who get it right every week. Well, sorry, folks. It was them pesky Ruskies again. It was Sputnik 2, which, of course, was distinguished by taking the first living creature into space, at least the first we know about, good old Laika the dog. Laika. There's one of Laika's descendants there. She's still upset.

Actually, and our winner was Ken Brenneman. Ken Brenneman, who lives very close to our hometown here, Los Angeles, California. Ken said that it was Sputnik 2 with Laika and was a one-way trip, Ken points out. And he even says... Well, not technically accurate. It was just a one-way trip alive. Yeah, that's true.

Eventually, Laika's ashes were scattered across the atmosphere. Anyway, this is getting kind of dark. His point was still valid, which is, boy, what would PETA have said if they were trying to do that now? I don't think they'd be able to get away with it. What would a lot of people have said? No animals were harmed in the making of this space history.

No, in that case, one was. But some later dogs survived. Yeah, and some chimps and some humans. Wasn't there a bird? Somebody brought a bird up, I think, right? No, why not? Goldfish. Salamanders. Still wondering about

the skink, though, but anyway, go ahead. Oh, I've heard of that. There was a skink, right, on the ISS, the space station? Or was that in one of the shuttles?

Yes, but they eventually, the air filtration system made it so it didn't smell as bad. But a bum. What's up for next week? Next week. You'll have to tune back

next week to find out what's up in the sky, but what's up in terms of a trivia contest? What is the Earth's average orbital velocity around the sun? How fast is our world going around the sun? To answer that question, go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to submit your answer via email and win a fabulous prize. Going to change the time that you need to get that to us by a little bit, make it a little bit easier for some of you who may just be hearing the show on Monday mornings.

It's going to be April 11. This is the deadline, Monday, April 11 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's a whole extra two hours to get us your entry in. Wow. Hopefully win that fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt, as I've heard it described many times. It is. It is. It is indeed. Okay, everyone, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about how good you would

look in a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Thank you, and good night. Don't I look good? You look fabulous. And this is the old gray one. It is. The classic collector's item and gray one. Order now and you'll get the beautiful aqua teal one.

Yeah, something like that. It's pretty. Thank you and good night. That's Bruce Betts, fashion consultant to Planetary Radio and the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us each week here for What's Up. We're out of time for this week. Next time our guest will be David Charbonneau,

one of the astronomers who has detected the light of a planet circling a faraway star. Planetary Radio is brought to you by the Planetary Society. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Write to Planetary Radio at planetary.org.

Have a great week, everyone.