Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

Episode Date: April 6, 2009

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Have spacesuit, we'll travel, 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. A jam-packed show this week as we hear from a leader of the company that NASA has just picked to design the spacesuit that will eventually take Americans back to the moon. Mark Gittleman of Oceanarium International will tell us about this piece of the Constellation program. We've also got a special extended visit with Emily Lakdawalla in which she'll tell us about an instrument that may have detected early signs of a global dust storm on Mars. And Bruce Batts has learned to tweet about the night sky, random space facts, and this week's space trivia contest, with your chance to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

You can visit planetary.org for lots of news about what's going on up there, perhaps beginning with another detailed update on the Mars exploration rovers. Emily has much more than that in the space blog. I'll be right back with Mark Gittleman first. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of Planetary Society, this week speaking to you from New York. I'm traveling, continuing the Bill Nye the Science Guy Change the World Tour, going to various universities back east. This week was quite a week.

It was the 100 hours of astronomy where we got people around the world to take a few minutes and look through a telescope at the spectacular arrangement of planets. And for me, as always, Saturn just has my heart. It's just a beautiful, beautiful object. I also had the privilege of speaking to an organization called the National Space Foundation. They have their meeting every year about this time in Colorado Springs. Now, these are conservative people. There's a lot of military people there. There's a lot of aerospace contractors who make their spy satellites and other exotic electronics, also for Earth observation to keep

track of climate change and world weather. These are mostly people involved in making space instruments that look down toward the Earth, not exclusively, but mostly. But here's the thing, as conservative as they are, they are the dreamers. They want to be part of the future. They want space exploration to be part of the human experience for everyone. It was quite a striking thing for me. Members of the Planetary Society are generally people that want to explore the planets in the solar system, talk about human life outside of earth and humans one day living on Mars and other exotic ideas. These are conservative, buttoned-down military people and aerospace contractors,

yet we share this vision to have space to be part of the human way of life for centuries to come. It was an exciting time, and we talked about national security. We talked about weather. We talked about climate change. And we talked about the joy of knowing our place in the universe through space exploration. Well, thanks for listening. I'll be back in California next week. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy.

New rockets, new capsules, and new spacesuits. All of these and more are part of NASA's Constellation Program. We're going to talk about just one of these challenges with Mark Gittleman. Mark is Vice President and General Manager of Oceaneering Space Systems, a division of Oceaneering Space Systems, a division of Oceaneering International. His group has just won NASA's George M. Lowe Award for Quality and Performance, but he may be even happier about the award of a preliminary contract for the CSSS, the Constellation Space Suit System. I talked to Mark a few days ago at his headquarters near Houston, Texas. Mark, I want to

thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio and also congratulate you and Oceanarian International on the award, at least the preliminary award, of this contract to build the next spacesuit for American astronauts. Well, thank you. It's very exciting to have the opportunity to do this work with NASA, and it's great to be on your show. Now, are you right there in the facility next to the Johnson Space Center? We are. We're across the street from the back gate at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas. Well, that's convenient. I'll tell you, the first thing that I noticed when I saw this press release and I went to your website,

there was this wonderful graphic that I just look for again. I hope it's still up there someplace. And it shows stuff that Oceanarian International makes spread all over the ocean floor. I mean, remote-operated vehicles and all kinds of hardware for supporting life in this perhaps more familiar and more commercialized but very harsh environment. Does that say something about Oceaneering's ability to protect us from a different harsh environment? Well, I think it does. I think it speaks to deeply ingrained concern for safe operations. You know, Oceaneering started as a commercial diving company in the Gulf of Mexico about 45 years ago. And we've grown from that to what we are today.

But we never lost sight of where we started, which is developing and operating life support systems for human beings. And so whether it's commercial diving or in space, you know, the first thing is the safety of the person who's using your equipment. You know, the first thing is the safety of the person who's using your equipment. So to go from deep diving, and we can dive with humans past 2,000 feet up through space, it's all about making sure that you can get the work done and return that person safely to wherever it is they came from. So in one case, you've got humans being protected from the enormous pressures of the deep ocean. In this case, it's quite the opposite. You want to keep that pressure inside and keep the vacuum on the outside. Sounds like in spite of that, there are similarities in terms of engineering challenges. There are similarities. We all live on the Earth's surface at 14.7 psi, one atmosphere, and breathe a mixture that we call air that's

oxygen and nitrogen. When we dive deep, we use air. As we go deeper, we mix gases and use other mixtures, adjusting the percentages. In space, we do something similar. We adjust percentages and pressures. But the main thing is to keep the human being comfortable and provide the human being, the astronaut or the diver, with the right mix of gases and to take away the waste gas that human beings generate. And so from a macro perspective, the challenges are really very similar. And, of course, you have to keep the environment out, whether it's vacuum or seawater. You have to keep the environment away from the person. It was a long time ago, probably decades ago, somebody changed my view of spacesuits and said, look, you know, what you've got is a little human-shaped spaceship.

I mean, whether it has its own propulsion system or not, it really has to provide essentially all the functions that the capsule or space station or shuttle that they just got out of. That's exactly right. You have to keep them thermally comfortable, right? Not too hot, not too cold. You have to provide, of course, the breathing gas, the air, the oxygen. You have to take away the carbon dioxide. So that's a very good analogy. They really are small spaceships, human-shaped spaceships. And it's the same with the underwater work. We have hardsuits of different kinds, advanced diving systems that are anthropomorphically

shaped submarines. What kinds of challenges, what kind of standards did NASA set out for the design of this new generation of spacesuits? Yeah, that's a good question. Of course, the spacesuits that NASA has had since the earliest days have all been very safe, and they've proven that over the years. And one of the things that we'll be working on here is not just safe, which, of course, you have to maintain, but also easy to operate and maintain over a very long life cycle. So the spacesuits that we've had all these years have gone into space, been used, and then generally they've come back, although there have been some that have stayed on space

station for extended periods of time. These new suits ultimately will go to the moon and stay there. And so the operations and the maintenance of these suits need to be something that the astronauts can literally do in the field, if you think of the moon as the field. So one thing is that they need to be very robust, and they need to be field maintainable, going to try to enhance the crew comfort. There's a requirement for an extended stay in the suit in a contingency or an emergency. So it's things like that, comfort, mobility. One big difference, humans haven't walked on the moon in a very long time, of course. We need these suits to be able to

make it comfortable for the astronauts to walk across the moon, bend down and pick up a rock, get in and out of them, helping each other, but not much more than that, and then be able to withstand the lunar dust for extended periods of time also. I'm glad you mentioned the dust. That was one I wanted to ask you about. That lunar dust proved to be a bit of a problem for the Apollo astronauts, you know, almost 40 years ago now. We're coming up on the anniversary.

What kinds of measures are you going to be taking? Does the company even know yet to defend these suits and the humans within them from this dust, which can be kind of nasty? It can be nasty. We have been working, as has NASA and many other companies and universities on ways to mitigate this dust problem. It's invasive. It's quite sharp edged, which people don't usually think about. But dust on the earth has been moved around a lot. Air moves it around the wind, so the edges get knocked off. On the moon, nothing knocks the edges off, so it can get pretty sharp. edges get knocked off. On the moon, nothing knocks the edges off, so it can get pretty sharp.

So the answer is we're going to incorporate this research that's really been ongoing for quite some time into the designs of the suit itself, the fabrics, the joints at the elbow, shoulders, waist, etc., and the connectors themselves. I'll be right back with Mark Gittleman of Oceanary and Space Systems. They'll be building America's next spacesuit. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration

and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show.

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest is the Vice President and General Manager of Oceaneering Space Systems, Mark Gittleman. His company has just been awarded the preliminary contract for development of the Constellation Spacesuit System, or CSSS. Keeping astronauts safe in the new suit is just one of Mark's goals. That comfort issue that you mentioned, that's significant.

I'm sure astronauts, given a choice of comfort or safety, will always go for safety. But guys on EVA, guys and women on EVA, have been known to come back a little scraped up and a little black and blue, just trying to deal with the world or the world above our planet from inside these suits. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about trying to minimize? It is. And we expect to work very closely with NASA and the astronauts to make these suits just as comfortable as we possibly can. I watched a video on the NASA website the other day, and it was sort of the story of one extravehicular activity. And I was impressed with how difficult it was to get in and out of the suits that are currently used on the shuttle and the ISS. to get in and out of the suits that are currently used on the shuttle and the ISS.

Can you really do much about that? Are these folks still going to need some help? I think you said they would to get in and out of these. Well, I think they probably will, but we have some ideas, still early ideas, on how to simplify that. And again, after all these years of using these suits and working with them, NASA really has a wealth of information on things that we can do differently. And we intend to tap into that and work closely to enhance that, enhance the comfort as much as we can and simplify the operations. It's an incremental process. You take your best shot with the early prototypes, evaluate it with engineers and crew,

tweak it some, try it again, and that's the approach we're going to take. It's not entirely fair to ask about the design of this new suit because, after all, you've only just gotten started on it. But I'm also thinking of the gloves, which have received a lot of attention. In fact, NASA had one of its competitions to allow people to try and come up with more flexible, more comfortable designs. Is that a particular area of focus? It is. Glove comfort is a big deal.

If you think about what it's like to wear a pressurized glove, I've heard it described as like squeezing a tennis ball every time you close your hand. Oh, boy. It's work. It's not easy. We designed tools, EVA equipment, to try to minimize the hand squeezing that the crew has to do. So comfort does become a big deal, and work becomes a big deal. If you have to squeeze, squeeze all the time, imagine just how tired your hands and your forearms would get. So one of our teammates has a fair amount of expertise in glove design.

We have some longstanding expertise. We have other fresh ideas that have come out of universities and our own design. And as you just said, it's still early in the process, but we think that given all the work that's been done to date, we will be able to make it more comfortable to wear and use those gloves. I imagine it's helpful that one of your colleagues there, Jim Buckley, I hope I got his last name pronounced correctly, he's been through this. He knows what it's like to wear one of these. Yes, he does. Jim flew on the shuttle four times and was deputy in the astronaut office at NASA. And it's nice to have somebody in the program that has that sort of firsthand knowledge and also close relationship with crew past and present, astronaut crew past and present.

We all feel a great deal of ownership when it comes to sort of the deeper meaning of what we're doing here. The space program is one of the great things that this country does. Human spaceflight is one of the unique things that we do in this country and that we pioneered. unique things that we do in this country and that we pioneered. We're helping NASA and the United States go to the next step in space exploration with humans. For most of us, it's really, it goes beyond just being a business. It goes to something a little more emotional than that. And so we really understand deep down inside what it means when we design and build a spacesuit that a human being, a NASA astronaut, is going to get into

and stake his life on, if you will, that it's going to work just as intended. Yes, Jim brings that firsthand knowledge, and the rest of us really feel it as well. Mark, we're about out of time. I was hoping we'd get to talk about some of the other things you do for NASA and the American Space Program. You mentioned building the tools that we see people using up there generally outside the International Space Station over the last few years. But there's at least one other thing that you do for NASA, and it's operations in the swimming pool that I would most like to

take a dip in someday. You and me both. That being the neutral buoyancy lab there at the Johnson Space Center. That's right. It's a 6.2 million gallon tank, 40 feet deep. It's an amazing facility. The astronauts train there for their EVAs, for their spacewalks, and by all accounts, it is the best training that an astronaut can have to get ready for an EVA. And I think it's an important contributor to the success that we see when they get on orbit. Time after time, they go out there and they nail whatever it is they set out to do, and a huge part of that is the excellence of the training that they receive out at the NBL. Kind of brings together the two ends of Oceanarian International, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. We are out of time. I want to thank you again for joining us, and congratulations on the award of this contract to develop the Constellation spacesuit systems. Well, thank you, Matt. I appreciate that. These are exciting times for NASA and for space exploration, and I can't wait to see what the future brings. Mark Gittleman is vice president and general manager at Oceanair International Incorporated,

where he heads the Oceanair Space Systems Division, which was just given a preliminary contract for development of the CSSS, Constellation Space Suit System. And that's how our astronauts are going to be going outside their protective ships as they float in orbit and walk on the moon sometime roughly 10 or a little bit more than that years from now. We'll be looking at that night sky as we do every week with Bruce Betts. That'll be during this week's edition of What's Up, right after we hear from Emily and Q&A. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. I asked her to forego Q&A's regular format this week so that she could tell us about a scoop she got from someone on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team.

So, Emily, are we now predicting dust storms on Mars? Apparently we are. The Mars Climate Sounders team member David Kass contacted me last week with news of this first signs of what may be a global dust event on Mars. How did they arrive at this, since they haven't actually seen dust in any pictures yet? Right. Mars Climate Sounder is not an imager. It's designed to look at profiles of temperature and pressure above Mars' surface and its atmosphere. In fact, it usually scans across Mars' limbs, so it sees only Mars' atmosphere, not the surface. And it's been doing this throughout its mission at Mars. It's now into the second Mars year, so they're looking at year-to-year variability. And they noticed this week a very sharp rise in the temperature in the upper levels of Mars'

atmosphere from 20 to 40 kilometers elevation. It was a sharp rise in temperature that was only there during the day, not during the night. And that's a telltale sign that fine dust, the dust that is ubiquitous on Mars, has been lofted high into Mars' atmosphere, much higher than its usual levels, which is down below 10 kilometers elevation. Is this a sign of perhaps an impending planet-wide dust storm, as we've seen many times in the past? It could be, but like any extreme weather, you know, it's more likely to be less extreme than it is to be more extreme. But still, it's a worrying sign. It's something that the Mars Climate Sounder team and certainly the rover teams are going to be keeping a close eye on

to see if they're going to suffer one of these global dust events like they had in the past. Does this also tell us that we are, in fact, learning a little bit more about the dynamics of this very dynamic planet? We definitely are. And we, for the first time, have some really good tools in place to see what's going on in the Mars' atmosphere in real time. You know, Mars Climate Orbiter was supposed to do this for us, but it was lost back in 1999. time. You know, Mars Climate Orbiter was supposed to do this for us, but it was lost back in 99. And so Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, it's actually the third attempt for the Mars Climate Sounder guys to get that instrument to Mars. And now that it's there, it's really helping to provide these real-time looks at what's going on at the changing dynamics of Mars's atmosphere.

Where can listeners learn more about this instrument? Well, you can learn more on the Planetary Society's website at planetary.org.mcs. Society is actually the education and public outreach partner for the Mars Climate Sounder team, so it's our job to tell the world about what this instrument is doing. All right, Emily, thanks very much, and we look forward to hearing from you again soon. All right, thank you, Matt. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Everybody knows what you do. Go ahead, tell us about the night sky. Okay, I will. In the evening sky,

got Saturn up there in the east and Leo after sunset and high overhead by kind of mid-evening. Mercury, gonna start coming up looking like a bright star low in the west after sunset, starting mid-April and then getting higher for a week or two after that. But the trick is, it's brightest when it first appears, because it becomes more and more of a crescent, as seen through a telescope. Pre-dawn sky, busy. We've got Jupiter somewhat high up these days in the pre-dawn, very bright star-like object.

Below it, Mars, dimmer, reddish. And below that, if you can see that low, is Venus. And here's a weird thing coming up, Matt. You may want to try to check out. In western North America, which, by the way, is where we live, the moon will pass in front of Venus before dawn on April 22nd. But it is kind of a localized thing. One last thing, Lyrids, kind of an average meteor shower, peaking on April 21st.

Okay, the day before. All right, I'm going to take your advice because you gave me advice offline last week that it would be a good time to see the International Space Station going over Southern California. And man, was it spectacular. I mean, just unmistakably bright. And the best part is when it fades out.

Oh, it is. It's very cool. If you see it, depending on what time you see it, the one you saw, it enters the Earth's shadow. As seen by the astronauts, it's sunset for them. And so you see it fade out. Just beautiful. And people should try and catch that. Look it up on the web. They should. I would announce that every week, except that it's localized.

So you have to go to the web. www.heavens-above.com is a great site that you can sign up and get predictions. There are also other places you can find them. Yeah, worth the trouble. What else you got for us? On to this week in space history, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, first human in space. 20 years later, same date, but 1981, the first space shuttle mission launches to space. And we've got the 50th anniversary of the selection of the Mercury 7, the first seven NASA astronauts.

Very auspicious occasions. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you very much. We move on to random space back. Had a kind of Western theme to it. Maybe you can put some horses or a cattle drive in the background. Rawhide! Speaking of Rawhide, actually this has nothing to do with Rawhide. The James Webb Space Telescope, coming up to be launched

in a few years here, will have 18 mirror segments, all hexagonal, but they all get put together, and they're made of beryllium. They're coated in gold, truly exotic, and they're made of beryllium they're coated in gold truly exotic and they have to fold up the different segments and then be unfolded in space because there's no rocket big enough to to open this bad boy up total diameter of all of them together 6.5 meters you know and

i usually have more faith than you that these things are going to work once they get up there or down somewhere else. I'm amazed. If this one makes it, I am just going to be flabbergasted. It is so complex. It is indeed, but they're putting a lot of time, effort, and money into it, so hopefully it'll work. On to trivia time. Name at least three techniques used to discover exoplanets. How'd we do, Matt?

We got tons. A lot of people named seven. Our winner named six. And that winner is John Gallant. John, who's out of Lima, New York. It has been almost exactly one year since his name came up in the quiz. We got a lot of entries, too, because you know what? I think people want those T-shirts.

And that's what we're going to send John along with, if he wants it, an Oceanside Photo and Telescope Rewards card from opt.corp. We did get some other funny stuff. We got some good ones, like Maurice Sluka, who said that yet another technique

is just drive around and ask for directions. I personally couldn't do that. Yeah, it's kind of the guy way to do things, but not if there's somebody else going shotgun. I'd just stare with my eyes until I, you know, pretended to find something. Torsten kind of said the same thing,

just warp around looking for Class Ms. But my favorite is from Abby. Abby Marion, how do you find exoplanets? Knowledge, skill, and determination. That is true. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's certainly true. You can find out more about all sorts of techniques at planetary.org slash exoplanets, as well as check out our catalog of exoplanets.

Yeah, collect the whole set of cards there, baseball cards. Baseball exo, exo baseball cards. Collect them all. Well, I can't get enough asking for things in threes, but this time there really are only three so far. Here's the question for next time. What are the three science modules currently part of the International Space Station? The three science modules currently part of the International Space Station. Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to enter. Hey, you know what? You should get us those entries by April 13th, Monday the 13th at 2 p.m. Pacific time for your chance to win that spectacular Planetary Radio t-shirt and an OPT rewards card. I think we're done, except that I just wanted to mention that you found me on Twitter. I did. I found you tweeting on Twitter, which still makes me laugh to say. Yes, you're nicely letting people know about the show as well as your other inspiring thoughts.

So far, I've only been telling people while the show is already on. I'm going to try and give people a preview of the show before it actually airs. So anyway, it's under Matt Kaplan. And then I saw that you were following me. So, of course, now I'm following you. And you are Mr. Random Space Fact. Indeed. I've just started into this wild and wacky world of Twitter.

So if you're out there, check me out. Random Space Fact is the name I go under. You can find it on their regular search anyway. And we're out of here. All right. Thank you, everyone. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about silverware, especially the spork. Thank you, and good night. I wonder if somebody has a spork Twitter account. I'm going to check that in a minute. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up?

Is that a sparrow or a spork? It's a tweet. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова