Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Honoring Ray Bradbury, Mars Photographer

Episode Date: July 23, 2007

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Ray Bradbury, Mars photographer, 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. Join us as we continue our special coverage of the International Conference on Mars with this special event honoring the beloved author and playwright, poet and visionary, Ray Bradbury. We'll also hear from Arizona State's Phil Christensen, designer and principal investigator for the Themis camera on Odyssey, one of three active spacecraft orbiting Mars. As you'll hear, it was Phil and a

colleague who asked Ray to choose a spot on the red planet he'd like to have imaged. And what a choice he made. Later on, we'll get the latest on the night sky from Bruce Betts and give away another Planetary Radio t-shirt. Here's just a bit of what's going on around the solar system this week. Saturn picked up yet another moon, or rather the Cassini spacecraft found another that makes 60 satellites for the ringed planet. There's a list at planetary.org. The August launch of Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter will be pushed back so that repairs can be made. Engineers discovered that a condenser had been installed backwards.

You've probably heard the biggest space story this week. It takes us right back to Mars, where a dust storm has blanketed at least half the planet. In place of her regular Q&A segment, we've asked the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla for a special update on this latest challenge for spirit and opportunity. Emily, first of all, thank you. It's great that we can get this update from you because you have been talking to people, not only on the rover teams, but with the three orbiters circling over Mars about how this dust storm is affecting them. Let's start with the rovers.

Is the situation as dire as some of the popular media have indicated? Well, the rovers certainly aren't dead yet, and they'll probably survive the storm. At least that's what rover science team members have been telling me. Is one worse off than the other? I guess Opportunity may have it a little bit tougher? Up to now, Opportunity has been having a tougher time than Spirit, because in addition to the global levels of dust that are affecting the whole planet, there was an extra storm parked on top of Opportunity's site.

Just how much light is not getting to Opportunity since that apparently is the critical factor here? 99%, more than 99%. So it's very dark where Opportunity is because there's just so much dust in the atmosphere above the rover. So obviously power generation is cut way back. I take it the consumption is also cut back. That's right. The rover team is doing a lot to make sure that the rover draws as little power as possible. They started by cutting most science activities.

Actually, they started by cutting any roving and arm movements. Then they cut science. And then they started cutting maintenance activities like file operations, deleting old files so they could run the computer for as short a time as possible. And then at the very end, the very last thing they do is to cut communications. So for the first time this weekend, Opportunity did not communicate with Earth for reasons of power consumption. You talk about some of this, this holiday weekend that

Opportunity is getting as we speak in the long and very detailed article that you have at planetary.org that we recommend to people. With all of these cuts, have they been able to cut to the point where Opportunity is not drawing more power than it generates? Well, it depends on how much dust there is in the atmosphere at any given time. They measure this with a property called tau. As tau increases, the opacity of the atmosphere increases exponentially. Ordinarily, they see tau of up to 0 to 1. Opportunity has seen tau values as high as 5.5, which is just incredible. As long as tau remains below 5,

they can keep the rover power positive. And right now, that's the situation at Opportunity. Spirit has actually been seeing Tau values rise lately. So Spirit may also be getting into a tough power situation this week. But the rover team does sound optimistic about how the rovers are doing with these low power levels. And I read in your article that people are breathing a sigh of relief that they didn't send Opportunity down into Victoria Crater. Absolutely, because if the rover had been in the crater, then there would have been steep wall shadows to deal with, as well as the low levels of light. So the fact that Opportunity did not go in yet is a very good thing.

There is no other real serious danger from this dust to camera lenses or anything like that? No, there is a little bit of dust on the hazcams for both rovers. Actually, there's a silver lining to this storm. The high winds that have accompanied the storm have wiped the rover's solar panels absolutely clean. They look pristine. So the amount of light that's getting to the ground is very slight, but the rovers are making the most of it. This is the dry cleaning that we've seen from the dust devils for some years. Let's go high above the planet where those orbiters are, and they're not affected by the dust except for what they can see down on the surface.

That's right. There's really very little point in doing high-resolution imaging when all you're going to see is bland dust. All three of the orbiters at Mars are scrambling to cancel high data rate, high resolution imaging and switch it for other kinds of observations that they can use to learn a lot more about the dust storm. So for instance, for both Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the cameras have canceled a lot of work, but the spectrometers are doing a lot more work, and they're learning a great deal about the storm, where the dust is, how big the dust particles are,

how big the particles are that settle first, and how long the smaller ones stay in the air, and so on. Emily, are any Martian meteorologists predicting when this storm may settle out? Well, we've never had so many orbiters observing a storm at once, so it's a little hard to predict. This is new territory, and people are excited about studying it. I think that it's going to be many weeks before things really settle down, but hopefully the rovers will be able to start drawing enough power to start moving again in maybe a month or so. All right, Emily, thank you so much for the update, and I'll keep an eye on the website to see what else develops as the dust settles. You're welcome. Emily Lakdawalla

is usually here with our Q&A segment. You can find her at planetary.org with her blog on most occasions. But right now there is that great article about this massive dust storm and many smaller ones on the red planet. If you'd like to take a picture on Mars, the Themis team is over here. You can get on their laptop and specify a place on Mars on one of their next polar orbits in August. So come on over and take a look at this technology. It is astonishing. We are here in South Pasadena looking at a map of Mars specifying where future pictures will be taken on another world. And why was Bill Nye the science guy with that crowd in South Pasadena? They had just watched Ray Bradbury's hit play Greentown, presented by Bradbury's own Pandemonium Theatre Company. Planetary scientist Phil

Christensen took to the stage just before the special benefit performance. Phil had brought along a special gift for Ray. This is probably one of the highest resolution images ever taken of this place. And as this plaque says, it was targeted by Ray on May 9th. And so we thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to present this to you. That's beautiful. You did a great job. You took a really nice picture. Oh, that's beautiful.

That's where I was born. Absolutely. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the author, the man, the reason I think most of us are here, ladies and gentlemen, Ray Bradbury. Thank you. I suppose you wonder why I've called you here. Well, I'm a theater person. I've been in love with theater for all of my life from the age of 12 on.

And finally when I was in my 30s I began to write one-act plays and put them out in theaters. And I financed them myself. I didn't want money from other people because I didn't want to make a profit from theater. I wanted it for my heart. So what you're going to see tonight is the accumulation of truths that started when I was 12 years old.

When I was 12 years old, I discovered I was alive. I got out of bed one morning. I looked at the hairs on the back of my hand, and I said, my God, I'm alive. Why didn't someone tell me? So every day since then, the same thing has happened. I'm grateful for the life I've had and I learned it the more I've been around space people. I've had wonderful experiences with Caltech and with Lou Friedman and with Carl Sagan and with Mr. Sullivan from the New York Times. And we did a lecture at Caltech 30 years ago, which turned into a book about Mars.

We didn't know we were writing a book, but when we finished talking, they put it down and it made this fantastic book about Mars. Bruce Murray, yeah, and Arthur Clark. So you see, the sum of my life is love. I fell in love with Mars

when I was 13 years old. I lived in Tucson, Arizona, on a street called Lowell Avenue. You can't do better than that, can you? Mr. Lowell and his photographs of Mars. What you have here is an accumulation of the truths that have occurred to me and trying to live a life of love and doing theater and writing novels and doing short stories without knowing what I was doing.

So what you see tonight here is a combination of all these things. There's an Egyptian mummy in the third act and in the middle of the second act there are the magicians that influenced me There's an Egyptian mummy in the third act. And in the middle of the second act, there are the magicians that influenced me when I wanted to grow up and be a magician. I met Blackstone when I was seven. I helped him disappear a horse.

And so you see, I grew up and became a magician, didn't I? Anything I wanted you to believe, God damn it, that's what you're going to believe. And one final thing here before we start the play. This happened to me in the last two days. I got this from the French government, from the Republic Francaise, from the Minister of Culture, and they said, Monsieur Bradbury, you have been elected Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters

from the French government two days ago. Now that I'm a commander, I command you to enjoy. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Author and playwright Ray Bradbury. Stay with us.

We'll join the post-performance reception for Ray in a minute to hear from Phil Christensen and Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society. 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. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. 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. Ray Bradbury's Greentown had just received a standing ovation. The audience for the special benefit performance spilled out into the Fremont Center Theater's outdoor patio for a reception honoring Ray. Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman was there. Like so many scientists and engineers, Lou started out as a science fiction fan.

It's been a remarkable journey for me, personally, to see the mix of science fiction and science. I think my first science fiction book i have to admit wasn't ray bradbury i think was robert einlein me too uh but it but it it brought us into the idea of wanting to explore another world and mars has never disappoints us if i i was just remarking tonight uh to one of my colleagues here that all the results we see on Mars, they still get, they surprise us. There's still something more interesting about them.

They're not disappointing. There's these tantalizing hints of more things to explore. It's a real world there, and I think we owe that to this mix. Say something about this event. Well, one of the things about the Planetary Society is our audience isn't the scientists, like the Mars conference was all about the scientists this week. Our audience is the public, people who have a wide range of interests.

Most of them, space is not their primary interest, but it's their inspiration. And to be able to do this play, which isn't about a space theme at all, but it's about an eternal time theme. It's about the whole aspect of connecting the past and the present and the future. But that's why we do space exploration. In a sense, if I get a little philosophical here, which I probably shouldn't while we're enjoying the party, we have the Einstein result about space and time being no different. And I think tonight's event sort of proves it, that it's a story about traveling in time in a way, but it's expanding our space as we're doing it.

It's almost metaphysical. Yeah, well, excuse me. I'm feeling very good because it's a nice evening. You know, in a couple of weeks, we're going to have a launch of the Phoenix mission, which is another new mission to Mars. And on it is our CD called Visions of Mars, which is a whole set of science fiction stories, including one by Ray Bradbury. And it, too, is going to capture the same spirit that we're creating for the future Martians,

a library up there of works that have inspired us about space exploration. and it too is going to capture the same spirit that we're creating for the future Martians, a library up there of works that have inspired us about space exploration. Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society. Arizona State University's Phil Christensen and some of his colleagues were in a corner of the reception with a laptop computer. Guests were using special software to select spots on Mars for imaging by Themis, the instrument Phil designed for the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Themis stands for Thermal Emission Imaging System. It takes pictures using both infrared and visual wavelengths of light.

Propped up next to them was the beautiful framed picture of one of the Martian sites selected by Ray Bradbury. Quite a show, wasn't it? Did you enjoy that? It was spectacular. It was really fun. It's a wonderfully intimate audience and a great play, and to sit next to Ray Bradbury while he watched his play being performed was a real highlight. It was fun. It was spectacular. The man can turn a phrase, but I do want to talk to you about that gift you had for him. Tell that story. Well, six months or so ago, Jim Rice and I had the wonderful idea of letting Ray Bradbury take a picture of Mars. We have a camera around Mars. We've been imaging for a few years, but somehow it just seemed wonderfully fitting to

go to Ray and say, what would you like to take a picture of? Anything you want, anywhere on the planet. So we actually flew out and spent an hour and a half with him. And I have to say, I've met a lot of really interesting people in my life, and I think that hour and a half I spent with Ray Bradbury was a highlight. It was fantastic for me personally, and just a wonderful time. So we did. We sat down with the software we used to target the Themis camera, and we talked about what Mr. Bradbury was interested in, So we did. We sat down with the software we used to target the Themis camera,

and we talked about what Mr. Bradbury was interested in, and he said he was really interested in the South Pole, and he always thought about the poles of Mars. It turns out the sun is up in the south, and the imaging is great, and so we ended up taking a few pictures with him, one of which is a place called Inca City, which is this wonderfully enigmatic place in the South Pole. We targeted it, we sent the commands to the spacecraft, the image came down, and sure enough, it turned out beautifully,

and so tonight we presented it to him. We're going to have to try and include that image somewhere on the website because it really is fascinating. I mean, it doesn't even take Ray Bradbury's imagination to imagine an ancient city there. Interestingly, to this day, the scientific community struggles to explain this feature. It was first imaged by Mariner 9 back in the early 70s, and it's this series

of almost rectangular walls, if you will, that are a kilometer apart. And it looks like walls, if you will, that are a kilometer apart. And it looks like an old ancient city rising up out of the dust of Mars. I couldn't tell you what it really is geologically, but it looks remarkably unnatural. So it was a wonderfully fitting image for Mr. Bradbury to take. Funny where things will take you when you create an instrument that flies to Mars. Yeah, no, you always hope to find, you know, the remarkable thing, the aha moment.

But somehow, you know, sitting with Ray Bradbury and talking about civilizations on Mars and ancient cities, it was very moving. It was in a very, you know, surrealistic kind of way. It was very moving. It was in a very surrealistic kind of way. It was a lot of fun. You said that you were personally inspired by him, and you have a lot of colleagues who were too. Absolutely. Almost everyone I know in the science field, it's remarkable how,

yeah, when I was 11 years old, I read Martian Chronicles, and that's certainly my story, and it's the story of many people who are now exploring Mars. There was something that just, you know, sparked an imagination. I used to stare at Mars through a telescope for hours, and I had a little $20 telescope, and all Mars was was this fuzzy orange ball, couldn't see anything. But it was still fascinating to just stare and dream and think, and, you know, what does this planet look like? And to me it's remarkable that, you know, within my lifetime, Mars went from a fuzzy ball in the night sky

to features where I can look and see things the size of sand grains sitting on the surface. That's truly, I think we lose track of how phenomenal it is to have made that much progress in 45 or 50 years. I used to think, well, maybe if we land and we see it, it'll take some of the mystery away. Mars won't be this, we can't use our imagination anymore. And to me, that's not the case. I think the more we learn about Mars, the more fun it becomes, the more interesting and inspirational it becomes. And to slightly paraphrase Ray, the more we learn about Mars, the more we become the Martians.

Absolutely. And it's great. It's really nice for him to have lived to see that, to really live in the age where we are Martians, literally driving or walking on the surface, using our eyes and our robotic tools. He got it exactly right. All right, I've got to turn to science for a moment or two here. What can you tell us? What's the latest from your instruments there in orbit and on the planet. In orbit, right now Mars has a raging dust storm, and you would say, oh, gee, that's too bad.

But for many scientists it's fabulous because in all the years we've really been studying Mars, in the last 10 years or so, we haven't gotten a big dust storm. And so it's actually nice to see. How do they form? How do they grow? What triggers them? So the dust storm is actually really exciting. The rovers are about, you know, one of them is about to drive down into the Victoria Crater. The other one is wandering around in the hills just making spectacular discoveries.

Within the last few weeks, we've found these deposits that are 95% silica, which I went back to the original proposal I wrote 15 years ago talking about putting instruments on the surface of Mars, and wouldn't it be great if we found a deposit that was 90% silica, because that would point us at hot springs and water, and now we've stumbled across one. And that's really interesting. And so it's really giving food for thought for the geochemists to explain how you make a rock like that. Almost any way you make it involves a lot of water, warm water.

And those are the type of things, you know, it's very similar to the rocks you find in Yellowstone. Biologists are sort of asleep in the back of the room when we say, yeah, we found an ancient Yellowstone on Mars. Believe me, they wake up. They come to life. You found what? And so we're sort of right in the middle of that.

Like, you found what? So that's exciting. I mean, it's fun to just keep finding new things. Fact and fiction, just about equally fascinating and exciting. Absolutely. And as always, I think the facts are more exciting, but the fiction can sometimes be more moving. You put the two together and you have a wonderful evening.

Planetary scientist Phil Christensen at a South Pasadena reception for Ray Bradbury. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Dr. Bruce Betts is on the phone. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. What's your project today, project man? My project is to watch TV. You're watching this guy that we should send to Mars, right, on the Discovery Channel? Exactly. Man versus Mars.

He will survive using only the native rocks and a piece of bubble gum. This is the guy that, you know, all the speculation about the one-way trip and all the people who would volunteer. We should just draft this guy and send him. You know, he'd be like Robinson Crusoe on Mars. He'd find rocks that he could cook and make oxygen. Exactly. And then he'd build his own rocket from the native material and come back. That's right.

All right. All right. What's in the night sky? Well, Mars, in the pre-dawn middle of the night sky, dim and over in the east, and it'll keep getting higher. We'll keep you posted. In the evening sky, of course, Saturn pretty well slipping away. But Venus, still looking bright over there in the west shortly after sunset, but we're going to lose that within the next few weeks too,

although it will return in the morning sky in a few weeks. And Jupiter, kind of, once it vanishes, and now it's being the jewel of the evening sky, and you can see it up in the south in early evening, and if you look below it, you can see the reddish object is Antares and Scorpius, and it's just all quite lovely, don't you think? Very nice. You also might still catch a glimpse of Mercury low in the east in the pre-dawn sky in late July. It will be a fairly bright-looking object, but very low in the east, doing one of its brief apparitions.

Super. This week in space history, in 1969, of course, the Apollo 11 crew returns to Earth. We also had a couple of significant, more than a couple of significant launches, but I'll mention two. During this week, we had Apollo 15 launch a couple of years later, and then we had the Skylab 3 crew launching, the last crew to Skylab launching in the early 70s as well. On to Random Space Fact! It's a bit anemic, but we'll let it fly.

Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for, you know, a good meal today since I've just been living in the jungle and planning on hunting something. Eating whatever insects you can find. Yeah, termites are tasty, I hear. Tastes like chicken. Tastes like little tiny chicken. On to the random space fact. Over 1,000 trans-Neptunian objects have been discovered since the first discovery in 1992.

Pretty darn impressive. That's a lot of discovery in not a whole lot of time. Yeah, I'll say. And half of those, we actually know their orbits pretty well, and half not so much. So objects out by the orbit of Neptune, crossing the orbit of Neptune. Trans-Neptunian. Fascinating. Well, I try.

It's gone to the trivia contest. Well, it was quite a trick question, but it had a little twist of challenge to it, which was what was the first science return from NASA's Discovery Program? And I wanted people to give the spacecraft and the target. And how did we do, Matt? You know, I think we had a higher percentage of wrong answers on this, at least going by your reading of the correct answer, than we've ever had. Well, I'm always right, by definition.

Very, very interesting responses. One that does fit your criteria for correctness and winningness of T-shirts. It's Richard Coppo. Richard Coppo of Lynchburg, Virginia, who said the first science return from the Discovery Program was from NEAR, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. This is correct. And although NEAR had not reached its primary target of Eros, they did that thing they do and found other targets they could fly by, in this case the asteroid Matilda.

And on June 26th and 27th of 1997, the NEAR spacecraft returned over 500 images of Matilda as well as various other scientific data. And this was several days ahead of Mars Pathfinder, which was kind of lumped in at the last minute to being called a discovery mission. But it was a few days before it got to Mars and before Lunar Brow Spectre went off and played at the moon early the next year. What have you got for us as a brand-new contest?

Brand-new contest? Name all spacecraft. Go on, please. All right. That successfully returned images from the surface of Venus. Ooh, all spacecraft that successfully returned images from the surface of Venus. Landers and others. And to be clear, that they were actually on the surface.

Yeah. That's when they returned these. Not just cutting through the clouds with radar or something else. Right. All right. All right. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

And you've got to do that. Get that entry in by July 30th. That's Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time, July 30th. All right. We've got to get out of here. All right. Everybody go out there. Look up in the night sky.

Think about how you would survive on Mars. Thank you. Good night. You ever see how you would survive on Mars. Thank you. Good night. You ever see that, Robinson Crusoe on Mars? That guy was resourceful. I saw the one with Santa Claus on Mars. No, that was a sequel. That was different, okay.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Our special Mars coverage continues next week as we talk with Peter Smith, principal investigator for the Phoenix lander about to leave Earth for the red planet. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.