Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Kindred Spirits: Alison Gibbings and Carolyn Shoemaker at the Planetary Defense Conference

Episode Date: April 29, 2013

Our special coverage of the PDC continues with two planetary scientists separated by almost 60 years in age, but with similar dedication and enthusiasm for saving the planet.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Back to the Planetary Defense Conference, 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. Today, two women of planetary science. About 60 years separate the births of Alison Gibbings and Carolyn Shoemaker, but they have in common their love for exploration of our solar system and their dedication to the study of asteroids that regularly threaten our delicate planet. You'll hear them along with our regulars, Bruce Betts, Bill Nye the Science Guy,

and the Planetary Society's planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're going to talk about the wonderful world of color in space. First, I think you may want to congratulate Virgin Galactic. Absolutely. They had the first powered and first supersonic flight of Spaceship Two today. The powered part of the flight lasted for all of 16 seconds, but they did successfully go to Mach 1.2. It's a major milestone for Virgin Galactic, and they definitely deserve our congratulations. And what a beautiful photo of this monster flame shooting out of the rear of this beautiful space plane against this dark, dark sky. Yeah, there's that photo, and there's actually a second photo now that was shot from a camera mounted on one of the twin tail fins, basically looking at the nozzle as

it's firing. It's a pretty amazing photo. So definitely worth checking out. That's the way stuff coming out of a rocket engine should look. Anyway, it's today, if you happen to be hearing this on the first day the show is available. That's an April 29 entry. But let's get to this other blog entry you did, and it has to do with color. Yeah, it's just an example of what's really a pretty easy image processing trick that you can take black and white image data and some color information that's at much lower resolution and combine them together to make a beautifully detailed color photo. It's actually something that most space missions go to space planning to do. In order to take color pictures, they take many pictures through different color filters.

And those pictures all have a lot of similarity. They're all shadowed where they're in shadow and bright where they're bright. And so a lot of space missions, they only return very low resolution color information. They just return one detailed black and white image. And so I show people how you can combine those things into a highly detailed color image it's a really easy trick and a fun one to learn how to do so I thought you guys would enjoy it so it's a very nice do-it-yourself a how-to it's a April 23rd entry in Emily's blog at planetary.org easy to find and looks

like it's a pretty fun beautiful image here, by the way, of that storm, that hexagonal storm that we've all come to know. Emily, thanks so much. We'll talk to you again soon. All right. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist. And you can hear her regularly on our Thursday Google Hangout, Google Plus Hangout that we do every Thursday at noon Pacific time. She's also contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, it's been a couple of weeks since we've actually talked, since I was able to feature you at the Planetary Defense Conference on last week's show.

I was able to feature you at the Planetary Defense Conference on last week's show and remind everybody that the video for that is all available in the multimedia section at planetary.org. I need to congratulate you because you have a new position in Washington. Well, near Washington, yeah. I just got appointed to the NASA Advisory Council, the NAC. So notice that the NAC is a nested acronym. The N in NAC is an acronym for NASA. Anyway, you know, NASA has had a lot of trouble with its education public outreach, EPO funding. In other words, there were a couple of days where it was claimed because of the sequester, all the EPO activity was cut. No more education, public outreach activity, none. Then they backed down and said, well, we're going to have

all the stuff that exists now, websites, printed material, and so we'll do that, but nothing new, nothing new. Well, even that doesn't sound quite right. So I'm very excited, Matt. I'm going to be included in this group that helps spread the word about what NASA does and the value, the importance of space exploration for all of us. And so I'm going to be on the inside a little bit. And I'm going to try to, you know, I'm trying to change things, Matt. We hope to make it more effective so that people everywhere embrace what NASA does best, which is make these discoveries, these astonishing discoveries, about and on other worlds.

So, Bill, I know that you will also be in very good company there on the NAC, the NASA Advisory Council. I'll look forward to getting a report from you after the first one of those meetings that you attend. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. We're going to change the world a little. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary

Society, and now he's got the knack. We'll be right back with the PDC, the Planetary Defense Conference, in just a few moments. We began our coverage of April's Planetary Defense Conference last week when we brought you highlights of the grand public event at Flagstaff's Northern Arizona University. Remember that we have video of the entire evening at planetary.org. This time we'll pick up the conference itself with someone you've heard before on the show, Alison Gibbings works with Max Vasily at Scotland's University of Glasgow.

That's where their development of the Laser Bees concept continues. The idea is to deflect a near-Earth asteroid by firing powerful sun-driven lasers at the rock, ablating, vaporizing its surface, and thereby changing its course little by little. Two presentations this morning, both of them very exciting. I'm amazed at how far you and Max and the rest of your team are coming with this research. Yes, it's really testament to the support of the members of the Planetary Society that have enabled us to really validate the albation concept through our experimental campaign.

We've been able to translate this into a viable mission design that have been picked up by the European Space Agency. So hopefully we can gain momentum further to really evaluate laser albation as not only a viable method for asteroid deflection, but also the continued exploration of our solar system. And you were very kind. Did I ask you for that endorsement? I did not. No, that was for free. Look, two things I definitely want to talk to you about during this quick break here in the presentations. The first one being the work that you folks have done comparing laser ablation to one of the other

very sexy, much-talked-about techniques, which is this so-called gravity tractor where the vehicle just uses its own gravity to nudge the asteroid. Sounds like laser ablation comes out ahead. Definitely.

I mean, one thing that people don't consider about the gravity tractor... Excuse me, excuse me. That was the best presentation I've ever seen. Oh, please. Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt. That was great. Do you know this man? Unfortunately, yes.

Can I have your autograph? All right, would you go away? We're doing a serious radio interview here. Sorry. All right, so... I'm awesome. Dr. All right, so. I'm awesome. Dr. Bruce Betts.

Yeah, one thing that people didn't consider about the gravity tractor is that to produce the amount of deflection you need over a long period, because it is a low-thrust method, is that you need an awful lot of propellant and you need a really big kind of mass-consuming spacecraft. And the one real advantage over laser ablation is you don't have to take any propellant to the spacecraft because the propellant is already there. It's the asteroid itself that you're ablating with the laser. So not only are you saving mass,

but you're also reducing the overall mission complexity of the spacecraft. And we've really validated the ablation process based on the updated model and also with our direct comparison with the ablation process based on the updated model and also with our direct comparison with laser ablation to the gravity tractor and ion beam shepherd and we've been able to virtually demonstrate its potential at reducing the overall subsystem mass and that it is suggested to be a rather advantageous solution in every case that you looked at um yeah in terms of the power requirements we needed, which was representative of a laser ablation emission, and assuming that we had a comparable

delta V, then there is always a minimum threshold point of which laser ablation is advantageous. I don't want to say winning concept, because that's probably too strong a word, but it's certainly an area of further investigation, and I think it's pretty awesome. All right, now tell me about ADAM, which I had not heard of. Yes. ADAM came about through a European Space Agency ESA CISNOVA challenge, and it was to develop mission concepts for the contactless deflection of small to medium-sized asteroids, typically four meters in diameter. deflection of a small to medium-sized asteroids, typically four meters in diameter. And we had to prove the technology viability of deflecting an asteroid by one meter per second over a three-year

duration. And being ESA, it was very much emphasis on a low-cost rapid response mission. And through this, we evaluated laser ablation again from a subsystem mission analysis design, and we included the work that we've done on updating the model, and we came up with a spacecraft design called ADAM, which I got to name, which stands for the Asteroid Ablation Mission, and we came up with the configuration, including the laser as our primary payload, the design of the spacecraft, its configuration, how big the solar rays would be, how big the radiators, all the thermal power control, and how we

would not only use the laser for asteroid deflection, but also for all the other opportunistic science potential of laser ablation. Because laser itself does create a big plume of ejector that you can use for resource exploitation, in situ analysis, sample return missions. It's kind of like ChemCam on the Mars Science Laboratory, although you pointed out that it enables you to take samples of an asteroid from quite deep below the surface. Definitely. Validated through our experiment is that laser ablation results in this sort of volumetric removal of material that's created by the laser beam effectively drilling into the subsurface material.

So it ejects all this material in a plume that you can use by remote sensing analysis. You could fly through the plume and collect all the material that way. You could capture it. You could capture it within a sample container and return it to Earth. And so you're doing all this really, really neat science that you can achieve without having to land on the asteroid, drill into it, kind of have all the problems of flying within a small gravity field and the irregularity of the target material. So, yeah, I think it's pretty cool.

I was also just impressed by how very thorough this examination, this proposal for the spacecraft is. I mean, it seemed like this is something, if you had the money tomorrow, you could maybe start to build. Definitely. We have actually received a small grant from the European Space Agency to carry this work on further. But if it was picked up again through other agencies, and it's something that we would very much like to take forward, it is very much a preliminary mission design at this point. So sort of phase A concept studies. But yeah, there's quite a lot of momentum at the university to take this project forward.

And you actually proposed a possible launch date. Yes, we wanted to launch in either 2027 or 2028 as our backup and that would enable us to transfer and rendezvous with the asteroid within a year and then we could up late within another year and then do awesome science afterwards. Both of your presentations very well received, a lot of nice compliments, nice applause as well. But you're also enjoying the other proposals here. You were telling me how much you like coming to PDC.

Definitely. The Planetary Defence Conference is one of my favourites on the conference calendar. I think it's such an intimate conference to be at. There's so many new proposals, existing proposals that get presented in a really open and dynamic atmosphere. And it's really intuitive of kind of ongoing collaboration and kind of gaining and maintaining a network of engineers and scientists across the world. So it's a fantastic opportunity. And it's not a bad place to be either, Flagstaff. It's pretty, although cold here. It is a little bit chilly, which is something, coming from Scotland, I was a little bit shocked about.

But yes, the blue sky is fantastic. Well, we look forward to seeing you again in Pasadena when that opportunity comes up. Definitely. Thanks so much once again. Great talking to you. Thank you. Alison Gibbings of the University of Glasgow at the recent Planetary Defence Conference. After the break, the grand lady of asteroid and comet study, Carolyn Shoemaker. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory

rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business.

You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio and the Planetary Defense

Conference. I'm Matt Kaplan. You've heard of Shoemaker-Levy 9, right? The comet, or rather its fragments, put on quite a show when they impacted Jupiter back in July of 1994. The Shoemaker saluted in its name as co-discoverer was not planetary science pioneer Gene Shoemaker, but his wife and observational partner of many years, Carolyn Shoemaker. She has found more comets, 32 in all, than any other living astronomer. And then there are her more than 800 asteroids. Carolyn, it is truly an honor to speak to you here at the Planetary Defense Conference.

Thank you for taking a couple of minutes before the sessions begin again. You're very welcome. I'm very pleased to, and especially with a random space fact. Oh, yes, we're going to get to that. I'm going to grab you for that. You truly are one of the pioneers, you and your husband, doing the kind of stuff that this conference, 300 people are devoted to, a long time before there was something called the Planetary Defense Conference. Are you pleased to see this field of study getting this kind of attention? I'm very pleased any time that planetary science

gets attention, and particularly asteroids and comets and impact. Yes, it's wonderful to see so many people still interested in it. I wonder if you could say something also about the legacy that your husband left. It's your legacy

as well, but it's amazing to see how frequently the name Shoemaker comes up. Jean did so much with the study of impact and the study of craters and what the effect of that is on our solar system. And it's still being carried on by these people that are here today. They know more and more. And I'm particularly intrigued by what they can discover with the new instruments, the new spacecraft, things that didn't exist when Gene was still alive.

What has driven your interest in this for so many years? What has driven your interest in this for so many years? My interest was really sparked by my husband, who introduced me to the skies and to the wonders up there. And along with that was coupled his geologic interests. So he was not only interested in the astronomy, but he was interested in the effects of things that fell out of the sky and what that would do for people

or for our Earth. Were you here when you were quoted on one of the slides from a presenter in talking about Shoemaker-Levy 9, that comet, of course, which broke up and hit Jupiter. You said something about it. Do you remember the quote? Yes, I remember that quote. I don't know what I found, but it looks like a squash comet.

And it really did to me when I first saw it and always on our films because everyone knows that comets are round and have tails like that sticking out from them. And this was a bar of tails. I didn't know. How long after that did you realize, oh, this is broken up. This is now a bunch of comets. We knew by the end of that night because we had contacted Jim Scotti of the Space Guard survey, and he did the follow-up for us because we were snowed in. We had terrible weather coming by. We had terrible weather coming by, but we had called Jim Scotty, and he rather reluctantly said he would take a look because he thought probably this was an artifact of Jupiter on our films.

And we had already considered that. When we called him later in the night, he told us what he was seeing, and he was gradually homing in on this wonderful comet. He kept seeing little fragments with tails. I think the Shoemaker NEO program is just a fabulous thing. is just a fabulous thing. I think it inspires and continues to inspire a number of young people to continue the search for near-Earth asteroids when they wouldn't be able to otherwise. One of the best examples has to do with the discovery of the dark spots on Jupiter

that were made in Australia. And if he hadn't had the grant from the award, I'm not sure he would have seen it. I think others are encouraged to continue, because funds just aren't that plentiful for amateur astronomers. And amateur astronomers are essential to the overall discovery of any else. We also, of course, like that it celebrates this legacy, not just your husband's legacy, but yours. Well, I appreciate that, too.

I think of it as Gene's legacy because he's the one who really inspired me to get involved with asteroids to begin with, with comets to begin with, and with cratering to begin with. So I think it's a marvelous tribute to him, but I'll accept the tribute, too. I'm glad. Thank you. You're welcome. Astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker at the Planetary Defense Conference. Wait till you hear the conclusion of our conference coverage next week as 200 scientists and others scramble to deal with a killer asteroid.

Well, it's time for What's Up, and that's why we've got Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, on the Skype connection. Welcome back. Thank you. You know that we're still doing Planetary Defense Conference stuff here. Oh, by the way, I don't know if you heard it, but I included your little invasion of my conversation with Alison Giddings. I couldn't help myself. Thank you.

I'm glad you couldn't hold back. You actually included it. All right. I got a lot in the night sky going on. So let me leap into that. Jupiter still in the southwest looking super bright in the early evening. Jupiter still in the southwest looking super bright in the early evening, but Venus is now starting. Venus is on the rise in the evening sky. Could still be tricky to see have to check them out, especially to get Venus, check it out in the early evening. On May 11th, the moon is actually between Jupiter and Venus,

so it's just a brightness party low in the west shortly after sunset. We also have the Eta Aquarids, which is kind of an average meteor shower peaking on May 5th. It'll be somewhat better from the southern hemisphere than the northern hemisphere. But it's something, particularly if you can go out before dawn, when the sky is still dark, you'll pick something up. So not great, but good on average. A lot going on. Mercury will be popping up a little later in May, and it'll just be a party in the evening sky. Busy, busy, busy.

We move on to this week in space history. In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space this week. Have you got any guest random space facts? As a matter of fact, that's another thing I forgot to tell you. We do have a celebrity random space fact. Oh, good, because I need to save my voice. Let's go to that. Here we go.

Hi, I'm Carolyn Shoemaker, and this is your random space fact. So wasn't that sweet? That was very, very nice. Well played. Way to get that. So we move on to the actual fact, which is Kepler's second law says a line between a planet and the sun will sweep out equal areas in equal times, which I always found a very odd way to phrase it. It's basically an oddball thing that falls out of the math that quantitatively

describes orbits. But basically, the really fundamental thing I'd say to get out of it is that objects go faster in the near sun part of their orbits, which is why comets spend most of their orbits, very elliptical orbits, very far from the sun. They're going very slowly out there and then moving very quickly as they come in by the sun. But true of any elliptical orbit of a smaller body around a much larger body. Sounds so calculistical. Calculistical?

Yeah, it's an adjective. Look it up. Cool. I'm going to start using that. And now we asked you to be calculistical in the trivia contest and asked you what the approximate diameter of Meteor Crater in Arizona is. How'd we do, Matt? Oh, man, nice response. First time entry, I believe, and therefore a first time winner. It's Dan Zimney of Lawrence, Kansas. And he gave it to us. We haven't had a response in lots of different units in a long time. So we have a

whole selection here. But let me give you, first of all, 1.186 kilometers is that correct that is correct i mean it's slightly variable so yes yes definitely works we got a lot of 4 000 foot uh submissions from a lot of other people uh but here here's just one of the others that dan gave us in parsecs, 3.84356424 times 10 to the negative 14th. Well, that's amusing. I don't know how helpful it is, but it's amusing. Really, is there any need for any other unit than the parsec? As long as you have scientific notation, I think we should throw out everything else.

Yeah, okay. And I would throw out also, sorry, Mark Smithith he gave it to us in cubits 2319 egyptian cubits but it is dan zimney who's going to be getting bill nye's voice on his answering system what do you got for next time okay we're gonna go calcolicitudinous. Close enough. A quite numerical one. What is the center line of the sodium doublet that, for example, is seen as two absorption lines in the visible spectrum of the sun? So sodium produces not one but two closely spaced lines called a doublet. And what is the center line between those two? Go to planetary.org

slash radio contest to enter. Wow, I am impressed, and perhaps intimidated by this one. You have until May 6th, that'd be Monday, May 6th at 2pm Pacific time, to get us this particular answer. And good luck. Alright everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what would happen if all chicken nuggets were made of gold. Thank you. Good night.

I suppose it would make a lot of dentists happy. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he's here every week with What's Up. I'm just trying to think if McDonald's maybe puts gold into chicken nuggets. Seems unlikely. Before we go, I want to tease you with a tiny but delicious slice of the tabletop asteroid impact mitigation exercise that took place on the last day of the Planetary Defense Conference. You'll mostly hear Kathy Plesko of the Planetary Defense Conference, you'll mostly hear

Kathy Plesko of the Los Alamos National Lab presenting her group's recommendation for a last-ditch double nuclear explosion to divert and break up a huge asteroid that is speeding toward Earth. Dissenting is Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikert, chairman and a founder of the B612 Planetary Defense Organization. Rusty Schweikart, B612 Planetary Defense Organization, NASA The National Nuclear Security Administration recommends a geometric optimum 60-meter standoff burst per Ahrens and Harris' 1992 paper because we will make the maximum amount of vapor, which will then push with, it will transfer the maximum delta v

much stronger than if we were to do a 10 meter standoff but we're doing it just total disruption it is total disruption at that height yes you're getting disruption and dyslexia deflection at the same time yes okay according to all of our calculations and those of the russians we will get disruption at that point we officially officially disbelieve your results. Because we're hitting it on both sides, right? Both sides? Yes, we're doing a two-launch thing. We're doing one on either side. Any of these boulders that are on the side where,

let's say we're doing it here and here, these guys are going to get vaporized. The only thing that you have to worry about would be boulders on the podes here. You can do telemetry between two, that's solved. They're just going to get shot out really quick by the converging shock waves. So that's what's going to

happen. Okay. Now I'm going to tell you that from an orbital mechanics point of view, that can still be very dangerous. Yes. Okay? Yeah. Much more next week as we close out our coverage of the Planetary Defense Conference. Planetary Radio is coverage of the Planetary Defense Conference.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the blindingly bright members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова