Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Going Behind the Scenes With LightSail 1

Episode Date: June 28, 2010

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How to build a solar sail, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. As Icarus speeds away from our solar system, another much simpler solar sail has reached a major milestone back here on Earth. Today we'll drop in on a critical design meeting for LightSail 1, a spacecraft that will start out the size of a shoebox and expand to more than 32 square meters in space.

You'll hear from the project manager, Jim Cantrell, from a university professor and some of his students who are playing a vital role in the creation of LightSail, and from Planetary Society Executive Director and solar sail pioneer, Lou Friedman. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, brought his engineering and other expertise to the meeting. We'll start our report with him in just a minute. No Emily today. Ms. Laktawalla has the week off as she enjoys her hard-earned vacation.

But Bruce Betts is lurking in the wings with news of the night sky, and we've got a Celestron weather station to give to our latest space trivia contest winner. We haven't forgotten the Kepler spacecraft or the recent announcement that it may have discovered not one, not 20, but hundreds of exoplanets. Go to planetary.org for a great story by my colleague Amir Alexander. Kepler mission head Bill Barucki will be my guest next week.

Speaking of exoplanets, here's a hell of a story. In fact, it's a planet that sounds like hell. This Jupiter-class world is 20 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. As you might imagine, it's a toasty place, at least on the sun-facing side

of the tidally locked globe. Scientists from the Netherlands and the U.S. have detected the mother of all storms generated by that heat. It seems a carbon monoxide gale is blowing at 5,000 to 10,000 kilometers per hour. There comes a time in the realization of any great project when you have to stop fiddling with the blueprints and declare that you are ready to build. That milestone, or as Bill would say, kilometer marker,

came a couple of weeks ago for LightSail. About 40 engineers and others gathered at Planetary Society headquarters to review every aspect of the spacecraft and mission plan. Many of the attendees were students who had driven down the night before from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo along the central California coast. We'll hear from them later in today's show. Bill Nye was right up front in the discussion. I grabbed the Planetary Society executive director designate

between a couple of the engineering presentations. This is so cool, isn't it? Oh, it's fantastic, the complexity of this thing. It's a box or three boxes stacked together a little bigger than a shoebox, thrown into space ever so gently by this beautiful spring on the side of a rocket that we negotiate to get a ride on and then the sails unfurl running if you will tape measure steel backwards. This little motor is going to keep them from going out too fast and this very very large, very thin sail will be deployed in space. And then the pressure of photons, this tiny, tiny momentum that relativity indicates will exist in light,

will push the spacecraft and make its orbit get a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger. And these guys, I mean, I was an engineer full-time for many years. These guys are so sophisticated. Almost all of them are very young and they're really, they're really good at this stuff. It's amazing. They're good at all the software, keeping track of how many lines of code. And we're using Linux, which is this open source software to get a lot of the important but well understood jobs done in the background. Then these mechanical engineers, they're making these beautiful things.

Oh, it's all so elegant. It would never have been done. Yes, there's a Japanese spacecraft, Icarus, deployed a solar sail, but this will be right above the Earth where we can see the spacecraft and the Earth below with our cameras. Very exciting. And you made a big point of that. There was this great presentation about the camera, which was another illustration of how complex this attempt is. But you were adamant about we need a shot that shows this sail and our home planet.

Oh, that's very important. Now, see, I'm a TV guy also. I'm a television guy.. I'm a television guy. A thousand words is not accurate. It's millions of words. Pictures do millions of words. You've got a room full of very young people here, men and women. This is part of their studies and hopefully part of what they'll be spending their lives doing.

Yeah, they're getting their master's degrees. And while they're at it, oh yeah, we'll design you a spacecraft in the summer, sure, we can get that done. But they can. I mean, it's very impressive. And a lot of it, I'll say, is the legacy or the sophistication of modern software. Problems in logic, like which thing turns on first, how long is it on, where do we store the data that we've captured while the thing is on the accelerometer, the camera. All that is so much better than it used to be with Moore's law, advances in computer

memory, that these guys can take on just jobs that I used to imagine and dismiss. Now they can just do them. It's a very, very exciting time. What a great experience for them. Oh, yes, for them. I wish I were getting something out of it. No, it's great for all of us. It's very, very exciting. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world.

Bill Nye, the science guy, Planetary Society Executive Director Designate, and our regular commentator. Lou Friedman will keep the title of executive director for a few more weeks, but he'll remain a guiding force in the LightSail project for much longer. I asked Lou to tell me more about the meeting that was underway. Well, we're having a two-day review. We call it the critical design review. I've always debated it's an old aerospace term. It actually comes from the military. They have these important design reviews just before the project is ready to build the hardware that's ready to go on in the project. But I never know whether critical means it's important or critical means we get a lot of criticism

because we do get, that's the purpose of it, we're supposed to get a lot of criticism, we're supposed to really scrub hard and be asked tough questions. Why are you doing this? Are you doing too much? Are you doing too little? Are you being too optimistic? Are you being too pessimistic? So we get an independent review team here and we go through the entire, entire job, soup to nuts, from building every little component in the spacecraft, to the software, to the mission operations, to the tracking, to the navigation, and to the very challenging, the mission design itself. Should we go to a different orbit? Should we have a goal of trying to fly this way or that way, or with the sail,

how big it should be? They really debate everything. And that's a peculiarly aspect of aerospace engineering, because you get to look at the whole thing as a system. And that's what we're doing here. And I have commented to other people on what this drives home for me is the complexity of this seemingly simple project. Well, that's right. I told everybody at the very beginning, when we first started the meeting, I wanted you to think of one number above all, and that was four and a half. Because four and a half is the weight of the spacecraft.

Four and a half kilograms. This thing you could hold in your hand, take it out and put it in the back seat of your car, and give it to your kids to bring in the house. It's a very small thing, but you're quite right. It's as complex as a spacecraft as you could imagine with lots of components and lots of interfaces, and only one thing has to go wrong to mess it up. Are you satisfied? Are you happy with the progress you're hearing about today? mess it up. Are you satisfied? Are you happy with the progress you're hearing about today? I am. We've come a long way. The preliminary design review was far more critical than this critical design review. We got a lot of criticism in the preliminary design review. We were told we

were being too ambitious and we were being unrealistic in certain areas. There was questions about our scheduling. And so we took a lot of that to heart, made some changes, some simplifications, some clever design trades. And right now I think it's coming together just brilliantly. We're going to finish this development. We're going to be ready to launch before the launch vehicle is ready for us, unfortunately. But that's okay. You know, waiting a few months for a ride to space is always something that's worthwhile doing. Lou, we'll let you get back into the meeting. Thanks, as always.

Thank you. Lou Friedman, co-founder and soon-to-be emeritus executive director of the Planetary Society. Lou will remain the light sail program manager. Experienced aerospace engineer and manager Jim Cantrell has a similar title. Jim is CEO of Strategic Space Development Incorporated and a veteran of the earlier Cosmos One solar sail project. I asked him to describe his role. What is your role as project manager for LightSail? Herding the cats. I'm the program manager.

And you're not kidding, judging from what I've heard in here. A lot of people involved with this. Yeah, with everybody, they all have different ideas about what ought to be and what should be and what shouldn't be. And so my role is judge and executioner in a way to make sure that in the end that we hear those things that are valid and valuable and we hear those things that are true and valuable, and we hear those things that are true but we can't afford or we don't want to do for various reasons, and then to, in the end,

set a tone where nobody's happy and say, this is what we're going to do. So that's part of your job is to wield the axe or maybe the scalpel? Yeah, sometimes an axe, sometimes a scalpel, depending on what we're doing. And, yeah, I mean, we have a budget, we have a schedule, and we have to be successful. And so there's a balance between all of those things, and there's always more that we can do, and there's always better ways we can do it. But I like to live by the phrase that better is the mortal enemy of good enough. They just seem to be exquisitely sensitive. And is that one of the elements of LightSail that is innovative? There's a lot of things about

LightSail that's innovative. That is certainly one of them, because we believe that that system, if it proves that it truly works, we believe they'll work. But if they work in terms of an operational sense of being able to both figure out what the spacecraft is doing in terms of its own motion, and then also for a navigation solution that down the road, not only will this help LightSail 2 and 3, but many other missions that could truly revolutionize it. Other innovations are deploying these large sails in a manner that's both mass effective and cost effective. The government programs, I go back to that, again, has a need to de-orbit satellites after they're used for life.

And one of the things that this could be used for is, in fact, deploying a sail-like material that doesn't necessarily provide the solar thrust, but rather the atmospheric drag and drags them down. So this is another innovation, and how we're doing that with the gearing and so forth as a package is a pretty innovative product. Putting all of this complexity together in such a little tiny package, remember this is the size of a loaf of bread, and putting all of this in there into what used to be something the size of a school bus 20, 30 years ago, to me is innovative no matter how you approach it.

And one of the interesting things I found out about the Cal Poly group was a lot of their students that graduate through the CubeSat program that we're deriving a lot of our benefit from end up going to work for Apple to design the iPhones, the iPads, and those very, very innovative products. So there's a lot of intellectual property sharing going on here that's pretty impressive. Best of luck with LightSail, Jim. Thank you. That's Jim Cantrell, project manager for LightSail at the recent Critical Design Review in Pasadena, California. We'll talk with a professor and his lucky students from a university about their role in the project after a break.

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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. This week we're providing a behind-the-scenes look at a critical step in the development of any space mission. In fact, it's called the Critical Design Review, or CDR.

The often grueling meeting should result in the near lockdown of plans for the actual fabrication of a spacecraft. That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago in the CDR for LightSail 1, the solar sail project led by the Planetary Society that should be launched into Earth orbit this year or next. Some of the key players in the effort haven't yet graduated from college. They are students at the California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo, about 250 miles up the coast from Pasadena and Los Angeles. Their leader is aerospace engineering professor Jordi Pucsuari.

How was it that you and Cal Poly became involved in LightSail? That's a very good question. And actually we were asked to help by Stellar. Stellar is a local company, Stellar Innovations. They're in San Luis Obispo. We've worked with them. We know them well. They hire Cal Poly students. I've known Tomas for a long time. And it actually happens that LightSail was coming online. They were looking for a really small avionics package.

We were in the process of developing that. So it was really all the stars lined up, and it was the perfect timing for everybody. So we're very grateful that worked out. This would seem to be a remarkable opportunity for the students in your program up at Cal Poly SLO. It's awesome, and it's actually great to have Planetary Society and Stellar and Aerospace Corporation and all the real aerospace companies, if you want to call it that, working on the project because it gives the students kind of a much better window of the real world. And the training is also a lot more severe. They have to convince other people that they're doing the right things. They don't get to choose what they do.

They have to follow requirements and meet the parameters. So it makes for a very world-like learning experience, and that's invaluable for them. world-like learning experience, and that's invaluable for them. The exposure they're getting to how complex this project is, I'm sure that they've been exposed to this in the classroom, but a more valuable real-world experience. Yes, and actually that's the reason we build these little satellites. I mean, there is a level of integration and complexity and systems view that you cannot do in a classroom.

Even within a major, we cannot do it. We have a group with electrical engineers and computer scientists and aeros and mechanicals all working together. That's the only way you can do it. Totally out of the classroom experience. Are these all grad students? You've got quite a crowd here today. Or are there undergrads involved as well?

We have a lot of undergrads involved. And actually, most of our grad students start as undergrads. We like it that way. There are so many aspects of the project that are not something they're going to find in a classroom that we feel we need a year or two just to get them up to speed where they can contribute to the program. And we bring them from different majors. We'll have electricals that have never talked to a mechanical engineer in their careers since calculus. And now we need to get that language skills going and that communication.

So it takes us a little bit. So we always start them as undergrads if we can. And then the good ones, which is most of them, we encourage them to stay for a master's, and many of them do. And that's where our grad students come from. We grow them. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Aerospace Engineering Professor Jordi Puxuari. We'll finish our special coverage of the LightSail Critical Design Review by spending a couple of minutes with just three of Jordi's students. Austin Williams is working on his master's thesis at Cal Poly. Greg Maniak and Daniel Fluitt are nearing their bachelor's degrees. All are working basically as volunteers on LightSail. Have you had an

experience like this before where you are thrown in there with these engineers who've been at this for a long time and you're really digging into the incredible complexity of a project like LightSail? You're really digging into the incredible complexity of a project like LightSail. This, it's almost a clash of cultures. A lot of people we're talking to are, you know, upper JPL management who do things in a very rigid way. You know, we're coming from kind of this ragtag university group. We're not always in the most structured. We don't have the best documentation.

So we're trying to, but there's an understanding on both sides. We're trying to meet in the middle and compromise, and it's actually working out really, really well. Daniel, what did you say there? You broke in? We don't have the money. That's part of it. But you may have more fun. I don't know. What do you think, Rick? Oh, yeah, I couldn't believe how much fun I'm having with this, and I never really imagined these possibilities that this program is enabling us to do, and it's really been great for us.

Hopefully it seems to be working out for them, too, and I'm just really excited for us to's hopefully it seems to be working out for them too and I'm just really excited for us to get involved with the project of this scope. And do you all get the feeling that you're really part of this project you're not just sitting back and watching the old guys come up with ideas? Yeah I mean I spent a lot of time on those powerpoints over the past two weeks and you know making all these big design decisions. So we're, and really the students are the ones that have the most experience from the CubeSat side because Cal Poly has put three of them up.

So there's a lot of things that are coming to us too and saying, you know, how do you deal with initial deployment from the Peapod? What things are done autonomously? What's not? What kind of commands do you do? What kind of ground stations are you working with? And a lot of that stuff is stuff that we know that they're really learning from us. So we definitely feel we're playing an integral role, and we're very happy about that.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo students and LightSail team members Austin Williams, Greg Maniak, and Daniel Fluitt. I spoke to them at the critical design review for LightSail 1 held about two weeks ago at Planetary Society headquarters. You can learn much more about the LightSail project at planetary.org. Bruce Betts is moments away. Stay with us. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins me at Planetary Society headquarters for this week's edition of What's Up. Welcome again. Thank you very much. It's very exciting to be here, Matt.

After seven and a half years, you're still excited to see me i'm glad yes and up in the night sky in the evening sky you got three planets that are just going to keep growing closer and closer and closer not that close too close too close through august we've got venus the extremely bright star-like object low in the west after sunset look above venus to the upper left mars but between the two is the not reddish star regulus and farther to the upper left of mars is saturn and they're all going to come cozy up in a in another few weeks in the pre-dawn sky we got jupiter actually jupiter is rising one or two a.m now so it's it's up middle of the night, and it'll be high in the east. And if you check it out on July 3rd, you will see the moon hanging out near it, making for a lovely sight.

But you know what else is going on? No. Total solar eclipse! You were just talking about a lunar one, weren't you? Isn't it crazy? It's just wild. What kind of a solar system is this? This is crazy.

It's nuts. Well, there's a solar system is this? This is crazy. It's nuts. Well, there's a total solar eclipse. Be there. Be there. One few minutes only. July 11th. And hanging out in the South Pacific or southern portions of Chile or Argentina, you can see a total solar eclipse. And if you're not too far off those lines,

you'll get a shot at a partial solar eclipse as well. July 11th. Be there. So much going on this week. I bet nothing at all has happened in the past. You would be incorrect in that guess, my friend. In fact, it was during this week in 1908 that Tunguska event occurred, leveling 2,000 square kilometers of forest from an airburst of an impact earth. That was a big deal if you were in the region, if you were in the neighborhood that week. Sad for you. Yeah.

Now all sorts of weird stuff happened with that. Tell me, what is the one thing we refer to in 1054 A.D.? That was the big boom. You got it. The Crab Nebula supernova was observed by ancient astronomers. And the supernova that left a remnant of the Crab Nebula

will be coming back to that. But right now we're going to go on to Ruben's Space Fact! Okay. I was hanging out in a rock quarry yesterday. Yeah, rock quarry. Yeah. You have the most interesting hobbies.

This one wasn't even a hobby. It was doing another gig for the History Channel's The Universe. And I was in a rock quarry because we were demonstrating. And there was this lovely giant pile of crushed rock, 100 tons of it, roughly the amount of material that hits the Earth's atmosphere every day from space. That is pretty incredible. Was this the actual 100 tons gathered from around the world over the course of one year that had fallen to this planet? One day, my friend. One day? One day?

Yes, yes. world over the course of one year that had fallen to this planet one day my friend oh one day one day yes yes they flew around with a very high flying aircraft and hot each of them very tenderly as they entered the atmosphere keeping it all from burning up they get some help from santa on that dude don't don't hate on the santa i i wouldn't all right yeah he's cool no this wasn't the actual material no no this This was a representation. All that material would burn up in the atmosphere. High, high in the atmosphere. That's cool. With a lonely goat herd, I think.

This is getting seriously weird. Let's move on to the trivia contest. We asked you, I asked you, what was the original designation, the original name for the asteroid that was visited by Hayabusa, that was later renamed to Itokawa after a famous Japanese rocket pioneer. And truly, there's nothing funny or humorous about this name, despite what some of you may have thought. But, you know, you did give us that impression.

We had several listeners who wrote to me and said, what's funny about this name? And I said, you got me. I'm going to ask the guy. And OK, so there was nothing funny at all. It's quite serious. Apparently, you just all misinterpreted me. I was saying that this is not a humorous contest.

But somehow, you must have edited out the something. Please send us notes apologizing to Bruce. I blame Matt. Anyway, how did we do? What's the actual answer? Hey, huge response. I guess a lot of people want to know the weather because our winner today is getting the Celestron Deluxe Compact Weather Station, which is really quite cool. I happen to have the box right here.

It's got the remote thermometer. It's got a real barometer, not just, you know, oh, it's going to be stormy today. You can actually see how many inches of mercury or whatever. I'm sure it switches to a metric. It's a very cool device. And it's going to go, by the way, to Gary Green. Gary Green of Satellite Beach, Florida. Ooh, how appropriate.

Isn't that great? Yeah. He came up with the original name before it became Itakawa of 1998 SF-36. That cracks me up every time. Subscript 36, I should add. Some people actually added the subscript. Some call him the father of the Japanese rocket or space program, Hideo Itakawa. We had several people who were kind of curious about this.

I got to tell you, Bill Snelling, he put it this way. Hmm. Lone spaceship comes up on little known object in space. Attempts landing. Something goes terribly wrong. Weeks later, contact is reestablished. Craft limps home. Years later, crippled.

Are we looking at an intelligent descendant of Andromeda strain here? I'm expecting, yeah, I'm guessing not. looking at an intelligent descendant of Andromeda strain here? I'm expecting... Yeah, I'm guessing not. On the other hand, I do expect when they open the sample return capsule, there'll be a little tiny monolith. Kind of a mini-lith.

Okay, that's good. New question. Maybe it'll teach us something. New question for next time around. We're giving away the extremely valuable, oft-desired Planetary Radio t-shirt. Just a t-shirt? It is not just a t-shirt. How many times do I have to tell you this? It is a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

All right. It's collectible. It is a nice shirt. I wear them all the time. He does. I wear them all the time. He does. Anyway, as I was checking out the Crab Nebula content, I was fascinated by how big it is.

The supernova erupted, if that is the right term, in 1054. Tell me now, approximately, and this is only known approximately, but get it to the 25% that it's known, how big a cross is it in its largest linear dimension? How large is it in inches, miles, light years, parsecs? Big Macs. Big Macs. That did come to mind. It's just going to be a ridiculously large number, but okay. Although it is a large and tasty burger. You've got until the 5th of July, Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And how do they get us that answer? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how.

All right. We're done. All right, everybody go out there looking at the night sky and think about bamboo and all you can do with it. Thank you and good night. Okay, this is just freaky because my daughter does all the content, writes for a bamboo company that tells people all the wonderful things you can do with bamboo. So I'm going to check and answer your question. Wow.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Has the Kepler Space Telescope discovered hundreds of planets circling other stars? That's next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up! Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова