Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Going to the Moon With India!

Episode Date: November 24, 2008

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Flying to the Moon with India, 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 of the Planetary Society. We've said it before, everybody's going to the moon, and some of them are already there. We'll talk with Carly Peters, principal investigator for the M-cubed instrument on Chandrayaan-1,

the Indian probe that has just gone into orbit around our planet's only natural satellite. Emily Lakdawalla will tell us why it's a bad idea to look at the sun or even near the sun when your Mars mission lines up with good old Sol. Of course, you can also check out Emily's blog at planetary.org for the latest news from around the solar system. Bruce Betts will reintroduce us to the night sky and join me in an apology. You folks just gave us too many great sixth anniversary contest

entries, so we're delaying the announcement of our winners till next week. It's time for our friend Bill Nye to share his thoughts about one of last week's biggest stories on or off our pale blue dot. I'll be right back with Carly Peters. Hey, Bill Nye, Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. This week, astronauts in space were repairing a solar panel array that follows the sun. Now, my neighbor down the street, Ed Begley, he's got a solar panel array that follows the sun, but his is here on Earth. It's not out in space. So these people are out in space working, moving around on this enormous solar array, trying to get the thing back, if you will, on track. And for that, they had to loosen and tighten some screws, some fasteners, and they had to squirt in some lubricant from a grease gun, just like I used to do under my old Volkswagen Bug. But here's the thing. Somebody lost a tool

bag. Astronaut Stefan Schoenpiper lost a tool bag. And it drifted off, and But here's the thing. Somebody lost a tool bag. Astronaut Stefan Schoenpiper lost a tool bag and it drifted off. And now it's in orbit along with a screw that drifted by. And this would be kind of a horrible thing. I mean, it's a hundred thousand dollar tool bag and now it's a missile flying around in space could hit another space shuttle someday in the future. But get this, my friends, these people are out there walking around in space for seven hours at a time, and they're working and living in space. This has been a dream since October 4th, 1957. This is people actually living in space, doing routine jobs, and sure enough, stuff goes wrong. In the very near future, that astronaut's going to have

her or his jet pack, and she's going to just go over there and get the tool bag back. Just the same thing would happen when a scuba diver drops a tool when he's doing a weld repair underwater or something. It's going to be routine. This is just a step in the process. I have to say, as a guy who often wonders about the great value of human spaceflight, this is pretty cool. I mean, these people are fixing this solar array and it's going to keep the space station running. And I'm very hopeful that in the very near future, astronauts from China or taikonauts will be able to go up to the space station and do the same kind of jobs. This is a step on the great ziggurat, the great pyramid of space exploration. And human exploration of space will become just that much more routine and that much more of a value.

Thanks for listening. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Carly Peters of Brown University is an American planetary scientist, but she has just gone into orbit around the moon on the Indian mission called Chandrayaan-1. Her moon mineralogy mapper, M-cubed for short, may tell us that there is water hiding at the poles of Earth's cosmic companion. I talked with Dr. Peters a couple of weeks ago, just after the spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, and as she was preparing for a trip to India

to meet with other principal investigators and scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization, that nation's equivalent to NASA. Dr. Peters, first off, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Tell us how you ended up with an instrument on India's first mission to the moon. Well, it's certainly a pleasure to be here. It's not a terribly easy question to answer in one sentence, but this is, as you can tell, a very international mission that the Indians are undertaking.

Much to our pleasure, when they decided to plan a mission to the Indians are undertaking. Much to our pleasure, when they decided to plan a mission to the moon, not long thereafter, they also decided to open the payload, the instruments that they will carry to the international community and invited participants from around the world to submit suggestions and proposals for instruments that they would fly on their spacecraft, along with the instruments from India. So we prepared a brief proposal describing our instrument and were placed on the short list. and were placed on the short list. That gave us impetus then to submit a formal proposal to NASA,

to NASA's Discovery Program, which goes through a very extensive peer review process of scientific both missions and missions of opportunity for selection. We were very happy after this process, which is very intense and takes several months, to have been selected. And it's at that point that we then can start doing the detailed design. And from there, you go through milestone after milestone of meeting one accomplishment, reviewing in different places, and similar parallel reviews with the Indians as well. So we were absolutely delighted with the way the sequence evolved and are now one of five other foreign payloads that are on the Chandrayaan-1 space pack.

There are five international payloads in all, I think, and six that originated in India? That's correct. So really, you had to run the gauntlet of two national space agencies. Well, that's true. And then the two space agencies have to talk together as well. This was, again, a first for the United States and India in terms of developing cooperation in space exploration. That was another level of procedures that had to be accomplished

and agreements and memorandums of understanding in parallel to all the engineering and science discussions. And NASA has had nothing but congratulations and praise in parallel to all the engineering and science discussions. And NASA has had nothing but congratulations and praise for the ISRO on this mission, which so far looks to be very successful. Can you give us an update? I mean, we're speaking, oh, maybe a week and a half before this will actually be heard. And, in fact, when this program is heard, you may actually be in India. Yes, I will.

And, in fact, about that time is when we should be receiving our first photons from the moon. Excellent. So we're very excited about that. From the time that it launched, which was the 22nd of October, The time that it launched, which was the 22nd of October, it first went into an Earth orbit and then gradually increased the size of that orbit so that by the time about a week later, it was ready to have one more burn and then went into a lunar orbit on November 8th. And then several more burns to circulize the orbit. And from then, they start the instrument checkout and implementation.

And each one of these, from the launch through each individual burn, have been absolutely right on target. So that has been an absolute joy. This is the first time they have gone beyond near-Earth orbit, so it's a very substantial accomplishment to have it work so right on target and precisely. While we're talking about the Indians, how have you found their attitude toward this mission, which, as you said, is their first foray beyond near-Earth orbit? Have you found general enthusiasm among Indian society? Well, of course, Indian society is a billion people, so I haven't talked to everyone. But, yes, there has been a great deal of enthusiasm.

If you've been following any of the Indian press around the launch, there was jubilation, great excitement. You know, the moon is a special place in everyone's heart. We look at it on a moonlit night. We look at it over the ocean. Scientists look at it as a planetary body, the closest planetary body to Earth. So we all have a stake in the moon. And so this was a great deal of excitement on a very personal level for achieving such a significant accomplishment.

Have you been spending much time in India? Yes, I haven't counted. It's on about 10 times perhaps I've been over there. Most of them, of course, leading up to where we are now in terms of the instrument readiness. There's this international science team that has met typically about twice a year. So we've all gotten to know each other, talk about how we can collaborate with different instruments. It's been a pleasure. I've enjoyed enormously not only working with my European colleagues,

but getting to know our Indian colleagues, both the engineers and the scientists. They've been marvelous hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to go over there and be immersed in another culture that is so vibrant and the people are so warm and welcoming as we're proceeding on this adventure together. That's Carly Peters, principal investigator for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, now in lunar orbit on India's Chandrayaan-1. She'll tell us about M-cubed in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. 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. Carly Peters is part of the Dawn mission to the two largest asteroids, and she's the science manager of a NASA Keck lab at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

That's where she's been on the faculty for nearly 30 years. But we're talking to her about her work as principal investigator for M-Cubed, an instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter that may have begun collecting data by the time you hear this conversation. Tell us about the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. Oh, my pleasure. Well, we call it M-Cube for short. And the reason, of course, it's three M's, M-cube, it's an imaging system that measures the surface of the moon in 260 spectral channels. So instead of the three colors that your eye has or the seven colors that Landsat has. We have 260. This is designed so that we can measure quite precisely the spectral variations across the visible and near-infrared up to three microns, which is in the near-infra infrared. And by measuring the spectrum continuously in

this manner, we're able to identify highly diagnostic absorption features of the minerals of the surface. So that's where the Moon Mineralogy Mapper comes from. In science jargon, it's often referred to as a hyperspectral imaging system. It is an imaging system, so you have two dimensions of spatial information. You see craters, you see mountains, you see valleys. But in addition to the spatial information that you have, you have 260 spectral channels, and that's the third dimension. We have a cube of data. It's a large amount of data, but both of those components, the spatial information that gives you the geologic context, and then the spectral information, which gives you the composition of each element on the surface.

What should M3 be able to tell us about the surface? And I hope that you'll talk a little bit about the possibility of water. Water, water everywhere. We hope. Well, it won't be everywhere, of course. Well, maybe in those nice polar craters. Well, maybe in those nice polar craters. Well, perhaps. As you know, those permanently shadowed areas at both poles of the moon don't receive much sunlight and are very cold. So it's hypothesized that they have provided traps for any volatiles that migrated up there and never returned.

So you might have an accumulation of volatiles, including water or any other volatile element, perhaps that comets have brought in. In support of that hypothesis, the measurements by the Small Lunar Prospector mission did clearly detect a concentration of hydrogen at both of the poles of the moon. And that's highly suggestive that perhaps there's not lakes, but a few percent of water concentrated in these areas that are very cold. Now, we don't have any proof for that.

It could be this accumulation of frosts of various kinds. And an alternative hypothesis is that it could be simply solar wind hydrogen that, again, has concentrated there because it is so cold. that, again, has concentrated there because it is so cold. And what we need to do is to have a variety of different techniques to determine which of these cases it is. Whichever it turns out to be, and I would not be surprised either way, these polar areas are very interesting, and either way it's going to be very scientifically valuable

in terms of understanding the character of the moon and its resources. But we need to know which it is. Now, if it is, in fact, deposits of water frost or hydrated minerals, our instrument does go out to 3 microns, and there is a fundamental if, if there's enough photons from the scattered rim of these craters into the interior, then we should be able to detect it. So we could tell, and this is a unique signature, this distinct absorption of water or hydrated materials at 3 microns. If we detect an absorption band there, we know we've got hydrated materials. Now, you may have seen some lovely results from in Science Express that was made with their terrain camera.

This is a stereo camera, but it's a very sensitive and well-calibrated camera. polar terrain, to have enough dynamic range and enough precision that allowed them to not only measure the polar terrain and the craters and the shadows, but then to dig down into the very, very low signal level found in the shadows. And they imaged the interior of Shackleton Crater, which is right at the South Pole. And it's a beautiful image. It really is a lovely image. It's something that we've, of course, never seen before. But what it tells us for our experiment is that there are photons there.

The big question we will need to do then is to see if we can collect enough of those photons to then determine whether any of this hydrogen that's concentrated in these areas is in the form of hydrated material on the surface. And even if M-cube is not able to detect any water that does not say it's not there, it just says that it's not there exposed on the surface. It could be mixed with the soil and buried, which is what most people think it probably is. Well, hopefully I will come back with barrels and buckets of data that we will be thrilled with, so we will know very soon.

This is the moment of truth. Looking forward to it, and I hope we can talk with you again. Sure. Delight delightful, bye-bye Dr. Carly Peters has been at Brown University for many years, nearly 30 years now She is the science manager of the NASA Keck Reflectance Experiment Laboratory She's also a co-investigator on the Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres Those two biggest of all asteroids But we've been talking to her in her role as the principal investigator for M-Cubed,

the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which is carried by Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian mission to the Moon, soon to return data. We'll be returning with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up after we visit with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, pretty soon Mars is going to be within less than a degree of the sun. How do you communicate with Mars missions then? The sun on the antenna would fry the electronics at the focus of the dish.

About once every two years, their different orbital speeds carry Mars and Earth to opposite sides of the sun. The period during which Mars is close to the sun and Earth's sky is called Mars-Solar Conjunction. During conjunction, communication with Mars missions gets tough because the Sun is a potent source of radio noise. A radio dish pointed at Mars to receive data from an orbiter would pick up that noise in addition to the data, reducing its quality or even corrupting it beyond recognition. What's worse, any commands sent from Earth to control the Mars spacecraft could also get corrupted. To avoid these problems, mission control quits relying on radio communications to Mars spacecraft for the period of time that Mars is within 5 degrees of the sun, which usually lasts 4 or 5 weeks.

So the spacecraft and radio antennas never do try to point their dishes exactly at the sun, which could indeed cause overheating as the Sun's rays were focused by the dish onto the radio feed. Actually, though, some spacecraft have intentionally pointed their dishes very close to the Sun for reasons other than communications. Cassini was designed to operate in the cold outer reaches of the solar system, but its journey to Saturn took it as close to the Sun as Venus, where it's much hotter. its journey to Saturn took it as close to the Sun as Venus, where it's much hotter.

Cassini actually kept its radio dish pointed almost at the Sun during this phase of the mission, using its dish as a giant parasol to shade the rest of the spacecraft and keep it cool. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is on the Skype connection. It is time for us to talk about what's up in the solar system. In fact, this is What's Up with the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

Welcome back, and we have bad news. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do. Yeah. Actually, it's sort of we have bad news. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do. Yeah. Actually, it's sort of based on good news. We got so many entries to our six-anniversary slogan contest, and so many of them were so good. What are we going to do, Matt? That's an excellent point.

It actually is good news that we're going to wait until next week to announce the winners. They're really, I mean, we had a lot of entries and a huge amount of mail to wade through because a lot of people did wait until the end. There's just a lot of really good stuff, and we just want to take a little bit more time to decide on our three winners. We were pleasantly overwhelmed, and I apologize to everyone that we're going to delay this, but there's so much good stuff.

We need to wade pleasantly through the sea of happy slogans. Well, in the meantime, people can entertain themselves with really good stuff in the evening sky. If you haven't checked this out, and it's hard to miss, if you look up, check out Venus and Jupiter over in the west after sunset. You can't miss them. They're the two really bright star-like objects, both of them brighter than any star in the sky, Venus being the brighter and lower of the two. And they are going to keep getting closer and closer until November 30th when they're going to be within two degrees of each other. But wait, don't order yet. Go back out the next evening on December 1st

and this is going to be really cool looking. We've got Venus, Jupiter, and the moon all within a three degree triangle. Wow. It's going to be blinding. Be spectacular. And if you're in certain parts of Europe and you can check the web for this, if you are, you might even get Venus occultation, Venus actually going behind the moon. We're not going to see that, but we're going to see something really cool in the sky. December 1st, look over there in the west, spiffy keen. Also in the pre-dawn, well, middle of the night by now, we've got Saturn rising not too long after midnight in the east, and then up high overhead in the pre-dawn sky. Oh, I also want

to mention, if you check out Saturn, and it'll get easier and easier over the coming months if you're an evening person, but right now for the next few weeks, the rings are nearly edge-on still. In fact, they'll get more and more edge-on until roughly the end of the year, so kind of a different way to see it. We see Saturn over time with the rings opened up towards us, or more edge-on. Right now we're getting close to edge on. So this is the Saturnian equinox that I think Emily has mentioned a few weeks ago on the show. Saturnian equinox. That's just a cool phrase.

Yes, it is. Captain, we're going to apply the Saturnian equinox. Roger that. On to random Space Fact! Oh, that was lovely. And I have to mention, one of the slogans that we got, which of course is not a slogan for the show. Wait a minute, I have to find it now. Now that I've mentioned it, from Mark Smith,

If God doesn't play dice with the universe, where do random space facts come from? Yeah, I don't know if it's quite a slogan for the show, but I really enjoyed that. That was one of the ones that actually made me laugh out loud. Okay, lay a fact on us. All right, here's a fact for you. Mean orbital velocity, which I'll do an aside. I enjoy the fact that average, there are all these mathematical terms as you go along in school. Suddenly, they change the names. Like average becomes mean, just to confuse people. Perpendicular becomes normal.

Anyway, that's a whole different random lecture. Mean orbital velocity, average orbital velocity. Mercury, of course, the closest planet into the sun, going the fastest. This is linear velocity, as well as angular. And it's going about 48 kilometers per second in its orbit around the fastest. This is linear velocity as well as angular. And it's going about 48 kilometers per second in its orbit around the sun. So cooking, 48. If we go out to Neptune, Neptune is going close to five kilometers per second, five, five and a half kilometers per second. Indeed, a huge slowdown as you go out. And you probably may wonder if you don't already know, Earth, all of us right now moving 30 kilometers per second around the sun. Just right. Just the right speed. It is. It's the

Goldilocks speed. Not too fast, not too slow. I mean, I love the 30 kilometers per second. It's soothing. All right. We don't have the sixth anniversary, but we do have a trivia contest. We played Where in the Solar System? We asked you, where in the solar system is Hadley Rill? How'd we do, Matt? Maybe it's because of the sixth anniversary, but we got more trivia answers than ever before as well. So we waded through those and came up with Andy Fleming of, get this, Wolveston Village, County Durham in the United Kingdom. Wolveston Village. Doesn't that the United Kingdom. Wolveston Village.

Doesn't that sound like a beautiful place? It's the moon, of course. And it happens to also be the Apollo 15 landing site where they got to drive around in the little moon buggy and explore that rill. Yes, a rill, basically like a collapsed lava tube, long lava channel. And they checked it out. Spectacular images from orbit out, spectacular images from orbit and then spectacular images from the astronauts there in place. We're going to shift gears, as we often do,

for the next trivia contest. Who was the first person who had both, had had both their mother and their father having flown in space? Wow. And, because in the process of finding that out, presumably you'll find out who that person's parents were, the actual space travelers. Tell us that, too.

So we're looking for three names, the two space travelers and their offspring. Boy, this person really ought to be the first person to walk on Mars with a pedigree like that. He or she has my vote. And you will have your vote if you get your answer to us by 2 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, December 1st. We are offering a Planetary Radio t-shirt, correct? Yeah, we sure are.

Andy Fleming was the last person to win both a t-shirt and a one-year membership in the Planetary Society. Well, good. Remember, you can always get your own membership if you go to planetary.org slash radio. Get one of those cool T-shirts all on your own. Cool. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky,

and think about what the resistance of your brain might be measured in ohms. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up? My brain resistance? It's got to be at least a million ohms.

What's the little resistor color code for that? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Music Music Music Music