Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Jut Wynne in the Caves of the Atacama

Episode Date: August 18, 2008

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On the phone from the caves of Mars, 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. And yes, we will be on the satellite phone with a cave explorer, though he's not quite on Mars. Not yet, anyway. Jut Wynn of the U.S. Geological Survey and Northern Arizona University will join us from the ultra-arid Atacama Desert in Chile, where he is learning to find caves from the air, hoping someday to do the same on the red planet. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, puts us in an even more exotic locale next to a lake on Saturn's moon Titan.

We'll also learn the ABEs of asteroids with Emily Lakdawalla, and Bruce Batts will help point out what's up in the night sky and help me give away another space trivia contest prize. Do you know that it has been just over two years since the Stardust at Home project opened up its virtual microscope? Tens of thousands of you have been part of the hunt for tiny bits of interstellar dust trapped by the Stardust spacecraft. It has been a long, hard search, but now there's exciting news and an update at planetary.org. You may also want to take a look at Emily's blog, where you'll find a Phoenix-Mars lander update and some Cassini

images of Saturn's moon Enceladus that will make you feel like it is just beyond your fingertips. It just happens that Bill Nye is also excited about what we've found on another of Saturn's moons. Bill is a guest star on an upcoming episode of the television series Stargate Atlantis, along with Planetary Society President Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was shooting on location in the northwestern United States, but he didn't want to miss the chance to share some thoughts about Titan. Please excuse the marginal quality of the Skype connection, which was the best we could achieve from up there. I'll be right back with Jut Win in the Chilean

desert. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of Planetary Society. The last couple of weeks, it's been announced that there are lakes on Saturn's moon Titan. Now, if you're a science fiction buff, you might think, well, that's not so remarkable. What's the big deal? Lakes. Lakes. You know, there's rain and it flows downhill and there's erosion and stuff like that. Oh yeah, but there's a difference. These lakes are made of methane, natural gas, and ethane. And the reason you can do it with methane and ethane on this distant, distant moon of Saturn is that it's so cold. It's minus 300 Fahrenheit, minus 180 Celsius. And so there you get the same features of the hydrologic cycle that we have here on Earth.

It rains. That's precipitation. It flows down into a lake. That's collection. It evaporates back into the sky, evaporation, and then it condenses to form clouds. Condensation, condensation, precipitation, collection, and evaporation. It's a hydrologic cycle at minus 180 Celsius. It's astonishing. This really is the stuff of science fiction. Do you think that there are some sort of titanium microbes that have a whole life cycle associated with methane and ethane? And then it goes fantastically slowly because it's so cold? Who's to stop it?

So, my friends, this is another thing where we send these robotic instruments to far-flung places in our solar system and make discoveries that just change our lives. To find lakes on another world with rain, a hydrological cycle on another world, could change the way we view our hydrologic cycle, our ecology, our environment here on our world. It's remarkable. Space exploration is so exciting. And we're doing it with extensions of ourselves, with these robotic explorers, my friends, who knows what we'll find on the distant world Titan. Well, I got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. I first met Jay Judson Wynn almost a year ago when he joined Chris McKay and a lot of other scientists in California's Mojave Desert.

Jud, as he likes to be called, is a speleologist or cave researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey's Southwest Biological Science Center and Northern Arizona University. He told me how he and colleagues were learning to detect caves via remote infrared sensing. When he called me via satellite phone a couple of weeks ago, he was once again probing desert caves, but this time in the driest spot on Earth. The project is funded by NASA's Astrobiology Institute and managed by the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI

Institute. Jet, that Iridium satellite phone is working great at the moment, but we want to warn people that these things tend to come and go. So let's start talking about what the heck you're doing down there, crawling through little caves and big caves in the deserts of Chile. Could you repeat that, Matt? I just, just broke up just a little bit. Well, there you go. That satellite phones for you. Now, just tell us, what are you doing? What is the goal of this team that is with you exploring caves in Chile?

Well, currently we have an eight-person team down here in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. And what we are doing is we are mapping caves, we are exploring caves, and most importantly what we are doing is we are placing temperature and barometric pressure sensors within each cave. Now the reason why this is very important for looking for caves on Earth, determining how to find caves on Earth, and then applying these techniques to looking for caves on Mars is that we're able to model from the data that we collect within these caves how these caves behave thermally. And what we'll be able to do with those data, in addition to the measurements that we collect by mapping the caves,

is we will be then able to model how these caves behave thermally and then use those data to predict the best times for conducting overflights to find these caves using thermal imaging. Why is it going to be possibly so useful for us to know how to find caves from the air, perhaps when we're above Mars? Well, unfortunately, they're not going to send me to explore a cave on Mars this year. Yeah, you and me both. So, exactly. So what we have to do is we have to figure out how best to detect these caves using a remotely sensed platform,

because currently that's the only thing we have available to us. So by studying caves here on Earth, by actually physically being able to go into the caves and be able to both study the structure, the geology, and the thermal behavior of these structures and then be able to model when the most appropriate times would be to detect these caves on Earth. We can then take the data that we have collected here in the Atacama Desert, and we will also be collecting data in the Mojave as well. We will then be able to take these data and tweak it to Martian conditions, and then we can also model for Mars caves. So under what conditions would we expect to find caves on Mars?

That's how we would do that, by taking the data that we have currently available to us right here on our planet. Why the Atacama? Well, the Atacama is a premier Mars analog site. We have high UV. It's a hyper-arid environment. For us looking for caves and wanting to best be able to characterize cave thermal behavior, because we're looking largely at the entrance when we're using a thermal imaging platform, it's good not to have a lot of obstructions in front of the entrance, i.e. vegetation. We don't have that problem here. I've probably counted maybe 50 bushes on the way from San Pedro to where we're currently at right now. There is very little vegetation here. It is a

hyper-arid environment, incredibly stark vistas, and my gosh, everyone who has walked here has walked away saying, yes, I've has walked here has walked away saying, yes, I've now walked on Mars. You know, when I was out in the Mojave with one of those groups of teachers, there was a guy with us who was from the Atacama, and as he walked around the Mojave Desert, he said, oh, yeah, the Atacama makes this look like the tropics. That was probably my buddy Armando, and yes, he is absolutely correct.

By comparison, yes, the yes, he is absolutely correct. By comparison, yes, the Mojave is the tropics. These sensors that you are leaving in these caves, how are they getting their data back to you and to other researchers? Well, we have to come back here next year, this time, to pull the data off of the sensors. Wow. They are programmed to log data for, at hourly intervals, these Hobo Pro data loggers will then enable us to, once we come back in a year, pull the data off them. We will maintain them by, you know, making sure everything's working correctly, exchange the batteries, put fresh batteries in them, and relaunch them for another year. And then we'll come back in in them, and relaunch them for another year.

And then we'll come back in year three, and using the data that we have collected from year one, we will begin modeling when to conduct the overflights for these caves. Now, before we go any further, I want to make sure that we direct people toward your blog, which you are still, as we speak, doing entries in. Not just the great stories that you tell there, but these amazing photos of you and other people in these caves, squeezing through tight places, as you spelunkers are wont to do, but also apparently entering caves that had not been known before you guys discovered them. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they weren't known before we went into them. The local knowledge here, I think a lot of these folks already know about these caves,

but I guess you could say that for the most part, several of these caves, it would be the first time perhaps a non-Chilean has entered them. I would add that most of these caves that we are studying show very little evidence of continuous human use, which is good for the cave. It's not receiving a lot of traffic, so it's not being impacted. There are a lot of really fragile, incredibly beautiful salt formations within these caves, which are also not being damaged by people going through willy-nilly and knocking things over. So the fact that we are some of the first to go through these, yes, it definitely adds

to the excitement of this project. And if you want to see them, like I said, you want to take a look at Judd's blog, and we will put the link to that blog up at, as usual, planetary.org slash radio. But just in this case, because maybe somebody will want to take a look while we're speaking, it's jjudsonwin, all one word, jjudsonwinne.blogspot.com. And we'll hear more from cave explorer and scientist Judd Winn via satellite telephone in one minute. 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,

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radio i'm matt caplan jut or jay judson win is a u.s geological survey speleologist or cave researcher who wants to learn how to find caves elsewhere in our solar system and especially on mars to do that he is exploring and putting sensors in caves on Earth that come as close as possible to the much more extreme conditions found on the red planet. I recently spoke with him via satellite telephone as he stood in Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest spot on our planet. Judd, I know that as you explore these, it's not just about detecting them, but a good part of the mission has some biological purpose in mind.

With Mars being an incredibly hostile surface environment, if there's going to be life on Mars or even evidence of past life on Mars, we're going to find it underground. By doing this type of work, we're better honing our skills at finding those holes on the red planet, and hopefully at some point in my lifetime, we'll be sending in robots to look for evidence of life within these features. Now, you and your colleagues have had some tantalizing evidence that there may in fact be large caves on Mars, or do you want to update us on that research? Oh, well, yes, we do have what are called pit craters. These are features associated with volcanism. And as a lot of the listeners will know that, you know, the vast majority of Mars

is indeed volcanic. So that should come as no surprise that we would find little holes within the Red Planet. And I use the term little holes loosely because these are large. These are hundreds of meters across, but they are vertical shafts, and we refer to these features as pit craters, and currently we have very little evidence to suggest that these features will go off in a lateral direction. So we don't think that they are caves per se, but then again, we cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these pit craters might have caves or caverns associated with them. You know, I love to put scientists on the spot and get them speculating about things which make them uncomfortable. But you've been a geologist and you've been in caves a long time.

What's your hunch? Do you think that when we actually get up there with the tools that can help us find them properly, that we might just be surprised by how many big horizontal holes there are under that surface? Well, you know, I think so. You know, it's kind of hard to sit here and armchair quarterback exactly what we're going to find on Mars, but I would suggest, given the geology of the red planet, it is certainly likely that there will be caves. That's why we're here. We're here because we firmly believe that there are going to be caves on Mars, and NASA firmly believes that there should be caves on Mars, which is why they supported this project.

So, yes, I think we will likely find caves. Will they be big enough to support life? I would say probably so. And if not, in the worst-case scenario, these will be excellent sites to evaluate for potential permanent or even temporary astronaut settlements, where they can then emplace a habitat within these caves where astronauts can live and conduct work.

Tell us about the status of the mission right now. Where are you and where are you going next? Well, I am currently looking at a beautifully striking salt landscape with absolutely no vegetation. We do have clouds today. with absolutely no vegetation. We do have clouds today. The volcano Lincoln-Cabour, which is the most pronounced geologic feature on the landscape,

which is on the front range of the Andes, is receiving some snow. It is just simply beautiful here today. And right now I am actually looking into the entrance of a cave as we speak, and the rest of my team should be en route here any minute now. They are off with a Chilean official to investigate another potential study site. So what we basically have going on for today is we are going to be deploying sensors in this large cave here that we had, and I'm standing before. And then we're also going to be deploying sensors in what we're calling cave anomalies. And just to provide a little bit more

depth to this work for the listeners, what we need to do is we need to be able to differentiate actual caves from things that might look like caves, both with visual imaging and with thermal imagery. So we're looking at very shallow caves, alcoves, any shadowed areas. We have in this type of geology, because it's halite, which is a salt and mud and unconsolidated soils, when it does rain, when there is water that moves through this country, what happens is it kind of carves and sculpts holes. A lot of them are piping features, or most of them are piping features. You have an end point where the water enters and a point where the water exits at the base.

And some of these are very small. So we're also looking at these as anomalies. So we can say 10 years down the road, however long it takes us to get a high-resolution thermal imaging platform orbiting Mars, we can then be able to say with some level of assurity, when we do find these features, that, okay, well, this one is probably a shallow cave, and thus it's not an optimal target for exploration. However, you know, this other feature here that we found, okay, this is fitting our MO. This is what we're looking for, and, you know, we're thinking that this is fitting our MO. This is what we're looking for, and we're thinking that this

is a better target. So by looking at both caves and these cave-like features, which we're calling anomalies, this will enable us to best differentiate between caves and non-cave features. Fascinating. Judd, we're almost out of time. You're having fun, aren't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is a blast. This is what I do, and I'm pleased and humbled to be here, and I tell you, the team that I have had the past four weeks, these folks have been top-notch. I could not have dreamed for a better team. Bright, very enthusiastic people, and this has made the work just a pleasure. Jot, thank you so much for taking a break from that and spending some time with us on the Iridium satellite phone.

Signal held up pretty well, I would say. And do be careful. Don't try and crawl in any spaces smaller than your head. And I hear that the major injury you've gotten so far was thanks to a door. Yes, yes, that's what happens when one is not mindful of what they are doing. And fortunately, I tend to be very mindful in caves. Yes, I close my pinky finger on our front door. So, yes, yes, accidents do happen,

but we're all hopeful that that will be the extent of our accidents this mission. Well, once again, thank you, and keep having a great time and watch those doors. I sure will, Matt. Thank you so much. Judd Wynn is down with a team exploring the caves of Chile in preparation for exploring the caves of Mars. He's down there for the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. He is also with the United States Geological Survey, Southwest Biological Science Center at Northern Arizona University,

and the Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity, also at Northern Arizona University. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, what is an E-type asteroid? E-type asteroids are in the news because of Rosetta's plans to fly past one, Stein's, on September 5. They are common in the very inner edge of the asteroid belt, but they are very rare elsewhere. That location at the inside edge of the asteroid belt gives them a unique composition, because it means they were born under hotter conditions than most asteroids.

They probably have more rock and metal and less volatile elements than most asteroids do. They are to the rest of the asteroid belt as Mercury is to the rest of the planets. Most meteoriticists link E-type asteroids to a type of meteorite called an awbrite. Awbrites are weird because they are igneous rocks made of almost entirely one mineral called enstatite, hence E-type asteroids. E is for enstatite. That composition means they probably came from the mantle of some much larger ancient asteroid that had a rocky mantle and a metal core.

This isn't unheard of. There are other types of meteorites that probably came from the crust, mantle, and core of Vesta, a huge asteroid that seems to have been blasted in half by an ancient impact. The problem is that we've never seen anything but the mantle of whatever body the Albrights came from. Are they really the mantle of an ancient body? Or are they some weird type of rock

that somehow formed on its own? Perhaps once Rosetta has visited an E-type asteroid, we'll have some answers. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

going to give us yet another tour of the cosmos as we work our way toward another trivia contest answer as well. I'll keep my arms and legs inside the car. Please do. When you look up in the sky, what are you going to look for? Jupiter. Hey, this guy's been paying attention. I just like to test you once in a while.

Still? Still? A lot of Jupiter. A lot of Jupiter for a long time. Okay. It's really good. Look over in the east after sunset. Anytime in the evening, look high up. It is the brightest star-like object up there. And I encourage you to go take out, even binoculars held steady, but certainly a small telescope.

And you can see the Galilean satellites, the four largest moons of Jupiter, named after that Galileo guy. And they will appear in a line, although you may not see four, because they may be in front of or behind Jupiter. You can find predictions of which ones are on which side at which time. You can identify them. You can invite your friends. It's great! That's kind of like obscure baseball statistics, you know, having to know where the Galilean satellites are going to be, you know.

Hey, it's important. And fortunately, they rarely try to steal second. I'd say it's important to, oh, the Cassini folks. It's important if you're studying them. Okay. Absolutely. Absolutely right. But for my backyard telescope party? If you want to impress people at your backyard telescope party and then go, which one is that one second to the right? You're absolutely right. And you go, Bob, then they're going to probably not be impressed. You're absolutely right.

I stand corrected. Of course. Now I'm glad we've taken care of that. It was good we did because there isn't a whole lot else to look at. May, may, there are all sorts of planets still clustered. But they're even lower than last time I told you about them. But low, low in the west, shortly after sunset. Pull out the binoculars, look for Venus, Saturn, Mercury doing a dance.

Venus is the brightest, will be the easiest to pick out. Mars to the upper left of them. Planet X, the airplanes taking off. You might catch them all clustered in the sky low in the west. Look 20, 30 minutes after sunset, maybe with binoculars. All right, all right. I'll try. On to this week in space history.

A lot of launch stuff in space history. But among the launch stuff, there was the second woman in space in 1982, Svetlana Savitskaya. We also had launches of Viking 1 in 1975, Voyager 2 in 1977, and a plethora of other lesser known spacecraft objects. So that's the good stuff going on in space history. We go on to random space fact. I love that. I love how it built there.

Geostationary satellites. 22,300. You rock. I'm glad I'm not asking that as the trivia question this week. But I have another one. We'll see if you know that. Geostationary satellites stay over one point at the equator of a planet, matching the rotational speed.

People like to use them for things like television, sometimes communication, but it's so far away. It causes a quarter-second delay, half-second delay, depending on how long it processes on board. And indeed, the altitude of a geostationary satellite is? 22,300. Miles. Meters.

Miles. Miles. They're way up there. Yeah, I know. That's 35,800 kilometers approximately. And my point is, hey, they're way out there. That's like a tenth of the way to the moon, but perhaps more in your head. That's like 10 times higher than the International Space Station. Very cool. So you have to get out there. That's like a tenth of the way to the moon, but perhaps more in your head. That's like 10 times higher than the International Space Station. Very cool. So you have to get out there.

That's the altitude where their natural orbital velocity matches a point moving around on the surface. Wait a minute. 10 times higher than the space station or 100 times higher? 22,000 miles, 200, 2,000. Yeah, okay. Okay. I was only an order of magnitude off. Did I catch you? I caught you in one? I'll be darned. Busted. Good work, Matt.

Nice job, Matt. Two orders of magnitude. Yes, good job. Thank you. No, I mean, gosh, they really are way out there. They're 100 times farther from the surface of the Earth. Made my day. Than International Space Station.

Congratulations. Thank you so much. I just put that error in there to see if, you know, you could catch it. Can I get a poster? You're doing great this. Sure. Take a poster. Okay.

I think there are ones that are kind of beat up around the edges. Grab one of those. All right. All right. On to the trivia contest. We asked you last time around, what was the first successful balloon mission in the Venus atmosphere? How'd we do? Chuck Lund did well.

Chuck Lund of Otsego, Michigan. Otsego? Mangled, I'm sure. Do we have to ask pronunciations? He didn't give it. Help for the cities now? It would be helpful, yes. But Vega 1.

Vega 1. An old Soviet mission. Indeed. Vega 1. Followed But Vega 1, Vega 1, an old Soviet mission. Indeed, Vega 1, followed by Vega 2. Lasted a couple of days, which to me is just incredible. In that environment, floating around in that nasty, nasty place. It is a nasty place, but that's partly why you do balloons. You stay up above the even nastier surface. Yeah, okay.

Still, very cool and learned a lot of good stuff. So congratulations. We go on to the next trivia contest. Can I just mention Chuck's going to get an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster? Yes, you can mention that. Did I say Mars? And his will not be beat up. Yeah.

Well, you kind of said Mars. I'd Marred or something like that. Why don't we give him the one that has like a map and pictures of Mars? All right. In fact, let's give it to the next person if they can answer this question, which is not 22,300. What was the first geostationary satellite? Take that. Okay. I do know this one. Oh, well, don't say it. All right. They've got, well, tell them how to enter first. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to send us your entry. And you've got until Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific on August 25. Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific on August 25.

Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific on the 25th. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the sound of wind passing through a pine tree forest. Thank you, and good night. Let's just enjoy that for a moment. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

He's with us every week for What's Up, the Ulysses Mission, next time on Planetary Radio. Our show is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.