Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - JunoCam, The People’s Jupiter Camera

Episode Date: June 14, 2016

The Juno spacecraft will enter orbit at Jupiter on July 4th. It carries a camera that will send back spectacular images from just above the swirling clouds of that mighty planet. Planetary scientist Candy Hansen will tell us how we can help decide what it will view.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Citizen's Camera goes to Jupiter, 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. Candy Hansen's biggest job on the Juno mission is the JunoCam camera that will take pictures of what we the people think it should. She'll tell us what to expect. Bill Nye has the week off. Bruce Betts is sounding kind of sterile on this week's What's Up segment. Stay tuned if you want to know what I mean. Senior editor Emily Laktwala has written a comprehensive guide to JunoCam. It's her June 9th blog post at planetary.org.

to JunoCam. It's her June 9th blog post at planetary.org. I'd ask her about it, but we've got candy. So let's talk about your even more recent post, these two videos that you did while you were on the road. Tell us about them. Well, these are two videos of public talks that I've given, or at least talks to large audiences. And it's kind of interesting. They're sort of two endpoints of the kind of talks I give. One of them was to my 20th college reunion at Amherst College, which, of course, involved reunions of many, many other classes and also the children of people coming back for reunions. So I made that talk be very general in its approach and hopefully appeal to a wide audience. And then the other talk was to an audience of professionals at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. And these are both posted, of course, at planetary.org. You can get to them from Emily's blog or from our show page this week at planetary.org

slash radio. What did the two talks have in common, even though they had different audiences? Well, I think there's a couple of things that unite the talks. One is that there are just so many spacecraft returning so many gorgeous images from all over the solar system. And as a result, both talks featured lots of pictures, many or even most of them processed by members of the public who used public image data to make beautiful photos of the places that we visited. Another one is that I try to tell stories as I give talks so that people understand where they are in the talks and to help them follow along. And so you'll find I gave two slightly different stories here. One of them is a story about journeying across the solar system from

places that are familiar to places that we've only recently explored. And the other one is about connections with people and understanding why people choose to do what they do with image processing and how the professional community can take advantage of choose to do what they do with image processing and how the professional community can take advantage of the amazing work that they do. Need I add? Lots and lots of beautiful images. Absolutely. Thanks, Emily. I have not yet watched both of them myself, only a few minutes of each, but I look forward to doing that soon, and I recommend it to everybody else.

I hope you enjoy them. That's Emily Lakdawalla. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, out there doing a little planetary evangelism on this trip we just heard about. She's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

As I mentioned, Candy Hanson, the leader of JunoCam, about to arrive at that big, beautiful planet, is up next. A very big day in solar system exploration is almost here. Juno will go into orbit around Jupiter on July 4th. The solar-powered spacecraft has just one camera, but it's a very special one, not because of its technology, but because of who it will be working for. Candace Hansen is the co-investigator on the Juno mission who is in charge of JunoCam. Candace has been exploring

our solar neighborhood for a long time. She's studying those wonderful water vapor plumes on Saturn's moon Enceladus, and is Deputy Principal Investigator for the High-Rise Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, our SPICAM, above the red planet. She has received the Exceptional Scientific Achievement, Service, and Leadership Medals from NASA. Candy retired from JPL in 2010, but doesn't seem any less busy as she continues her career at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. That's where she was when we talked a few days ago. Candy, welcome to Planetary Radio, a long overdue appearance. Thank you very much for joining us to talk about JunoCam.

Thank you for inviting me. Tell us about this little camera. This is a wonderful little camera that's flying on the Juno mission. We have in mind some wonderful pictures of the pole of Jupiter. The Juno orbit around Jupiter is quite unique compared to past missions that have either gone into orbit or flown by, because those were all in Jupiter's equatorial plane. The spacecraft will be in a polar orbit, which means that we will be looking down on the North Pole and then swooping through our closest approach point, which we call Para

Jove, and then looking up at the South Pole with a perspective that we've never had before. looking up at the South Pole with a perspective that we've never had before. So we expect to get really fabulous images of the poles. And then during the two hours between the North Pole and the South Pole, we pass very close to Jupiter, within about 3,000 kilometers of the cloud tops. Wow. So we will get unprecedented close-ups of those clouds. So these close-ups, are you hoping to see better images than we got back from, let's say, Galileo and Voyager, since they're the other two visitors? Yeah, we expect to see much higher detail in the pictures. They will be color. I guess my nightmare scenario would be that it looks like a fog bank.

I think we know just from previous conversations about JunoCam, mostly with my colleague, Emily Lochte-Wallop, this camera is still billed as not essential to the mission, except that it's going to get so much interest from the public. And really, it's for the public, it's because of the public that it exists, right? Yes, that's correct. To achieve the science goals of the Juno mission, we did not strictly need a visible camera. That's not to say that we won't do great science with it, but if you write down all of the Level 1 science objectives,

it doesn't make its way into the list. We included the camera because we really wanted to get pictures that are accessible to the public, that will be exciting to the public. And once we had made that decision, we said, well, why don't we involve the public in a very meaningful way? In other words, let's enable public participation in the operation of this instrument. It's four components. We have amateur astronomers already helping us by sending us their pictures that they're taking of Jupiter right now. Jupiter's a very dynamic planet. There's lots and lots of motion in the clouds and the belts and the zones.

So you can't just have a static map and know what you're going to point at. You really need up-to-date data. So we have a website. It's missionjuno.swri.edu. And that's Southwest Research Institute, right? Yeah, that's correct. We invite amateur astronomers to go to that website, and on the planning page for JunoCam, we have a portal for the amateurs to upload their images taken with their telescopes. We then assemble those images, and this is part two of our public participation,

into a cylindrical map, and we have that on our discussion page. And we update that every two weeks with new pictures from our amateur astronomer community. weeks with new pictures from our amateur astronomer community. On that page, we then invite the public to identify what we call points of interest. So a storm feature, maybe some eddies where the belts and the zones interact, the great red spot, of course. And those become threads, if you will, a discussion thread where you can go in and comment on that choice of a point of interest. So we're building a discussion. This would be what we would be doing with our own science team, except now we're including the whole world in those discussions. Those two pages on the website are live. The third page is for voting.

This will not go live until November, but what we'll be asking the public to do is to look at these points of interest. We will say which ones will be available on any given orbit. We'll ask the public to help us decide which ones to take pictures of, of the points of interest, because we have limited resources, we have thermal constraints. So we can't just take a bunch of pictures as we fly through that two-hour period of time from the North Pole to the South Pole. So we might be able to get a half a dozen. Which half a dozen should we take? And so we're inviting the public to vote based on the commentary of all of the points of interest on which ones we should actually take pictures of. And then the final step is that we will post all of those images on the JunoCam

part of the Mission Juno website. And we will invite the public to go to that page, download the raw data, process it in whatever way they choose, and then upload their products, their creations, for all of us to admire. And at that point, we're hoping for things. You know, sometimes simply cropping a picture around a particular feature is very dynamic. We've got different color stretches. That's pretty often the kinds of contributions people make, doing montages, collages, that kind of thing.

So we're really open to whatever kinds of creative expression people choose to share with us. And we're really looking forward to, you know, to seeing what people do with this data. This kind of involvement that you're hoping to get from the public, and actually are already getting, it's unprecedented, isn't it? I mean, certainly it's unprecedented at Jupiter, but I'm thinking maybe anywhere in the solar system. It's very extensive in terms of outreach. There have been sort of smaller efforts.

One of the Earth-based satellites had a camera that students helped pick targets for, but this is the most extensive where we have just said, this is what we do, we're inviting you to be a part of it. This camera can do really good work too. Emily's June 9th blog post, which is a really wonderful, comprehensive exploration of your plans for JunoCam, she included an image of Earth that was taken by JunoCam as the spacecraft swung by in 2013. And it's, I gotta say, it's gorgeous. 2013. And it's, I gotta say, it's gorgeous. Yes, and on that Earth flyby, which we did for Gravity Assist, we did make all of those images available to the public, and we invited anyone

and everyone to pick them up and process them. We did not, at that point in time, have a good method for people to post their own efforts. But we did collect some, mostly from unmannedspaceflight.com, actually. We got pretty much the things I just listed. There was a very nice crop of the Southern Hemisphere, black and white, very dramatic that someone did. There was a nice montage of the Earth and the Moon and a picture of the spacecraft, a number of different sort of color renditions. The Moon picture, that was kind of funny. When the data was taken, it was the middle of the night, and we didn't expect to have it played back very quickly from the spacecraft, so I went to bed. The next morning I got up and not

only had the data been acquired, it had been processed. A color reconstruction had been done. This was by people in Europe who were up when I was sleeping, right? And they had labeled the different features that were visible in the image. I was like, oh, this is great. I'm just going to put my feet up for the whole entire mission. As you know, we... The work is done. Yeah. I wouldn't quite say that. Candy Hansen, in charge of JunoCam, which will soon arrive at Jupiter.

She'll tell us more in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Radio. our solar system, and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer,

the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer and what all the other candidates think at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Get ready for the people's camera to reach Jupiter and hang around there for a while. Candy Hanson leads the JunoCam effort as part of the Juno mission team. She's a co-investigator. I had more questions for her about what JunoCam may show us as it skims the clouds circling that huge world.

Will there be opportunities to sort of look obliquely, sort of sideways through Jupiter's atmosphere? The spacecraft itself is in a highly elliptical orbit, as you said, 14 days. Most of the time, Jupiter will appear quite small in our field of view. We're limited in resources for the camera, limited in mass, volume, power, and budget. So we had to be very choosy when we were deciding on the requirements and the design for the camera. So it has a 58-degree field of view. That is designed to get the best polar images possible so that we can see when the spacecraft is over the pole, we can look down and see limb to limb. Everything was geared around making those the

best possible images. That camera design then means that when you're further away from Jupiter, you don't have a very large object in your field of view. And so when we're out at Apogeo, Jupiter is only going to be about 25 pixels big, so not competitive with even a small telescope on the Earth, let alone what our amateurs have. So we really are focused on the two-hour passage of the spacecraft from the North Pole to the South Pole through Perijove. That is our best data. Now, having said all that, we are going to collect images around at least one orbit, maybe two, and put that together into a movie. And so you'll see Jupiter as a tiny little ball, and then it'll get larger and larger, and it'll be literally in our face,

and then it'll recede again. So I think that will be quite a dramatic movie. Absolutely. And you'll have an approach movie as well, I've read? Yes, we're starting to collect the data for that next week. Wow. And by the way, I love those terms, Apojov and Perijov. It really says we are at a different world.

Yes. How about the moons and the rings of that big planet? We will take a few images of the moons, but because Juno is on a polar elliptical orbit, we are never very close to any of the Galilean moons. So they don't get to be very big in our field of view. We do get close to the ring moons, but they're so tiny that they are only still going to be little bright points in the sky. So this mission is not really set up to do Galilean satellite science. Of course, we have the new plans for the Europa mission that have been approved, and then the Europeans have their mission that's called JUICE that will study Ganymede in detail.

Both of those missions have flybys of the other moons. Juno is really focused on understanding Jupiter itself. And there's nothing wrong with that. As you said, it is a very dynamic place and very, very beautiful. But it's a nasty place, the neighborhood of Jupiter. very, very beautiful. But it's a nasty place, the neighborhood of Jupiter. How long do you hope JunoCam will be able to stand up to the intense radiation that Juno will be flying through? That's a good question. We hope that we make it all the way to the end of the mission, but we rather expect that we will start to see gradual damage and degradation to the image as time goes on. So

let's call it the first four months, maybe six months, we should be fine. The orbit itself just makes a very quick pass through the worst radiation. But as time goes on, the orbit tilts, radiation. But as time goes on, the orbit tilts, if you will, and that brings the spacecraft into the more toxic doses. And then we'll just have to see. I imagine you're going to be somewhere with a good view, maybe JPL, during orbital insertion on the 4th of July? Yes, I will be at JPL. I will be a nervous wreck. Because I always am on these, you know, sort of critical events.

Well, you won't be alone. And we need to remind people as often as we can, as Emily does in her June 9th blog post, there won't be images for a while. We have to turn off the camera five days away from Jupiter orbit insertion. There won't be any close-up images taken around the 4th of July. Our next opportunity, actually our first opportunity, is going to be when we fly through Perijove 1. That flyby, or that passage, I guess I should say, because we'll be in orbit, is going to be very exciting because we will not be doing any maneuvers.

We will be turning on all of the science instruments, and we will get those first high-resolution pictures of the poles. And so that is on August 27th. The data gets recorded on the spacecraft, and then it'll be played back over the next number of days. Very exciting. We just have to be patient. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. You've been and you are part of so many planetary science missions

and instrument teams. This has got to be a different sort of experience with this focus on public involvement. Yes, it is. It's exciting and a little nerve-wracking all at the same time because so many aspects of the experiment are not under my control. You know, if no one processes any images, that'll be a problem. Oh, I don't think you need to worry about that. But, you know, I can't lay out a schedule or set deadlines or, you know, call someone up and say, how come you haven't delivered this yet?

So, yeah, it's quite different to just put it out there and trust that lots of good things will happen. Candy, can you guess who our most frequent guest has been on Planetary Radio? I have no idea. Well, I was hoping you wouldn't know. It's your friend and colleague, Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Cassini mission, who comes on about three times, three, four times a year to give us an update on what's going on at Saturn, another planet, and especially one of its moons that you care a lot about. I discovered that you and she both have bachelor's degrees from California State University, Fullerton.

Did you know each other back then? We did. Wow. We did. The two of us participated in the physics club, which in those days, we had a lot of fun. We went water skiing and things like that. Yeah, we hung out a lot. I mean, there were only seven women in the whole physics department. So the seven of us really stuck together. She was actually the person who got me the interview at JPL that ended in me getting a job working on Voyager. She and I both worked on Voyager. She represented the infrared instrument, and I represented the cameras. And then we went on to, you know, spend many, many years working together on Cassini. So I love that you were titans long before the missions that got us up close to that moon

of Saturn. Isn't that funny? Women in this field were a lot rarer when you and Linda got into it. Things have changed a lot, haven't they? It's a huge change. I love the fact that now when I walk into a room, I'm not the only woman in the room. Candy, I guess that's it. We will just be, well, I know where I will be at about, I think it's about 7.30 p.m. Pacific time on July 4th. It will be following along. In fact, I might even be

at JPL with Emily and the rest of you as we learn that Juno and JunoCam have gone into orbit around that beautiful, mighty planet. Best of luck and congratulations on this already. Thank you. Planetary scientist Candice Candy Hansen, leader of the JunoCam team, arriving at our solar system's biggest world in a handful of days. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The Planetary Society's Director of Science and Technology is here, Dr. Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Hi, Matt. Good to see you in person. I know. It's so rare nowadays. And it means that, remember I said that I had something for you from JPL last week? Ooh, ooh, ooh. Yeah, you did.

Yeah. Well, I was in a clean room looking at the descent radar for the 2020 Rover. I had to put on the clean room stuff, not the full bunny suit, but clothes. So I asked him if I could have a spare mask for you. So there it is. Cool. I love protective masks for my face. Shall I just put that on while we record? Yeah, so put it over your mouth, not your eyes.

Oh, sorry. My bad. Can you tell the difference? Do I sound like my germs are not going into the radio? You sound just like you're a JPL. Hi, I'm a JPL in a clean room. Or not. He really does have the mask on, just in case you're wondering.

What's up, Bruce? I find them very soothing. And a little distracting. So we've got Mars and Saturn over in the evening east, hanging out with Antares, the reddish star of Scorpius. We've got the moon near them on the 17th and for a day before and after that. And then we've got Jupiter high in the south. This is really distracting. It really is.

Could you take that off, please? Thank you. All right. So anyway, Jupiter is over in the south of the early evening. It takes so little to – so much to ruffle you usually. I had no idea that a surgical mask was the one thing I needed. In the pre-dawn, you can check out Mercury, although it's awfully low down, low in the east before sunrise. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2009 that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

was launched, along with the LCROSS spacecraft. And LRO is still going, kicking around the moon. We move on to random space. Sealed with a kiss. The galactic center, as you know, is about 26,000, 27,000 light years away from us. It is located in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Ophiuchus. Is that how you pronounce it? I've always wondered. That is how I pronounce it.

Anyway, that's in those constellations. That's also why the Milky Way appears the brightest That is how I pronounce it. Anyway, that's in those constellations. That's also why the Milky Way appears the brightest in dark skies where you can see the Milky Way easily. And there's strong evidence consistent with the existence of a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah, we're learning more about that. I hear there's a chance that it might be imaged sometime soon, which is, I don't know, it's a black hole. How do you image a black hole? You just have to use negative film.

Oh, it becomes a white hole. Exactly. Yeah, that's why I went into planetary science. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, at its closest approach, which we are just past, in 2016, how big was the disk of Mars in the sky as seen from Earth measured in arc seconds? How did we do, Matt? Because this smacked of needing math, or at least a term that most people don't generally deal with in their normal lives, arc seconds, it's slightly, but only slightly, depressed the number of entries this week. And for all of you who think that we never have repeat winners,

this is the second one in a row. We had one last week. Carl Anderson won about a year and a half ago. Is he close enough with 18.4 arc seconds of diameter? Sure. I had 18.6, but what's a couple tenths of an arcseconds among friends? Congratulations then, Carl. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, you are going to get one of those copies of Offworld Trading Company, the new and beautiful, engaging, and mostly

scientifically accurate economic strategy game set on Mars. And because you're our grand winner, you're going to get a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account as well. The International Network of Telescopes, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, pointed toward Sagittarius. Look for that black or white hole. I don't know. Maybe it's both. Just adjust what you're looking through. It'll be fine.

We got two other winners of the game. The first, Eric O'Day in Medford, Massachusetts, somebody we hear from quite a bit. But this time he's kind of stealing your act. He sent us a random space fact. You ready? That 18.6 arc seconds that you came up with, he is the same number. He says it's about the same apparent size as a half dollar on the sidewalk viewed from the top of the Empire State Building. Not bad.

Not bad at all. Although we tend to see clearer when we're looking at money. Yeah, you might say he's on the money. He's on the money. A man doing an Al Jolson impression with a surgical or clean room mask hanging over one ear. I love this new look. You just said take it off my face. I'm modeling it as an earring.

Can you get me another one? I'd rather not. I have another one for you. This is our third winner of Off World Trading Company this week. Josh Wolney of Cleveland, Ohio. He also said basically 18.6 arc seconds. Get this. If Bruce has an average sized head, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to imagine that. Well, if I had an average sized head, this mask would look ridiculous hanging off my hair. Anyway, apparently an average-sized head is 6.84 inches.

It says that you would have to be 1.13 miles away for your head to appear about 18.6 arc seconds across. Cool. Let's try it. I'm ready. Well, the truth is you'd have to go considerably farther away. But I'd look good sporting my mask earring. So arc second, by the way, 360 degrees is what the sky is broken into. If you could look all the way around, each degree is broken into 60 arc minutes. Each arc minute is broken into 60 arc seconds. arc minutes. Each arc minute is broken into 60 arc seconds. Yes, we transported all of our worst units together so we could have terrible math all the time. I got one more. You got to

understand, it's not like I want to use Dave Fairchild's poem every week. It's just that they're usually so good, as is this one. When Mars makes its closest appearance and Martians are bound to arrive, we measure the disk without danger or risk in arc seconds 18.5. Whatever rhymes. We're ready to go on. Shifting gears, what was the first human spaceflight of the Chinese space program? First human spaceflight. What was it called?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. The English version. You have it called? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. The English version. You have this time until the 21st. That'd be Tuesday, June 21st at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And once again, the winner will get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, Planetary Society, a genuine Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and an itelescope.net account, that 200-point account. And you were showing me the actual Chinese characters. There they are. Yeah, don't say anything.

By the way, you didn't roll your R's on rubber asteroid because I distracted you. You're right. That was great. All right, everybody, go out there, look at the night sky, and think about Matt's eyes and how deep and strange it is to look into them. Oh, God, and I thought it was getting strange before. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Put the mask back on. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its imaginative members. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies!