Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Kids in Space!

Episode Date: November 29, 2010

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Kids in Space, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. No, NASA isn't actually taking children into orbit, not yet anyway, but it is giving them a chance to put their experiments on the International Space Station. We'll talk about the Kids in Micro-G program with the space agency's Debbie Biggs. Thanks to Emily Lakdawalla and some talented fans of space exploration, you can now own all of the public updates issued during the Voyager missions.

Emily will tell you how to get them. Bill Nye has discovered that Pluto's planetary status is still being debated, and Bruce Betts will tell us about the night sky and why he'll be hanging ham from his Christmas tree. We'll go first to the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator. Emily, let's start with a recent piece in the blog about the Voyager tracking that you've been doing, or rather bringing back to the surface these reports done as the Voyager missions were still underway. That's right. It's easy to forget that there was anything that happened before the advent of the internet, but in fact quite a lot happened in space exploration before we could follow every moment of it on the web. And the Voyager missions, I think, were one thing that ignited a lot of people's excitement about robotic space exploration.

And the way that people learned about it was in these printed newsletters. They were two to four pages long with photos from the Voyagers, and you might wait six to eight weeks after the Voyager events had happened before you got these things in your mailbox, and there you got your own little glimpse of what was going on on the Voyager mission. Does seem like a different world, but they did a pretty thorough job from what I've seen of the stuff you've put up on the web. Yeah, especially at the beginning before the launch, they had an awful lot of technical and engineering detail about both things that were going right and things that went wrong on the spacecraft. And there were really quite a lot that went wrong with the Voyagers before they encountered Jupiter. But once they got into the swing of the planetary encounters, the mission was just one amazing

success and view of Strange Moon after another. And it's all chronicled in these 99 mission status bulletins that were scanned by Tom Faber, a reader of mine who is a pack rat with a scanner. And one weekend, he just decided he'd sit down and scan them all and sent them to me on PDF. And I'm very glad that he did. Yeah, nice work. And there's a lot of other incidental history here. For instance, you point out the addition of three Soviet, because there was still a Soviet Union at the time, three Soviet scientists to the Voyager team. That's right, and it was also interesting to me to see the advent of more women scientists

coming into the Voyager mission operations. And the Voyagers, you know, they span such a long period of time, it's interesting to see how things changed over the time they spent from their launch in 77 until the last image of the solar system taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. All right, quickly though, there is one other image that was pulled in, or a series of images pulled in by Voyager 1 that have been assembled into quite a montage, and if nothing else, people should take a look at this. Yes, this was the montage of images that inspired Carl Sagan's famous pale blue dot paragraph, where he described

the Earth as just what it is in this image, as a tiny dot suspended in a sunbeam, taken from billions of kilometers away as Voyager 1 was headed out of the solar system, and it caught views of all the other planets at the time, except for Mercury. Mercury was lost in the glare. Just one other thing to mention briefly, and these are some other beautiful images, much more contemporary, in fact, right up to the present, taken by Mars Express. Mars Express is on its, I don't know, its umpteenth mission extension, and it's just been re-extended until 2014. And right now it's doing a lot of work taking images of Phobos, because it's the only Mars orbiter that can get images of the backside of Phobos,

and that's where they need to see in order to land the Phobos Grunt sample return mission successfully. And congratulations to the Europeans. Kudos to them for extending not just Mars Express, but a lot of other missions. Yeah, 11 spacecraft in total, including Mars Express and Venus Express, Cluster, Herschel, a whole bunch of them. So they're really committed to the future of robotic space exploration. As are we. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I'll be back right after we hear from Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here,

Executive Director of the Planetary Society. And this week the big news in space is should Pluto be restored as a planet instead of just a dwarf planet as the International Astronautical Union called it back in 2006 because Eris, another icy object out there by Pluto, is apparently no longer thought to be slightly bigger than Pluto. Now, Eris is considered slightly smaller than Pluto, so maybe Pluto should go back to... Okay, fine. People, listen to me. They're icy. It's cold. They're way, way out there. If you brought Pluto into where the Earth's moon is, first of all, it's much smaller than the moon. So is Eris. So is Charon. Smaller than the moon. But not only that, they'd evaporate. They'd go away. I mean, is that what you expect of a traditional planet? So let go of the idea of a traditional planet, people. No, no. Oh, by the

way, by the way, Eris is Greek for discord or strife. Yes, Pluto is the god of the underworld, but no, no, Eris is the goddess of unhappiness. So let go, people. Let's move on. No, instead of having Pluto try to be a traditional planet or this, with all due respect, lame, sobriquet, nickname, dwarf planet. No, it's a new thing. It's not a traditional planet. No, it is a Plutoid. It's a Plutoid, a new class of icy object out there way, way out beyond the orbit of Neptune in a different plane because it has a different origin made of slightly different stuff and tells us something different about where we came from and our place in space. No, Plutoids. When New Horizons goes flying past Pluto in the year 2015, we will learn all kinds of amazing things. And speaking of flying, I got to fly Bill Nye the

Planetary Guy. Hey kids, here's a new excuse you may be able to use for not having your homework. You left it on the International Space Station. That's not quite as big a stretch as you may be able to use for not having your homework. You left it on the International Space Station. That's not quite as big a stretch as you may think. Not if your class is one of the lucky ones chosen to have its science experiment conducted by astronauts on the ISS. But you've got to submit your proposal very soon, according to Debbie Biggs. Debbie is an education specialist at the Johnson Space Center just outside Houston, Texas. She actually works with a couple of programs, NASA's Teaching from Space and the International Space Station National Lab Education Projects. The project that recently

caught my eye is called Kids in Micro-G. Debbie and her colleagues will soon be poring over scores of proposals from schools all over the U.S. It will be their job to select a handful that will make it into space. I reached her at the JSC late last week. Debbie, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, first of all. And you're coming up on a deadline for this program, aren't you? Yes, we are. It's December the 8th. That means that any teachers who happen to be listening to this show,

teachers of, what, 5th through 8th graders, had better get on the stick if they want to have their kids have a shot at putting an experiment on the International Space Station. That's a pretty impressive goal. Yeah, we think it's a neat program, and we're looking forward to hearing from a bunch of teachers from across the country. And so I hope your listeners will participate. This isn't the first time you've done this. How did it go the first time around, which was, what, just a year ago? Exactly. Yeah, last year was our first year for this project, and we were able to select

nine experiments that flew on board the space station. The astronauts executed those over the summer months that we just finished up in September with those. We had a great time doing that and learned a lot from our experience, and we're ready to do it again. Did you have enough contact with the kids who had the winning experiments that time that you got to sort of check out the experience for them? I mean, I would hope that they were pretty thrilled. Oh, they were. I mean, that was the fun part of this project for me, is that once we selected the experiments, we contacted the teacher and the students

and had a telecon with them and walked them through the process of how this was going to work. And so it was a lot of fun to talk with them over the phone and experience some of their excitement. And then we worked closely with the teachers to get feedback from the students once they got their video back from the space station to kind of get a feel for how it all went for them and what they thought of it. And so that's been a lot of fun to go through that entire process with them. Now talk about that video. They actually got to watch the astronauts performing their experiment?

Yes. What we do is the astronauts will execute their experiment on board the space station, and they videotape it. And then they downlink it to us on the ground, and then I order copies, and I send it to the teacher, and I send a couple copies so that there's one for the teacher and one for the students, and they can use it in their classroom and keep it themselves. You had nine winners. How many entries did you get? We had about 132 entries last year, and so we're hoping to increase that number this year by getting it out on more networks, more listservs, and things like this to help spread the word. And hopefully we're helping a little bit with that. I hope so, yes.

You know, I'm actually kind of surprised with this kind of an opportunity that more people didn't give it a shot. I was surprised with this kind of an opportunity that more people didn't give it a shot. But maybe it has to do with the fact that you really were looking for good science and good young scientists in this program. Definitely. You know, we want to see kids who are thinking creatively and exercising, you know, the scientific method and really thinking about what they want to do in orbit. scientific method and really thinking about what they want to do in orbit. We're also looking for experiments that will show different results in the microgravity environment. Why do you want to fly it up there? And what does that environment give you that you can see a little bit different from what you can see in your classroom? And so it's not necessarily as easy as you would think. You kind of have to get your brain wrapped around that a little bit. So we're hoping now that we've got a year under us that there have been some other

folks who've heard about it and have been thinking about it, and more people will take advantage of the opportunity. There are very complete instructions on how teachers can get their class involved. The website is www.nasa.gov slash education. That's not the direct website, but it's a lot easier. And we'll put that link up, of course, on our show page at planetary.org that you can get to from planetary.org. But one of the things I was really fascinated by, other than the rubric, which is just a word I like to say, is that you have this list of materials. It's the supply kit.

They're more or less common everyday kinds of things that people should be able to find in a classroom. But really, the kids can't go beyond this list. And what it reminded me of was watching the movie Apollo 13, when they come in and they dump out all the stuff that's available on the spacecraft and say, okay, build something that'll keep these guys alive. They really, they can't go beyond this list. That's right. We don't have an opportunity to launch any unique hardware, and so we have to use what's already there in orbit. And so we've worked with the space station program closely to identify items that we can use without perturbing any other experiments or anything like that. And that's how that list got generated. And also with a mind to things that teachers and students can

get fairly easily in their classroom and inexpensive to obtain. And, you know, that's been kind of fun to go through that process and trying to figure out what's already there that we can use. And what makes this so much fun for me is watching what people do with that list because it's fantastic. I've got to mention some of these. Soap, dental floss, socks, of course, timer, stopwatch. I'm sure that came in handy in some of the experiments. Scissors, pretty easy.

And by far the most important item on the list, duct tape. Absolutely. NASA education specialist Debbie Biggs will tell us more in a minute about kids in micro-G. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS.

Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. As we finish this week's show, there was barely a week left for 5th to 8th grade students and teachers to prepare their kids in micro-G submissions for NASA.

Debbie Biggs is an education specialist at the agency's Johnson Space Center. She's part of the team that is providing support for the project and the many classes that are designing experiments. That team will very soon begin to select the successful submissions that will be taken on by astronauts on the International Space Station. What kinds of experiments ended up being done last time around on the ISS? We had quite a range of experiments. We had an experiment that took a look at Newton's laws of motion. You know, an object in motion stays in motion.

And that experiment used jelly beans and crackers and candies in a Ziploc baggie. We had absorption experiments where people were looking at the rate of absorption of different materials. We had a capillary action experiment. We even had an adaptability experiment, which was very interesting to me, where the astronauts were asked to draw a picture, you know, repeat that about four or five times to see if it got any easier for them to draw. You know, is it harder to do that in microgravity than it is in the classroom kind of a thing? And so, you know, we had a projectile experiment as well, and so quite a range of things.

Yeah, nice variety. I'm going to go back to the materials list for a moment. What is the softer, soft moon, soft Mars? Those are actually scale models of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. And they're soft and cushy. They're almost like pillows. And they're actually part of an education payload that was put up there to use for demonstration purposes by the education office at JSC. And we've got permission to use those as part of our activity as well. I think I have that soft Mars.

I'm looking at it right now on top of one of my bookcases. So it's nice to know it's brother or sister is up there on the ISS, I think. Definitely. Tell me a little bit about your job as an education specialist there. You were saying before we started recording that you really split your time between a couple of offices there in the JSC. I do. I work with NASA's Teaching from Space Office, which is an office that is located within the astronaut office at JSC. And they are primarily responsible for any of the education activities that fly on board the space shuttle or the space

station. They coordinate a variety of activities, including live interactive events, the amateur radio activities that we do, education payloads, and things like that. And so I work with them quite closely. And then I also work with the ISS National Lab Education Project, of which Kids and Micro-G is one of those activities. My impression is, also judging from the website, the education website that we were just talking about, that this is not just an afterthought on the ISS, that this is something the astronauts devote a fair amount of time to. They have.

We've been quite pleased. The level of support and the level of interest that we've gotten, both from the program office and the crew office, the astronauts this past year just went above and beyond to make these nine experiments successful and added lots of stuff to them, some extra things that we didn't even request from them. They just took some extra care and patience with it, and the end result was really outstanding.

And so we're quite grateful for the interest that everyone has in it. Do the astronauts let you know whether this is an activity they enjoy, or do they look at it as just a distraction? No, I think everybody has been very supportive, and they do enjoy these types of things. I think they enjoy reaching out to students and encouraging them to consider science, technology, engineering, and mathematic careers as they begin to make those kinds of choices.

And so they all are very supportive of those types of things, and so we're quite lucky. That was one of those questions that I pretty much knew the answer to, because you can see in the videos on the website how much fun the astronauts are having as they demonstrate these basic scientific concepts. It really did look like they were having a blast. Yeah, I think they did. And we're looking forward to the next round. For this year, Katie Coleman will be the first astronaut that will be executing some of these experiments, and Ron Guerin will be the other one that we anticipate will be doing some of these. We've had an opportunity to do some ground training with those two, which we didn't get to do last year.

And so that's been fun to talk with them about this project before they actually launch. So we're looking forward to it. Let's make sure that people know, particularly you teachers of fifth to eighth graders out there, that you have until, what's the deadline? December the 8th. And how can they learn more? I mean, we've mentioned the website, but are there other resources? Well, everything that you could possibly need is on the website. And so we've tried to put some links on the website to things like what is microgravity, those kinds of things that they would need in order to gain a better understanding of the environment that these experiments will work in.

And so really that is the best place to go. And also on that website there's a place that if they have questions or get stuck on something, they can submit questions to this email address that's on the website. And we have somebody that's monitoring that pretty much around the clock. We get answers back to them as soon as possible. And when will the lucky winners get to see their experiment conducted in space? Well, our deadline right now is to notify our winners by January 31st. And we have about a month to pull the final procedures together. And the students actually film themselves in a little training video that we send up to the astronauts in orbit.

And so we have about a month to do that. So we're looking to be operational on board the space station no later than mid-March. Our goal is to get these finished by the end of the academic year this year so we can get the videos back to the teachers and students before they're out for the summer. Debbie, thanks so much. It's been delightful talking with you. My pleasure. Debbie Biggs is an education specialist for NASA, two programs really, the NASA Teaching from Space program and the ISS National

Lab Education Projects. We've been talking to her at the Johnson Space Center where she spends her days getting things ready for people to send up into orbit on the ISS. We'll head up in that direction as well in just a moment with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. We're back on Skype, still not face-to-face with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. At least I was able to give you your gift. You were, and I appreciate it so very much. It's a fun, cute little, it's a ham ornament. It's just a slab of ham that you can hang from the Christmas tree. No, it's a cute little ham, the chimpanzee that was launched into space and back in an old spacesuit.

And it will hang from your tree proudly, I'm sure, in just a few days. Oh, definitely. Thank you very much. You're very welcome, absolutely. My pleasure. You went to try to see a launch, and all I got was more than what you got. Maybe. Well, you can give me some more. Tell me what's up in the night sky. In the evening sky, Jupiter's still dominating in the south as the bright star like object also uh check out orion constellation with the three really bright stars in a row orion's

belt over in the the east in the early evening in the pre-dawn becoming a bit of a party there is we've got venus the extremely bright star like, a little before dawn over in the east. Just above it is Spica, bright star of Virgo. And higher above that is Saturn. And on December 1st and 2nd, Crescent Moon is dancing around in that area as well. But also coming up, most reliable meteor shower of the year for good results, the Geminids. And it will be peaking on December 13th or 14th, depending on your exact locale. So a good opportunity to go out and stare at the sky for a while and look for bright streaks of light that represent the bits of dust burning up as they

hit the atmosphere at high speeds. We move on to this week in space history. In 1996, Mars Pathfinder was launched on its way to its successful mission at Mars. And in 1954, we have a special shout-out on this one to Elizabeth Hodges, pretty much the only person I'm aware of who was actually hit by a meteorite. Fortunately for her, after this 10-pound meteorite

had slammed through the top of her house and slowed down some, so leaving her with just some bruises and a really great story. Wasn't she on the couch watching TV? I think, actually, she was listening to Planetary Radio. Which is the 1954 edition. Interesting. That was the black-and-white version, wasn't it? Yeah, I remember when we used to do this show in black and white. All right. Listen, we don't have any special treats regarding random space fact this week,

but we did get enough requests, I don't know, two or three, from people who wanted us to post last week's Think About Tune separately. So we're going to make that available. Go to planetary.org and then from there to the show page and you can get to this link and all the others related to this week's show. So it's up to you, big guy. Pressure's back. Random space fact! That was very good. Kind of a 50s Richie Valens tune to it.

So Halley's Comet, most people know it's orbit every 76 years. But it turns out it's not actually that consistent over long periods of time. And so you can't just project 76 years back over the centuries due to the effects of gravity from other bodies in the solar system having tweaked it. So over the last many centuries, Halley's orbital period has varied from 76 years to just a little more than 79 years. Very interesting random space fact. Thank you. You're welcome. In the contest, we asked you. I have no idea what we asked.

You got into Greek mythology. Does that help? Oh, that does help. So we asked you about Ursa Major, the big bear. Why in the sky, Ursa Major, and actually the same is true for Ursa Minor, how Greek mythology tried to explain that these bears had really long tails when the bears we know do not have long tails. How did we do, Matt, and what'd we learn? Pretty fair number of entries here.

Not huge, because this was a little bit difficult. Some people had a lot of trouble finding the answer, actually. I will let you know that John Gallant, John Gallant of Lima, New York, who has not won for about a year and three quarters, he came up with this. The Greeks said that Zeus threw the bears into the sky by swinging them from their tails, thus stretching them out. Good demonstration of, would it be a centripetal or centrifugal force there. So congratulations, John.

John won, by the way, one of those Beyond Earth t-shirts from our friends at chopshopstore.com. This is the really cool one that has all the different robotic spacecraft around the solar system right on the front of the shirt. And I indeed wear it proudly. I do want to mention Torsten Zimmer as well, who can be counted on for this kind of thing. He went into a little bit more of the detail, and it has to do with good old Zeus and having his way once again with women, in this case Callisto, who got turned into a bear by Zeus's wife Hera. You know, it goes on and on and on. Torsten mentions that Zeus enjoyed this new sport of bear hurling quite a bit, so he also turned Callisto's son into a bear, threw him up into the sky, and there's Ursa Minor for you.

However, Zeus's attempts to establish bear hurling as an Olympic discipline failed due to lack of competition and ultimately of bears. Particularly bears that were willing to have their tails stretched. Sounds quite painful. So no 2012 bear hurling event in London, I suppose. No, it could just be an event having bears hurling. Chicago bears, maybe.

But that would get messy. Anyway, we move on to the next question. Back to the Geminid meteor shower. What is thought to be the source object for the Geminid meteor shower? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter.

Not surprisingly at all, you have until December 13, Monday, December 13 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And I think we're done. Oh, by the way, we'll give you another one of these terrific Beyond Earth t-shirts from chopshopstore.com. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about long-tailed bears, and try not to be too scared. Thank you, and good night. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my.

Oh, my. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. The troubled but still amazing James Webb Space Telescope. That's our topic next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies! Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова