Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Interview with Bruce Betts

Episode Date: December 2, 2002

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Hello again, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Thanks for joining us on our second installment of Planetary Radio. This week we'll find out how fast Bruce Betts can talk. The regular host of our What's Up segment will spend a little more time than usual with us as he attempts to describe all

of the Society's projects in record time. If we're lucky, he'll still have a minute or two to tell us what's up in the night sky this week. We'll end today's show with a special feature about robots that are smart enough to cooperate with each other and possibly smart enough to build a Mars base. But first, is Mars dry as a bone?

Or is it hiding enough H2O to fill an ocean? Here's Emily with more random space facts. I'll be right back. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla, Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, with Random Space Facts. Did you know that no human has yet visited Mars? The trip to Mars will be far more difficult and hazardous than the trip to the Moon,

but Mars is the most Earth-like of all other destinations in the solar system, making it a prime target for human exploration. Its gravity, about one-third of Earth's, would be comfortable for human explorers. Although Mars is a much colder place than the Earth, with average temperatures of minus 60 degrees Celsius, daytime temperatures near the equator often reach a balmy 5 degrees Celsius or 40 Fahrenheit. What's more important, there is abundant evidence of a natural resource that is critical to the survival of humans, water. Like Earth, Mars has permanent polar caps

containing water ice, and recent observations by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft suggest that plenty more water lies buried underground. I'll tell you more about water on Mars in a few minutes. Now, back to Planetary Radio. a few minutes. Now, back to Planetary Radio. Dr. Bruce Betts joins us as he does every week with his regular segment, What's Up? But we're going to give Bruce a little bit of extra time this week because he is the Planetary Society Director of Projects. And as such, well, we're going to see if we can sort of do a whirlwind tour of those projects. We are allotting all of 15 minutes for that tour,

and we've already taken bets against us, Bruce, that that's going to be impossible at a rate of about, oh, on average, a minute and a half per project. What do you think? Well, we'll give it a try, but we do have a lot going on, so it's going to be tricky, but hopefully we can win. Now, before we actually start this great race, what is this all about? I mean, why is the Planetary Society up to so much? Is there some unifying theme behind all of these projects?

Well, yes, to answer your second question first, yes, there are some unifying themes between these projects. The Planetary Society, as you know, the largest space interest group in the world, there are really three main things we do. We do advocacy for planetary exploration with all the governments of the space-faring countries of the world. We do publications such as our award-winning Planetary Report magazine for our members, our website, and then the third big category of things we do are what we refer to as projects. What we're trying to do with those is a few different things. Trying to involve the public as never before in planetary exploration,

as well as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI. We're trying to do things that are publicly interesting. And we're also trying to fill gaps in funding, places where NASA and other agencies aren't funding that we and our members feel are important. We also are often, at the same time, trying to raise awareness to programs and to changes in programs. That was particularly successful in the 90s with a series of rover testing that the Planetary Society did as a project, and eventually was quite instrumental in leading to actually flying rovers such as Sojourner to Mars. Well, that pretty well establishes the raison d'etre for all of this.

Are you ready to give a shot at this little contest? Let's do it. All right. Let me start the clock. And we are running. Let's go with number one. All right. Number one, let me mention the solar sail.

Solar sail was mentioned some by Lou Friedman last week on your show. Let me review it briefly. It's our largest project. It is an attempt to fly the first ever solar sail in space. Solar sailing is a technology that has been proposed to propel spacecraft about the solar system. It uses light from the sun. Most people don't realize light actually exerts pressure. It pushes on things, which on the normal course of our lives makes no difference whatsoever because it's so small. You get in the vacuum of space, you use big reflective materials such as, in our case, aluminized mylar, and

you can actually push a spacecraft. And the great thing is you don't have to have that propellant with you. The sun just keeps pushing it. So we, during next year, will try to launch the first ever solar sail mission. It's also the first ever mission by any type of private space interest group. So we begin with the biggest and most ambitious. What's next? Mars Microphone.

This was the first privately funded instrument to ever fly on board a NASA spacecraft, NASA planetary spacecraft. The Mars Microphone flew first on board the Mars Polar Lander, a NASA spacecraft that unfortunately crashed into Mars and did not succeed, so we did not get results from it. But it is now slated to fly on the European Net Lander mission that will launch in 2007 going to Mars, and actually much better microphones. What this is is just what it sounds like. It's microphones that are designed to pick up the first ever sound that we'll hear from the surface of Mars. But we will be able to hear both natural sounds, dust blowing around wind, also instrumental sounds. So it's really adding another sense to the one that people usually relate to, which is eyesight and the camera

pictures of planets. Now we've got another thing to really make people relate to the other planets by they will be able to hear them, in this case, on Netlander in stereo. Good job, Bruce. We're on track here, on schedule. Let's go to number three. Are we going to stick with the red planet? Yeah, let's stick with the red planet, polish it off first. We do have several things related to the red planet,

partially because there are so many missions from various countries going to Mars in the next few years. The next project is Red Rover Goes to Mars, which is an outgrowth of Red Rover, Red Rover, a Planetary Society project in partnership with a Lego company that allows classrooms and students to build Lego rovers with cameras on them and explore Mars-type terrain. Well, Red Rover Goes to Mars takes a huge leap and takes the theme of involving people in the public with driving rovers on Mars to actually involving the public with rovers that will literally drive on Mars, not just in classrooms. And that's, we're tied to the, we're an official part of the Mars Exploration Rover mission,

NASA mission, going to Mars, launching in the middle of 2003, getting there in early 2004. And this will allow all the public involvement in the missions in various ways. One is through what we're calling the Student Astronaut Program, which we actually have an active contest right now through the middle of next March for roughly high school-aged kids that can compete through an essay contest. And these are kids from all over the world compete to be in operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

helping out with some of the different science experiments during the mission, a very unique opportunity, particularly for an open international contest, really the first time that this type of thing will be done. We also produce space hardware, two DVDs, one that will fly on each of the spacecraft, carrying millions of names that NASA has collected of people who want their names to go to the surface of Mars. Those also have a lot of activities tied to them that the public, and particularly students,

will be able to participate in. One other aspect that has come up, we're also in partnership with the Lego Company, is the Name the Rovers contest. Kids K-12 can compete to actually name the two rovers, and they can learn more about that at the Name the Rovers website, nametherovers.org, or you can learn more about all these projects at planetary.org. Okay, Bruce, let's move on to number four in this whirlwind tour of Planetary Society projects. What is this Mars Outposts?

Well, this is one of our new projects we're very excited about. I won't go into a lot of detail because we're putting together a lot of the details, but Mars Outposts is an exploration strategy concept. It's a lot of words saying, how should we explore Mars, and particularly eventually with humans? What Mars Outpost does is it bridges the gap between robotic exploration of Mars and future human exploration of Mars.

Typically, there's a lot of friction between the two communities of human exploration and robotic. What this does is comes up with a strategy where you can systematically emplace things at a single location on Mars, an outpost. You can put your infrastructure, What this does is it comes up with a strategy where you can systematically emplace things at a single location on Mars, an outpost. You can put your infrastructure, your robots that explore, your building propellant from

the stuff around you, and keep building those up and get it so people in the public get to know these sites, and then eventually you can send humans there. Well, we're not only advocating that, but also we'll be doing some Earth analogs where we do Mars outposts on Earth and to try to build awareness for the project and get the public interested. Excellent. Well, I think we have time for one more before we take a break and let you catch your breath. Where would you like to go next? Well, let's move off Mars and to the study of near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets, particularly asteroids that come somewhere across the path of Earth's orbit during their orbit and therefore represent a danger to possible future impact into the Earth. Near-Earth objects is one of these

areas that I referred to where there really has been a gap in funding, a real lack of funding for discovering these objects. And in fact, it's partially through things like our advocacy in the Near Earth Objects program we do have that we are starting to see more funding in terms of finding these objects that might be out there, at least the larger ones. But where we're still quite unique is we're providing funding largely to amateurs, but also to some very renowned professionals to not only discover these objects but also follow up with them. Because even if you know an object is there, unless you keep tracking it, you don't know whether your name is on it and whether it's coming and going to hit Earth eventually.

So you have to have a lot of follow-up observations. And it's amazing with current technology how much amateurs can accomplish in this. But they often need little seed money grants to get them going and buy equipment, and that's what we run. Okay, Bruce, nice job. We are sticking very close to the mission profile here as we hear about virtually all of the Planetary Society projects in the space of, oh, about 15 minutes.

We are going to let you take a quick break here, rest up, fan yourself. We're going to take a minute off to hear a special message, and then we'll be back with more from Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society Director of Projects. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report.

The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. That's planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

We're back with Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. He is normally the presenter of our What's Up segment, but we're taking a little bit of extra time today with Bruce so that he can continue this whirlwind tour, as I've said too many times, of all of the Planetary Society's projects. We've covered Mars. We've talked about near-Earth objects. We've talked about the solar sail.

Bruce, what's next on your agenda? Extra solar planets. This is searching for planets around other stars and taking the planetary society out beyond this solar system of planets and out to the discovery of other planets. controlled telescope on Kitt Peak, where we are partnering with the Planetary Science Institute, and we'll do an optical search for planets, an automated search that will gather enormous amounts of data and basically look for stars to dim slightly when planets pass in front of them. As you can imagine, this is enormously challenging since you have to, these stars and planets are so far away, you're detecting very small dips in light, and you have to look over and and planets are so far away, you're detecting very small dips in light and you have to look over and over again to make sure you're seeing them and to see what the period of them is and determine such.

So this is a new, another sort of cutting edge technology that we're supporting in another what we consider underfunded area of significant importance. Certainly one of the most exciting areas in astronomy today. Let's move on to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, where the Planetary Society is involved in at least four ways. That is true. And in fact, in some ways, you can count extrasolar planets searching as the same thing. The implications of that help tell you how likely it might be to find habitable worlds elsewhere. The first one let me talk about is one of probably our best-known SETI project that we support.

We're the founding sponsor and continue to be the primary sponsor of SETI at Home. Many of our listeners may recognize this since there have been 4 million users of SETI at Home. It is the largest computing experiment in the world, gathering the largest amount of computing time. And what it does is it takes data collected at the Arecibo Radio Observatory, where you get radio signals from different places, often space, and you need to process those to try to figure out if there's a signal in there which is not just natural random noise. You're looking for some pattern that would be indicative of civilization trying to communicate

with us. Well, it takes an enormous amount of computing power. So the very clever solution that was determined by the group leading this at UC Berkeley was to actually use people's screensavers on their PCs and Macs at home and use that computing power that when people aren't using their computer but their screensaver is going, it actually crunches these numbers. And so the screensaver communicates with a central database, gets some data, chews on it, spits the results back, and so on and so on.

The popularity has been unbelievable. Again, 4 million users over the last three or four years, and the vast majority of those very active and doing this constantly. So it's been cutting edge not only in SETI, but also in computing and distributed computing. And even though we're a little bit behind in our schedule now, I do want to mention a little promo for next week. Dave Anderson of SETI at Home will be our featured guest on Planetary Radio next Monday, that is December 9. Let's go on. What other kinds of SETI projects are underway? We've also been supporting radio SETI for a long time, in fact, going back 20 years.

We're also supporting now in the last few years what is also cutting-edge SETI, which is doing optical SETI. The concept before, because technology is available, was to search the radio wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum for possible signals. Well, especially now we realize that with laser technology where it is on Earth, that now or in the very near future you could more efficiently send signals using very high-powered lasers

where basically you'd see little pulses of light. And so what optical SETI does is looks for patterns from other stars that would be patterns in the optical signal that would be indicative of some type of intelligent broadcast. And we've been supporting both targeted optical SETI where certain, you look at certain sites as much as you can and both of those have been out of UC Berkeley and out of Harvard University. And both of those piggyback off of other studies.

So people studying other things send some of their light over to the SETI people, and they do their analysis. What we are now finding and what will come up during the next few months is the first dedicated optical telescope for studying SETI, and that is actually the largest optical telescope east of the Rockies, and it will be based in Harvard, Massachusetts. It's almost completed. And so that's something we're very excited about and very proud that, once again,

we're pushing the cutting edge, the frontiers of these things, to look in areas that no one ever has, so we really don't know what's there. Fascinating. And so, of course, this is going on this possibility that somebody out there is pointing a laser our way and using it to communicate. Did we make it? We made it. We made it.

I'll be darned. We have time to spare. Yes, that's right, with about a minute to spare. Nice work. Listen, that gives us enough time, I think, to do a little abbreviated version of what's up. Always interested. Yeah, let's talk about what's easy to look at in the night sky during this coming week. And you mentioned four of the planets are quite visible at different times of night.

So starting from early in the night, you can see Saturn rises right basically as the sun is setting. Saturn rises in the east. So if you look, especially it will be easier to see after an hour or so after sunset, look in the east, and the bright thing that looks like the brightest star in the east is actually Saturn. A little bit later on, around 10 or 11, Jupiter will rise in the east. Jupiter is much brighter than Saturn, actually much brighter than any star in the sky, so the very bright looking object off in the east at 11 p.m. or midnight will be Jupiter. off in the east at 11 p.m. or midnight will be Jupiter.

And then if you're up really early in the morning, you can check out Venus and Mars low on the horizon in the east, Venus extremely bright, the brightest planet in the sky, and then Mars looking slightly reddish to the upper right of where you see Venus. So that's what's going on in the sky. I've also got a little, a quick look back in space history. Great. Well, you can leave us with this. All right. Well, here's something for you to ponder. December 7th marks not only an anniversary of Pearl Harbor. A date that will live in infamy. Exactly. And I suppose you can, in some ways, look at it this way, too. But no, 30 years ago,

December 7th, was the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft carrying humans to the moon. Apollo 17 launched on December 7th, 1972, the last Apollo mission to the moon, the last time humans have visited the moon in person. A glorious and yet, yeah, kind of a sad anniversary. It's a mixed thing. That's why I say it's sad. It's been so long since we've been back to planetary body, but obviously glorious in the incredible success that they had,

particularly by the time they were getting to that last mission, the science take was incredibly valuable for understanding the moon and where it came from. No question. Let's see what we can do to get back up there and beyond. Bruce, thanks very much for joining us for this sort of extended participation in Planetary Radio. But you'll be back next week with your regular What's Up feature, won't you? Yes, I will. Thanks again very much, and we'll talk to you then.

All right. Take care. That was Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Planetary Radio will continue right after this. I'm Emily, back with more random space facts about water on Mars. Liquid water cannot survive on the surface of Mars today. Mars' atmosphere is so thin that any liquid water exposed at the surface would rapidly boil away. But everywhere you look on Mars, you can find evidence that liquid water once flowed across the surface. Huge canyons and channels gouged into the Martian crust speak of immense ancient floods in which volumes of liquid water catastrophically erupted onto the surface. At smaller scales,

many mountains and volcanoes on Mars show branching networks of valleys that look something like river valleys on Earth. And some scientists believe that the very flat northern lowlands of Mars contain a huge north polar ocean. Where did all that water go? And how could the liquid water have lasted long enough on the surface of Mars to carve channels, riverbeds, and shoreline terraces? These are some of the biggest mysteries about Mars, mysteries that future missions like NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and the European Space Agency's Mars Express are designed to answer. Join me for more random space facts in next week's

show. Here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Lily, can you help me move this box over to the couch? You pull and I'll push. Children learn to cooperate. Can you help me move this box over to the couch? You pull and I'll push. Children learn to cooperate.

They learn almost as early as they learn to compete. And through cooperation, we humans have managed to build everything from nations to spaceships. You take that end, Lily, and I'll take this end, and then we can carry it together over into the dining room. Machines do not cooperate in the human sense. At least they haven't until very recently. Yet cooperation among machines, call them intelligent agents, offers many of the same advantages it brought us. brought us. A growing number of scientists and engineers are designing and programming robot teams that work together on tasks even R2-D2 couldn't accomplish alone. These autonomous but linked robots may be essential to the future of space exploration, as well as many earthbound endeavors. Dr. George Becky founded the Robotics Laboratories at USC, which is a leader in robotics research.

He also edits the international journal Autonomous Robots. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet succeeded in giving a pair of robots a pile of bricks and a box of mortar and having them build a wall. But progress continues at a rapid pace. As evidence, consider the annual robotic equivalent of the World Cup, appropriately titled RoboCup. It consists of groups of robots, currently five on a team, that actually play soccer against each other. As you can imagine, cooperation is the essence. Not only do these guys have to be able to know where other members of their team are, they have to be able to separate their team from those of the opposition, find the ball, and move it in the direction of the opposite goal. What's happening here is far more impressive than

a bunch of axe-wielding yet brainless machines hacking each other to pieces on a cable channel. BattleBots are no more than radio-controlled extensions of their human builders. They don't think for themselves. Good for ratings, maybe, but not nearly as useful when the humans are a hundred million miles away and there's a Mars base to be built. Cut to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, where an experimental robot team is being taught to do just that.

On a simulated Mars surface at JPL, the robotic work crew is busy assembling a simulated solar power station. The two small, somewhat spindly-looking machines move about on four wheels, guided by stereoscopic cameras. They carefully approach opposite ends of an eight-foot beam. Each lowers a grappler, which closes over the heavy piece of metal. Then, in a robotic pas de deux, they lift the beam and carry it more than 150 feet. Their parents look on proudly. Paul Schenker supervises the mechanical and robots technologies group at JPL. There are some basic advances we're after here, first of kind in robotics, and they include the idea of having robots that not just cooperate,

that is, if you would take the example of saying have two robots travel in the same direction over open ground, but work as tightly coupled, coordinated teammates. For instance, if you share a payload, as you see these two robots linked by a beam, like two people who are tied together by something heavy they're carrying, they have to coordinate their footsteps. They have to share their visual understanding of the environment they're going to be walking over. They have to work together to avoid obstacles so that one doesn't trip and fall. The idea, as applies to space exploration, is that these robots would be directed towards Mars, a future Mars robotic outpost.

Though certainly the concepts we're talking about, multiple robot cooperation, tight coordination, has more general technical application to be it flying or surface-based robots. Surface-based as in here on Earth, where George Becky has firsthand knowledge of military interest in cooperating robots. This has to do with using robots for reconnaissance. We've done it, for example, by cooperating robot helicopters and then wheeled ground vehicles. And they communicate with each other, send each other pictures,

determine where there might be danger, send other vehicles there, and so on. Right now, JPL's Paul Schenker is happy just looking forward to teams of intelligent, capable workers who are not much bothered by minor nuisances like frigid cold, ionizing radiation, and hard vacuum. Here we have an evolution of sensory intelligence, of control intelligence, and cooperation among assets. This is a major step in that direction. and cooperation among assets. This is a major step in that direction. It's the beginnings of a computing architecture,

a network robotic capability, that will lead us towards the definition and development of that kind of future planetary system. You can learn much more about robots that are exploring Mars and the rest of our solar system at the Planetary Society website, planetary.org. While you're there, check out our comprehensive collection of space-related links, including one for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Don't try to blame me. I didn't ask you to turn on the thermal heater.

I merely commented that it was freezing in the princess's chamber. But it's supposed to be freezing. How are we going to dry out all her clothes? I really don't know. Oh, switch off. That's all the time we have for Planetary Radio this week. Please join us again next Monday at 5.30 p.m. Pacific Time here on KUCI. You can also hear this and all of our other shows anytime you like at planetary.org. And let us know what you think.

Write to planetaryradio at planetary.org. And let us know what you think. Write to planetaryradio at planetary.org. Thanks for listening. Have a great week, everyone. Planetary Radio is a production of the Planetary Society, which is solely responsible for its content. Our producer is Matt Kaplan. Other contributors include Charlene Anderson, Monica Lopez, and Jennifer Vaughn.

The executive producer is Dr. Louis Friedman. This edition of Planetary Radio is program number 0202 and is copyrighted by the Planetary Society. All rights are reserved.