Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Getting WISE With the Universe

Episode Date: January 4, 2010

Getting WISE With the UniverseLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We'll get WISE with the Universe this week on Planetary Radio. Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, is ready to reveal much more of the solar system and beyond.

We'll talk with mission head Ned Wright about what's in store. Bruce Betts will tell us about the night sky and more this week, including word of the three finalists for an interplanetary mission to come. Bill Nye will be back next week, but Emily Lakdawalla is here right now with the best of her blog, which last week included her picks for the best space images of 2009. Emily, let's lead off with your somewhat sad piece about Spirit. I guess the outlook is not great. The outlook is not great. It looks like the mission has formally given up on trying to get Spirit out of the sand trap. Now they're turning their efforts to trying to get a better, more favorable tilt on the solar panels so that they can get

enough power to last through the coming winter. And that might mean doing exactly the opposite of what they've been trying to do. Yeah, exactly. They might have to dig some of the wheels in more just to try to dig one side down to tilt the panels more toward the north. So what was the big challenge here? If they'd had six properly functioning wheels, do they think they might have been able to get out? Yeah, although ifs are cheap. If they had six properly functioning wheels, they would never have been in this position

in the first place. They would have climbed on top of home plate in order to get to the opposite end of it. But instead, they were traveling around it in uncharted territory and wandered into the sand trap. And yeah, probably if they had six functioning wheels, they could have gotten out. What happened in the event is that the most buried wheel is the one that wound up failing at the end. And so they only have four fully functioning wheels, three of which are on the side that wound up failing at the end. And so they only have four fully functioning wheels, three of which are on the side that's buried in the sand trap. So it's really pretty grim. So they got to dig in a little bit deeper just to sort of tilt things and

hopefully make it through the next winter. Hopefully. And that's a big if. If I read the press release correctly, if the dust continues to accumulate at the same rate that it's currently accumulating, they should have enough power to barely survive the winter. But it's hard to predict what Mars weather is going to throw at them. So it's just a wait and see at this point. And why keep Spirit alive? Except that, and I ask this rhetorically, of course, because I certainly hope they're successful at that.

Is it going to be able to do some science sitting there on the sand trap? There's actually quite a lot of interesting science Spirit could do. I mean, in the first place, there's just weather monitoring. It can watch clouds to see cloud patterns, measure temperatures in its joints, will be sort of a way of getting at temperature of the air. But there's actually some cool geophysics they could do. With Spirit absolutely embedded in the soil,

they have a chance at detecting mini-Mars quakes. They can also even learn something about the way that the interior of Mars is built through the tiny variations in its rotation over the course of the year. And with Spirit absolutely stably positioned at exactly the same spot at all times, they could actually detect whether Mars's outer core is molten or not. Down but not out is Spirit. Just a couple of seconds left here, Emily. Tell us about your selection of the best photos. Well, they're not the best photos. Well, they're not

the best photos. I make no claims as to the top 10. They're instead photos that I think tell important stories from last year. So stories like the restoration of Hubble and the great new photos that it took. Stories like the pictures that the rover sent back from Mars documenting the kinds of work they've been doing in the past year. And other stories of important events like the death of Cagio and the third flyby of Mercury by Messenger. So go to theplanetary.org and check them out. Thanks, Emily. Thank you. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. Check out her work most easily in the Planetary Society blog at planetary.org. And we'll be right back with Ned Wright of the WISE mission in just a few moments.

Word came right after I chatted with Ned Wright that the lens cover was successfully popped off of his new eye on the universe. Professor Wright of UCLA is the principal investigator for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. This supercooled instrument was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on December 14. It joins Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler, and other space telescopes, but it has a unique mission. Ned, first of all, congratulations on a very successful launch, and I guess the mission is going according to plan so far. Thank you, Matt. Everything is working well.

We've tested just about everything we can test until the moment of removing the cover or lens cap that's been protecting the optics, and that is supposed to go off on December 29th. So that's just the day after you and I are speaking. Is that a nervous moment? I mean, you are, depending on some pyrotechnics there. Yes, it certainly is a critical event in the lifetime of WISE. It's been very well tested. We're fairly confident that everything's going to work fine, but we'll certainly be eager to see telemetry coming down indicating that the cover did in fact come off.

Well, I hope it goes as well as did the launch. And we covered the launch audio and congratulated your team when that took place just a couple of weeks ago. What is WISE going to do for us that we have not gotten from other telescopes in space? WISE, of course, is an infrared telescope, and it's also a wide-field telescope. What hasn't been done that WISE will be able to do is a very sensitive survey of the sky in the mid-infrared that is radiated by room temperature objects, a survey with good angular resolution so you get fairly sharp images and can see hundreds of millions of objects. So you're going to be building sort of an atlas.

I thought of, if you're at all a Star Trek fan and Star Trek Next Generation, they used to go to stellar cartography. I wonder if in that fictional show they could be using data that would date back to WISE. That probably is unlikely, but WISE is in fact building an atlas. So you can think of previous infrared surveys, and there have been some, as producing the all-sky map or the map of the entire Earth that you might hang on your wall. And there's not enough detail in that map to really see what's present. But with WISE, we're going to have a much more detailed atlas. It's not going to be completely down to the street level or individual house level

that you can do with our local city maps, but it's that intermediate level that lets you find objects or cities or whatever that are really interesting to visit. And then you can direct a large telescope like the Spitzer Space Telescope or the Hubble Space Telescope or the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to look at the most interesting objects. So is WISE something of a pathfinder for these other instruments, including the JWST that you just mentioned? WISE should function as a pathfinder.

That's one of its important goals is to actually be a guide for future astronomers over the next several decades. I'm amazed by the diversity of objects that you may reveal to us, ranging from asteroids to galaxies. Well, that's right. But the reason why there's such a diversity is that every object, if it's warmer than absolute zero, actually radiates infrared. And WISE is looking at objects, wavelengths rather, that are 5 to 33 times longer than the red light your eye can see. And that means we're particularly good for studying objects that are 5 to 33 times colder than the light bulb filaments or the sun that produces the light that we normally see. And that puts us right in the range around room temperature. And everything really radiates infrared. So you can see just about anything in the universe, though some objects are too cool

for wise. They do radiate at longer wavelengths. It can be seen by the Herschel Space Telescope. But really, we are set up to study a really wide range of objects. And part of the reason is we cover such a wide range of wavelengths. Five to 33 times longer than red light is nearly three octaves. So it's a very wide range of wavelengths that we study. That's an amazing amount of bandwidth. Is a key to WISE's capability the fact that it's going to be a good deal colder than most of the objects that it's going to, well, I guess all of them that it's going to find? Absolutely. WISE has to be cold because infrared light that it studies is produced by room temperature objects. So if you did not cool WISE, it would be blinded by its own

emission. So it's absolutely necessary that WISE be very cold. In fact, it's cooled to about minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit. That means that WISE itself doesn't radiate infrared light that it can see, and so it's not blinded by its own emission. Have there been any other spacecraft that have used not liquid helium in this case, but hydrogen ice to achieve these incredibly low operating temperatures? Solid hydrogen has been used in a couple of previous spacecraft and has been proposed in science instruments for other spacecraft. So the

Midcourse Space Experiment, which flew on an Air Force satellite several years ago, was cooled by solid hydrogen. Quite an interesting operation to actually cool the solid hydrogen, because what we do is flow liquid helium to get our tanks really cold, and then hydrogen gas goes in and freezes in the tanks. Yeah, I saw an image on the website, which we will provide a link to, of quite an interesting apparatus, sort of a scaffolding around the spacecraft, which brought you down to these temperatures? That's correct. WISE is essentially a plumber's dream. It is filled with all sorts of pipes and tubing.

So we have pipes for putting the hydrogen in and pipes for the evaporating hydrogen to come out. Plus we have the pipes for the liquid helium that we circulated on the ground to keep the hydrogen frozen and solid. How long is WISE going to be able to maintain this very low temperature? Well, a solid hydrogen gradually evaporates away. It's like dry ice in that regard. It evaporates straight to a gas. But we expect it will last about 10 months after launch. So that will take us into the middle of October. But there's some uncertainty in that. It could be plus or minus a month. More of our conversation with Ned Wright, Principal Investigator for the just-launched WISE mission, when Planetary Radio

continues. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio continues. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening.

Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. 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. My guest is a very happy Ned Wright. He is the principal investigator for WISE, the newest space telescope. Its full name is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer. Ned told

us the spacecraft's supply of frozen or solid hydrogen is expected to run out in 10 months. Does that mean that that's the end for WISE, or will it have a life beyond its solid hydrogen? There is the potential for operating half of the WISE detectors without the solid hydrogen. So the shorter wavelengths do not require such extreme cooling in order to function properly. So there's some possibility of a warm WISE mission,

similar to the warm SpISE mission, similar to the warm Spitzer mission that has just started recently. And when you mention half the detectors, you've got four of those, and I guess a lot more pixels to play with than the last time anybody tried an infrared survey. Yes, the last infrared survey of the whole sky was done by IRAS, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, and it was launched in 1983, a long time ago in terms of digital cameras, and it only had 62 pixels, whereas WISE now has 4 million pixels. It's incredible to think of accomplishing even what IRAS did all those years ago with just 62 pixels. Is that another key part of what you expect WISE's capability to be?

Not just that it's going to be so very cold, but obviously it's going to be, is it just higher resolution or is this just a function of being able to look at such huge swaths of the sky? WISE provides both greater sensitivity and higher resolution, so we'll be able to see many more objects and we'll be able to get much sharper images than were obtainable with IRAS. Over those, I think you said, 10 months that the solid hydrogen will allow you to maintain that low temperature, just above absolute zero, how many images do you expect to see sent back to Earth that you'll stitch together? Well, I should take about 7,500 image sets per day. I say image set because it includes all four of the arrays, giving us four different colors.

So 7,500 per day, or about 2 million over the expected lifetime. Wow. So these are going to be full-color images. Well, they're more than full-color images, because with four colors, you have to pick three to make a full-color image. And I'm reminding myself that we're talking about in the infrared below what our eyes can normally sense anyway. But I assume that these images will be false colored. Well, of course, we will have to convert the infrared wavelength seen by WISE into light that your eye can see. Otherwise, you won't be able to see anything. And so there will definitely be false colors. We'll try to make them more or less representative. In other words, have the reddest or longest wavelengths that WISE looks at be the reddest color in the picture, and so on. I was very intrigued by something.

It might have been one of the press releases or somewhere else on one of the WISE websites that mentioned WISE may help to tell us a little bit more about this most mysterious force, perhaps the most mysterious in the universe, dark energy. Is that the case? Well, WISE will be able to do a little bit to help us with dark energy. So it is going to be surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies. And these galaxies will be observed in the light of old stars. And thus, the WISE catalog of galaxies will give us a fairly good idea of where the mass in galaxies is located. Now, this mass actually has a small effect on the cosmic microwave background that is observed by, for example, the WMAP satellite. And this cosmic microwave background effect, due to the intervening clusters of galaxies,

actually is sensitive to the presence of dark energy. So we can make a small contribution to the study of dark energy by cataloging galaxies all over the sky. Ned, how long have you been with this program as principal investigator, or did it start before that? Well, I've been working on WISE for almost 12 years. So we first proposed WISE, not under the name WISE, but the same concept, in 1998. But it's interesting that actually there was an earlier proposal prepared by my thesis advisor called NIRAS,

the Near Infrared Astronomical Satellite, that went in in 1988, and I was part of that. So the idea of resurveying the sky after IRAS with better sensitivity using arrays has been around for a while. And it's been a long, long time, but it's finally ready now to redo the project. Would you care to guess at, or do you have an estimate of when we'll have first light through this new instrument in space? Well, first light should happen an hour or so after the cover comes off.

And that is very soon, tomorrow. But those images will not be properly synced up with the motion of the satellite, so they're likely to be blurry. We take pictures with exposures of about nine seconds. And so unless we have the satellite and the camera working together, the stars will be little streaks. And so we'll spend the next week after the cover comes off getting that synchronization going so we're not getting streaky images. But we should have images fairly soon and perhaps pretty good images to release to the public in not too long, say by the end of January.

And the final image data release for astronomers is going to take place in two parts, for astronomers is going to take place in two parts, one in April of 2011 and one in March of 2012, where we will release all of the data. The first release will be half the data. The second will be all of the data. I hope we can check back with you after WISE has completed all or at least a good part of this magnificent sky survey that you're looking forward to. Thank you. We expect that WISE will be announcing results as we find interesting objects.

And so it'd certainly be reasonable to come back on the show and talk about those exciting results. We'll look forward to that. Ned, congratulations once again to you and the entire WISE team. Well, thank you, Matt. Edward, or Ned Wright, holds the David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics at UCLA, where he's in the Physics and Astronomy Department, but he is also,

as you've heard, the principal investigator for WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is just about to pop off the lens cap and start to reveal much more of our universe than we've ever seen before. We'll see what's available to the naked eye when we pay our regular visit to Bruce Betts.

That'll be in this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's the director of projects, Dr. Bruce Betts. Happy 2010. Welcome to the new year. Thank you. Happy 2010 to you as well. Welcome to the tens. Yeah, the year we make contact. But don't mess with Europa. That's right. Hands off Europa. So tell us, how's the 2010 night sky?

Well, I thought you want me to tell them about the new mission selection. Oh, you want to do that? Go ahead. Please do, because you wrote a nice piece about it in the Planetary Society blog on December 30th. What's going on here? Well, when I say selections, NASA has selected or done a down select, as they call it internally, for the New Frontiers next round. New Frontiers is the medium class missions, $650 million price tags. The first two were New Horizons and Juno, the upcoming Jupiter orbiter. And they've selected three missions, which will get a year and $3 million each to go off and prove that they really can do what they say they will do. And then one of these will be selected and have some patience.

They have until 2018 to launch. But they're really cool missions in alphabetical order by the mission name Moonrise, which is Bradley Joliff at Washington University heads it, and it would be a lunar South Pole Aitken Basin sample return. This is where we think there's like mantle materials exposed on the surface. And then there's OSIRIS-REx, led by Michael Drake at University of Arizona. And this would be a near-Earth object, near-Earth asteroid sample return mission. Going out, grab some stuff, bring it back, just like Moonrise does with the moon.

And then SAGE with PI Larry Esposito at the University of Colorado. It's a Venus mission. Go descend through the atmosphere, collect information as you're going down, and then actually a Venus lander and measure the mineralogy composition of the surface rocks. Even have a little grinder, kind of like the rat on the Mars Exploration Rovers to grind through the outer layer of a rock and check out what's underneath. Nice report. You know what, I was thinking, I think somebody's beat us to it, that you and I should set up a consultancy to help these guys name their missions so that they really stick in the minds of NASA administrators.

But these guys have done a really good job, or they got help. So I think somebody beat us to it. Yeah, they probably got help, but I think we would have a niche we could try to exploit. Fabulous mission names. Well, the first thing we have to do is work on a fabulous name for our company. I thought it was fabulous mission names. FMN, I think we're going to have to, maybe. I think we should work on it tell us about the

night sky fame fabulous and mission no never mind night sky let's talk about that we've got uh jupiter looking lovely in the evening sky still in the early evening over in the west but mars mars check it out uh rising in the the mid-evening in the. And so if you go out there by 9 or 10, you'll see it in the east looking reddish and continuing to brighten until opposition on January 29th, looking like a very bright reddish star. Saturn up high in the sky in the pre-dawn and rising in the east in the middle of the evening, middle of the night. So if you catch this right after it comes out, kind of a middle of the road meteor shower, the Quantron tids, although there'll

be some light pollution for those, but there is a meteor shower peaking on the 3rd and 4th of January. So you can still catch the tail end of that possibly. And we move on to this week in space history. Always enjoy this, a round number in hundreds. This, of course, will get a lot of attention. 400 year anniversary of Galileo discovering the Galilean satellites, as they were later named before big moons of Jupiter happened during this week in 1610. Woohoo. That's a biggie. That is a biggie, including the one that they won't let us go play on because the aliens are busy there. That's right.

By the way, these are references to 2010, the movie, if people are missing them. Let us move on to Random Space Fact. You take double A's or triple A's? I'll have to get you a new set. Nine volt batteries, please. If you were on Mercury, first of all, it would be painful. But second of all, the visible diameter of the sun would be about two and a half times larger than it appears from the Earth, on average. Now, Mercury has pretty elliptical orbits, so it actually varies from 2.2 times larger to 3.2 times larger.

On average, this would make it roughly six times brighter than it is here on Earth. Excellent. Now, that is a really interesting random space fact. We better roll right on to the contest because we're running late. We asked you, in the context of planetary studies, what is a palimpsest? Did I pronounce that right, Matt? Well, let's just check with the nice lady at dictionary.com.

Palimpsest. Why, apparently you did. Excellent. Nicely done. And how do we do? How do our listeners do? Oh, you really stump people with this. People really struggle to get it, and a lot of them relied on Wikipedia. What can we do? How do our listeners do? Oh, you really stump people with this. People really struggled to get it. And a lot of them relied on Wikipedia.

What can we say? There's nothing wrong with that. It did kind of hold down the number of entries. Let me tell you my very favorite one. This is not the winner. Sorry, Steve. Steve Castleman. But he sent this in. Palimpsest means something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface. Many people are like this.

Some are not. So, honorable mention there to Steve. But our winner, and he has not won as far as I can tell for three and a half years, is Mark Smith. Mark Smith of San Diego, California, who said indeed that a palimpsest is an ancient, relatively bright, circular feature on the surface of a dark, icy moon, such as Ganymede or Callisto. In fact, he gave us a picture of one, Memphis Facula, on Ganymede. Basically, it's like a crater that

there isn't really much evidence left of anymore. Have I got that right? It's exactly right. So the topography has smushed away on this icy surface over long periods of time, but you're still left with whatever the impact dredged up from underneath that leaves the different color there. By the way, Mark is sorry he missed you when he heard a couple of weeks ago that you were in Coronado. He works on the Navy base there, and he would have loved to have made a side trip to get an autograph. Mark's on the Navy base there, and he would have loved to have made a side trip to get an autograph. Well, sure. I was so busy signing autographs anyway that weekend. It probably wouldn't have worked out.

Well, Mark, you're going to have to settle for a T-shirt, but we'll get one in the mail to you real soon now. I can sign it if you want. You could. Yeah, why not? Why not? And ruin it. Yeah, that would kind of hurt. So we're moving on to the new one, and we have a special prize. Can you tell us about it? Why, yes. We have an autographed copy of the Traveler's Guide to Mars book by Bill Hartman. And Bill has kindly autographed that.

And that's our prize. It's a really cool book. Basically, if you're traveling to Mars and wanted a travel guide, it takes you to many of the hot spots on Mars. Full of beautiful illustrations and photos. Bill is quite a wonderful artist. Past a multi-appearing guest of this radio show. How can people win this?

Well, just give us the answer to this question. How long is the International Space Station? Hopefully simple, straightforward. How long is it? Use whatever units you want, because people always enjoy that, and go to planetary.org slash radio and send us your entry. You have until the 11th, January 11 of this year, 2010, to get us that answer. And I think we're done done except for one correction that we

need to make from last week. Yes, I have an erratum. Errato. An errati and a mea culpa, dude. Yeah, I kind of did the subtraction wrong. And indeed, last week I said that Spirit landed five years ago, and it was six. Six years the rovers have been being amazing, and Spirit now struggling, but considering it had a 90-day nominal mission lifetime, it's doing fabulous, and we wish it and all the rover people best of luck on their six years on the surface of Mars. Yes, congratulations to both Spirit and Opportunity and the wonderful people behind them. And no t-shirt for Bruce. Say goodnight. Goodnight everybody. Alright, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about sticks.

Thank you and goodnight. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And he joins us every week here for What's Up. Hey, my home in the Twitterverse has been renamed PlanRad. That's one word. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Keep looking up. Thank you.