Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - How "Outside In" Will Rock Your Solar System

Episode Date: January 16, 2012

Outside In is a spectacular IMAX movie being made out of nothing but actual photos of our solar system and beyond -- no computer-generated images. Hear how and why it's coming together from its creator, Stephen van Vuuren, and his associate Mike Malaska.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How you will see the universe as never before, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and we've got another packed half hour for you. In a few moments, you'll hear from the maker of a soon-to-premiere IMAX movie that will knock your socks off. First, though, we'll talk with the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I suspect you would like to stick with just talking about, you know, real science, and we're going to get to that. But you do have a blog entry about Phobos grunt, which by the time people hear this, may have made its way back down somewhere on our planet. Yeah, and it seems to fall to me to follow the second to second updates on missions like this one, because I seem to be better at using Google Translate to read foreign language documents than

a lot of other people. Anyway, yeah, Phobos Grunt is coming down. By the time you listen to this, it's probably going to be down. And it's a very sad thing for a lot of people. There's a lot of people worried, of course, about a spacecraft falling out of the sky. And there's all kinds of predictions. It's going to fall in Afghanistan. No, it's going to be the Indian Ocean. No, it's going to be somewhere else. We just don't know. And we won't know until just a few hours before the event. So stay tuned to my, or I guess you should already have read my Twitter account to find out what finally actually happened. In all likelihood, it crashed in the middle of the ocean and nobody saw it, but we'll see. All right, let's do get back to real science and our friend Mark Raymond of the Dawn Mission, which has seen some very impressive successes out there at Vesta.

very impressive successes out there at Vesta. That's right. You know, engineers are very good at managing people's expectations. So they promise you certain things, but they always hold back what they think they might be able to do. And I think that was the case with Dawn in its low-altitude mapping orbit. This one, it's a little over 200 kilometers above the surface of Vesta. And in this particular orbit, they are taking photos, but that's not the main goal of the mission right now. They're using their neutron detector to try to build up a picture of the composition of Vesta's surface. And with this neutron detector, there's a straight correlation between how much time they can keep the detector pointed at the surface and how good their data is. The problem is that at the same time, they want to get data with their radio science to

figure out using Doppler tracking the gravity around Vesta. And that gravity field tells you a lot about how the inside is constructed. Well, originally, they said we were going to either be able to do neutron detecting or gravity, but not both at the same time. Well, now they actually say yes, we can do both at the same time, because they don't need their high gain antenna to do the radio tracking. They can use one of their omnidirectional or at least wide angle low gain antennas. So they can do their neutron detecting. They can do their radio science and get twice as much science for the price that they were planning on spending on a single kind at once. So that's really good news.

And the other piece of good news is that they had built 40 days of margin into their schedule and they don't need a single day of it. So that's 40 more days of integration for the neutron detector. It's both of those things are very good news for the Dawn mission. So 40 more days of science at Vesta, but then I guess it still has to hit a window to head on to Ceres. That's right. Later this summer, it's going to be departing Vesta for a long cruise, few years before it gets to Ceres. And that, I think, is going to be even more exciting than Vesta has been. Emily, thanks so much. Are you carrying an umbrella for Phobos Grunt?

I think we'll be okay, Matt. Emily Lactewal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We're going to talk with the Chief executive officer of the Planetary Society now. That's Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back to the show. I think we're going to start by talking about the latest bit of advocacy that the Planetary Society has sent off to Washington, D.C.,

in the form of a letter with your signature at the bottom. Yes, my signature along with our president, Dr. Jim Bell, the photographer on Mars, if you will. Yeah, my signature along with our president, Dr. Jim Bell, the photographer on Mars, if you will. Yeah, so people are concerned. The largest space agency in the world is still NASA. And if there are cuts to NASA, it affects space exploration everywhere. And so the world economic situation, people say to themselves, we got to make cuts, we got to cut back. And the first thing or among the first things people want to cut is space exploration. It seems like there's other fish to fry here on Earth. But our feeling, our concern is that there will be disproportionately

large cuts to planetary science. Because planetary science, a couple missions, famous ones or infamous ones, the Curiosity rover, which lands August 5th that night or August 6th, depending on your time zone, be there. That program went way over budget. And so did the James Webb Space Telescope, which has yet to launch. And so this thing in the United States called the Office of Management and Budget wants to make cuts to planetary science. And we think that is a mistake. Planetary science is the crown jewel of space exploration. It's the coolest things, the greatest things that we do nowadays in space are done with

the planetary science community. And so this is what I like to call trickle-up economics. You get what we call intellectual capital. Your society has the ability to do these extraordinary things when it is stimulated by hiring engineers and scientists and technicians and people who support them, lawyers who protect intellectual property, venture capitalists who take risks that space exploration people then hire and take a chance on. All that enriches your society. And so what we do at the Planetary Society is advocate. So we wrote a letter, which is very traditional,

and we may ask our members to send petitions and emails. It's a big concern. We want to keep humankind moving forward. If you stop exploring, what does that say about you? And it's this letter to Jacob Lew, who was the head of the Office of Management and Budget at the OMB. Yeah, he's expanded. Now he's also the chief of staff. Not many places to move up to from there.

Listen, very, very briefly, you've had some exposure to the work being done by our next guest, exposure to the work being done by our next guest, the fellow who is making his own IMAX movie based on real planetary science images. Oh, outside in. Oh, God, it's fantastic. It's also on the Planetary Society website. So this guy took these images, speaking of which, taken by an extraordinary spacecraft, Cassini, way out there, way out, orbit of Saturn. And he's made an IMAX film because the images, I guess, well, you'll know more about it. The images are so high quality. They're so high resolution. They are magnificent. And we're going to meet him. He's putting it together right now. Both him and one of his biggest boosters, somebody who's helping him to make the film, another friend of the Planetary Society. Bill, thank you so much. Great talking to you.

Thank you, Matt. Have a good week. He's Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy. He's the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society. Stay tuned and prepare to be amazed. If you enjoy this show, you are going to be thrilled by a new IMAX movie called Outside In. Even the small sample that can be seen right now will rock your solar system. It has already been viewed millions of times online. The guy making this film, almost entirely on his own, is Stephen Fanfuren. And Stephen needs your help.

Mike Malaska has already come to his aid. I recently talked with these North Carolinians about this epic project that may soon be on a giant screen near you. Stephen, Mike, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's great to be here. Good to hear you. I cannot tell you how impressed I am, and I guess I am one of millions who feel this way, by the footage that is available so far on your website, Stephen. And we'll be providing that website, of course, a little bit later so that other people can check this out. Tell us, Stephen, a little bit about Outside In. What do you have in mind with this pretty magnificent undertaking? It's a film about flying through space, literally. It's something that started out not to be that. I was going to, when Cassini arrived at Saturn, I was kind of frustrated by the lack of publicity and media coverage, and I wrote a one-act play that I was going to do about space exploration or why we should explore space. That just didn't satisfy me. Long story short,

after lots of twists and turns, everything, I was thinking about a little planetarium film, but then I had a chance meeting from somebody from the IMAX industry who, when he heard what I had in mind, is like, you have to make an IMAX film. And I said, that's impossible. It can't be done. But being a person that when someone tells me, even if it's me, that I can't do something, I decided, well, maybe I can do this.

It's a film created from real photographs from space missions that allows you to fly through time and space, from the Big Bang all the way through a climactic fly-through at the Cassini images of Saturn. You have to tell us more about this greatest, perhaps, fact about this film, which is that there's no CGI here. How in the world were you able to create this sequence that is already on the web, this fly-through of the Saturnian system, without using computer-generated imagery? It was kind of necessity is the mother of invention. I got the inspiration to try to figure out something when I saw the first Cassini

images come down, when the spacecraft had gone through the rings and sent back those first photographs that were the close-up of the ring shots, I was absolutely floored by how unexpected those images were and what I saw. And my first thought was, wouldn't it be great to have some kind of video or film camera there? When you see CGI images of stuff, first of all, you kind of know it's not real. And then because Saturn is still a world that we're discovering, it's hard to model the unexpected. And I felt that, well, it's got to be photographs. But there was a lot of failures because as people know, the camera is basically a one megapixel black and white camera and trying to figure out how to create high res images.

There were a lot of dead ends, but I took inspiration from the Ken Burns method, which if you've ever seen his documentaries on the Civil War or jazz, he does this panning and zooming and scaling of photographs that give it a lovely feel of kind of floating through the images. of photographs that give it a lovely feel of kind of floating through the images. And there was a documentary that I'd also seen from about 2004 called The Kid Stays in This Picture that used a 2.5D photographic animation. And that was very inspirational because that used a piece of software called Adobe After Effects. And I just spent years literally developing, refining, and adding to those techniques so that I could take, rather than just a single photograph that I'm panning and zooming, literally thousands of photographs that I changed dynamically over time, panning and zooming and scaling to create this illusion of flying through photographs.

You know, of course, the photographs are computer processed, but none of the images are computer generated. This sounds like an enormous amount of work. It is. And, you know, I've had people from time to time who wanted to help on the animation. I happen to be insane, crazy, or just I'm doing the right thing because I love doing it. I absolutely love doing it. But a lot of people find it very, very tedious. But I've always loved still photography. I've always loved stop motion and animation. I just really enjoy that methodical step by step process of putting this stuff together. It's just pure fun for me. But it is it is months and months of work because

a lot of it is also Photoshop work of just assembling all these thousands of images you need to maintain the resolution. Because, you know, when you zoom into a photograph, if you zoom in even just a little too much, you get pixelation. So I have a constant battle, especially at the resolution of IMAX, to avoid the pixelation that occurs. You have a lot of boosters. One of them is on the line with us, Mike Malaska. Mike, you and I, of course, met because we were going down into caves together looking for signs of extreme life. My trip to New Mexico a little while back.

But that was when I learned that you're not just a booster of this project, Outside In. You've actually contributed some work. I see that Stephen has listed you as one of what, Stephen? You call them the compositors? That's correct. I mean, that's the kind of IMDB listing. One of the key things to the film is if I had to generate all the high-resolution composites for the film, it would literally probably take 100 years.

But there's so many people, people like Mike, who produce these kind of images on their own, and they have all donated their work to the film. Mike, how did you get involved with this? So I first heard of Stephen Van Furen's work when he posted it on UnmannedSpaceFlight.com, which is a Planetary Society project as well. Yeah, someplace our Emily Lochte Wall, of course, likes to hang out. Right, and there was a lot of us who like going through some of the raw spacecraft imagery or into the planetary data system and processing up some of these images

and making, you know, composites or color images or mosaics. We were more than happy to contribute to Stephen's work to making this movie. Was it just coincidence that you guys learned that you're both North Carolina residents? Yeah, that's where you're talking to me from. Well, I actually did see on Stephen's handle on unmannedspaceflight.com that he was in Greensboro, North Carolina. I went, wow, that's just right down the road from me. Amazing.

So that started the conversation going, and it's been just a great ride ever since. That's volunteer planetary scientist Mike Malaska. He and filmmaker Stephen Fanfuren will be back to tell us more about Outside In. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other

intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 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. Stephen Van Furen is slowly assembling a spectacular visual feast called Outside In. He's creating this film on a broken shoestring budget, inventing tools and techniques that should be useful to other filmmakers, scientists, and image manipulators. It is far enough along that he was recently able to show a few precious minutes in a Raleigh, North Carolina IMAX theater. He and his associate, Mike Malaska, report that the audience was ecstatic and a bit dizzy. That's one of the things about why this became an obsession,

because many of us have seen these amazing images that Cassini and all these spacecraft have taken, but almost nobody has seen them when the sense of scale is correct, when your entire field of view is filled by these images. And when it screens like this, you can just see people's jaws kind of drop. And when the camera is turning or tumbling around, they're gripping, you know, their seat arms trying to hold on. It really gives you that feeling, and that's the reason that this film needs to be an IMAX, because until you experience space images where your whole peripheral vision is filled,

it's impossible to explain to someone how different it is. You know, I've never, I think, felt at such a loss at not being able to make these samples of this film to come a part of the radio show. But, of course, we will put up links to your website and directly to this incredibly impressive fly-by or fly-through of the Saturn system, which I just took another look at, and it just seems to be getting better. How far along is the film, and do you have a target date for completion? The target date for completion is hopefully the end this year, the beginning of next year. One thing that kind of factors into this is that IMAX theaters are still film-based. This is kind of the first year that it looks like the transition

is going to make. And because of the enormous cost of outputting imagery to IMAX film, I'm trying to gauge when there are going to be enough digital theaters that I can initially premiere the film, since it's a non-profit labor of love. I can premiere it in digital form on the giant screen, get people interested and excited, and then move to find someone to cover the expense of outputting it to IMAX film. So I'm not going to stick to a firm target date at this point. Plus, film production, especially a labor of love like this, I want to make sure it's ready and perfect for people to watch. Very quickly, how does your budget compare to most IMAX films? IMAX filmmaking is enormously expensive.

If we actually had the facility to fly a spacecraft to Saturn with an IMAX film camera, the cost of the film stock alone would be, for a 40-minute film, is about $3 million. Wow. And that doesn't cover any production or any crew expenses. That's just literally the stock. And my budget is less than 10% of that. This film will have the honor of being the lowest-cost native IMAX film ever made by a long shot. How can people learn more? And maybe most important at this point, how can they become a part of this by helping you to get it made?

The best way to learn about the film is simply to visit the website, which is OutsideInTheMovie.com. Or fortunately, because of the viral and internet exposure the film has had, in fact, if you just type Outside In in Google, it's generally around the third hit that you find. There on the website, you can learn more about the film. We have a Facebook group. There are lots of opportunities to get involved with helping process the images, support the film, share it with everybody you know is probably the most important thing that people can do, is just spreading the word, especially internationally. There's been a lot of interest in the film from people around the world.

We're about out of time, but Mike, I've got to come back to you for a moment. What has this experience, being involved with this production, meant to you? It's been inspiring. I think one of the things that sets this movie apart from many of the other movies that have been made is that this is more of like an art movie. You're seeing a series of images and you're seeing some beautiful music being played with this fly-through effect. And you don't have this documentary voiceover telling you a bunch of facts and figures. So it's really very similar to the experience that you would have when you saw something like Fantasia, for example, where you're able to just sit, relax, and enjoy and just see these incredible, beautiful, stunning vistas going through the movie. And here is the quote that is

right in line with that, that Stephen, you have in your email, a film is or should be more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. And, of course, that was Stanley Kubrick. Stephen, I think he'd be proud. It has been a great pleasure to talk with both of you. And best of luck with this wonderful project. Well, thanks very much, and thanks so much for having us on.

Yeah, thank you very much, Matt. It was great. And, of course, we will put up links, as I said, both to the Outside In website and directly to this video sample. Just a taste, a tiny taste, literally tiny, of what we hope we'll all be able to see on IMAX screens before too long. We've been talking with the filmmaker, Stephen Van Furin. He is the guy behind, it's his dream to create this IMAX film, Outside In. And one of his many fans, but more than a fan, Mike Malaska, who describes himself as a volunteer planetary scientist. Probably very appropriate considering the kinds of work he does with images and the excitement that he has about our solar system. We'll talk with another one of those guys in just a moment.

That would be Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he has an entry in the Planetary Society. And he has an entry in the Planetary Society blog of a few days ago, which expresses sort of mixed emotions about the loss of Phobos grunt. And hello, Guy, you've been kind of managing Phobos life for us. Has to be mixed feelings. Oh, it is. It's mostly negative. Mostly sad, yeah. Mostly sad. Our Phobos Life project was to have organisms exposed to deep space for 34 months, instead expose them to low Earth orbit for two months.

Obviously, there's some hope that we'll retrieve the biomodule depending on where it falls, but it's not too likely. And there would be some science out of that. And of course, there's always, as I blather on in the blog entry about, the reminder that space exploration is hard and kind of painful, but it does lead you to try to stick with it and look to the future and know that we're doing a noble thing. We just need to keep trying. It's very, very nice blather, actually. And I recommend people take a look at it. And I both give you my condolences and my congratulations. And now you can tell us about the night sky.

Well, thank you. I'll try to give some more nice blather. Night sky. Venus. Jupiter dominating the evening sky. Venus low towards the horizon in the west after sunset jupiter higher overhead two brightest planets we've also got mars getting closer to its march opposition so it's getting brighter and brighter looking pretty darn bright rising around

11 p.m in the east and then high overhead later in the night, and Saturn rising around 2 a.m. and high overhead in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. In 1969, it was the first docking of two-man spacecraft done by the Soviets. Hard to believe, but it was six years ago New Horizons started its voyage to Pluto. It's still got another three and a half years to go. We go on to random space facts. Kind of a psychotic Elmo there. Poor Elmo.

Galaxies. We classify them typically, well, in various ways, but they're originally classified by their morphology, their shape, how they looked. And we have the Hubble sequence, named not after the telescope, but the original dude, Edwin Hubble. And basically, you've got your spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way. You've got your elliptical galaxies, kind of elliptical blob shaped. In between, you've got lenticular galaxies. The neat thing about them is if you turn them sideways, you actually see a different galaxy. It's an obscure reference to lenticular, you know, postcards and things. And then if you don't fit at all, you're like the goth teenager galaxy, then they just call you irregular.

Which there is no over-the-counter medication for, by the way. Not yet, but we're all hoping. We move on to our trivia contest. And I asked you, how massive can a white dwarf be? And we got some subtleties in the answer. The basic concept is after a star stops its active nuclear process and it collapses, it'll collapse down to a white dwarf unless it's beyond a certain mass, in which case it will collapse even further to a neutron star. How'd we do, Matt? Very well. I'm going to ignore the many, many, many people who

couldn't resist making references to either Snow White or Gimli. Totally different mass. Yeah, we'll go straight to the winner. And I do think he's a first time winner. Don't get many from New York, New York, my wife's hometown. Henry Schiller hails from that, the Big Apple. And he said 1.4 solar masses, otherwise known as, Bruce? The Chandra Sekhar Limit. That's exactly right. So, Henry, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Had some other very interesting insights into this, though.

Several people who pointed out that that's for a star that is not spinning, and that if it spins, I guess the limit goes up a little bit. Makes sense, I guess. The faster you're spinning, it's the carnival ride analogy, then that's helping to effectively push outwards on the mass in some kind of sloppily defined way. I couldn't resist this response from Ilya Schwartz, who talked about how, yeah, they're going to continue to cool and eventually become black dwarfs. But Ilya says, however, since no white dwarf can be older than the age of the universe,

13.7 billion years, give or take, even the oldest white dwarf still radiated temperatures of a few thousand kelvins, and no black dwarfs are thought to exist yet. How in the world, Mr. Astronomer, can it be taking so long for these to cool off? After they collapse, there are a series of heating lamps that surround them. Ask a serious question. ask a serious question there's an amazing amount of energy in there and you know there's a lot of stuff to cool down but heating lamps that's the real answer yeah that's it and a few hot water bottles okay

i think you should tell us the one we're going to answer in a couple of weeks all right trying to to embrace spacecraft reentry. What was the largest spacecraft to ever re-enter the Earth's atmosphere? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. So this is something that was actually in space and came back home. You have until Monday the 23rd, January 23rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us that answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about fish. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

You won't need a babblefish in your ear to listen in to him on What's Up every week here on Planetary Radio. him on What's Up every week here on Planetary Radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the

Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.