Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Landing On Mars With JPL's Matt Golombek

Episode Date: June 17, 2013

Join us at JPL for a conversation with Mars landing site selection leader Matt Golombek. Matt is also now Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover program, and shares the great news from Opportunity about its latest discovery. Emily Lakdawalla presents a guest blog entry that features splendid images from Mars Express, while Bill Nye traces the convoluted ways of space science funding in Washington. Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan are at a legendary Pasadena eatery for this week’s What’s Up. Cosmic hot dog, anyone?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Landing on Mars with Matt Golombek, 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. We'll head for the Jet Propulsion Lab for a visit with the man who has helped choose where to set down on Mars for nearly two decades. Matt Golombek will talk about this effort, along with the latest discovery by Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and InSight, the next Mars lander. Emily Lakdawalla is coming right up, followed by our weekly visit with Bill Nye. And out at the other end of the show waits Bruce Betts with the dog of his dreams. Hot dog, that is.

Emily, good to be talking with you once again. This piece put up by your colleague, one of our guest bloggers, Bill Dunford. Tell us about this. Yeah, Bill put up this great piece celebrating 10 years in space for Mars Express. Mars Express is the European Space Agency's spacecraft at Mars, and it's equipped with a couple of different cameras and a radar system that can see beneath the surface. And it's really kind of wonderful how this mission has fit in

amongst all of the pieces of the NASA missions that are at Mars to help build up this amazing picture that we now have of Mars as a dynamic planet, both in the present and in the past. And the photos that Bill has selected really show that off. He starts with one of my favorite space cameras. It's the visual monitoring camera on Mars Express. It's actually quite a crummy little camera. It was only stuck on the spacecraft in order to watch Beagle 2 depart. And then it wasn't used for a couple of years. And when they turned it back on again, almost on a lark, just to see, you know, does this thing still work? And what would it get?

It gets global views of Mars. It's the only camera in space right now that does that, except for, say, Hubble. And we see Mars with all of its weather and its changing seasons. It's just a wonderful camera. So then he also has this image, which I have to scroll through. It looks like it's about a mile. Actually, it probably covers much more than a mile on the surface of Mars. It's really beautiful. It's pretty amazing. And the Mars Express images from the high-resolution stereo camera have this strange and kind of wonderful atmospheric quality to them because of the unique way that the camera works. It gets its color images by looking both ahead and behind of the spacecraft as its orbit takes

it across Mars. And because of that, it sees through a bit more atmosphere than many other images at Mars do. And this isn't necessarily a good thing for science, but it gives a much more atmospheric ethereal quality to the images. This particular one is combined with some elevation data so that you can see how much lower the crater and the channel floors are than the landscape around it. And it just shows you this landscape on Mars that is both impact cratered, meaning it's very old and unchanged for a long time, but also has all of these channels that are carved both by tectonics and volcanism and even probably some water activity. So again, it's this combination that Mars has of being both static and dynamic. Just say a word about our guest bloggers in general and Bill in particular.

Our new website, not so new, it's actually more than a year old now, but it's allowed me to feature so many more voices from all over the internet, many of them amateurs, some of them professionals. Bill is just a longtime member, I believe a charter member of the Planetary Society, who had his own blog and has been posting these amazing photos, the kind of thing that I love to do when I have the time, just to dig up wonderful views of space that haven't been appreciated before. We have bloggers like Jason Davis, we have scientists like Sarah Horst, who just share their stories. And I'm not

doing as much writing as I used to, but I am very involved in the selection and editing of all of the people who do post their stories on our website. And I'm very pleased with the work that's being done there. And that's why Emily is our senior editor at the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. Emily, thanks very much. and I will see you on stage for Planetary Radio Live for next week's show. Looking forward to it, Matt. She is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Up next, the boss, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye.

Welcome back, Bill. I guess we are returning to the machinations there within the Beltway in Washington between Congress and NASA. Well, it goes, it's a multi-step process. NASA requests money. Congress authorizes money. Then Congress appropriates money against the maximum authorized. And then NASA distributes the money on the fine scale, the details, the line items, and what's called the operating plan.

Now, there's been a lot of discussion this week about the operating plan and who's going to get what, but basically planetary science stands to get cut $300 million. Now, this is, in a sense, against the will of Congress, which is, in a sense, against the will of the people. And so that's why the Planetary Society advocates for everybody to write to your congressman representative. If you're not in the U.S., we have a means that you can get in touch with these people, the heads of the committees and stuff. It's a frustrating thing because our claim, and I don't think this is an extraordinary one, is planetary science is what NASA does best. Nobody else in the world can land a rover on Mars. Nobody can send a mission in orbit

around Jupiter or the mission that's on its way to Pluto or the messenger mission around Mercury and so on. Why cut that? That's the one thing that's working. So, of course, the asteroid retrieval thing is in the mix somehow. But all that aside, Chinese space agency just put another woman in orbit on the way to their space station, yes? Yeah, they definitely did with a couple of guys. And it's an auspicious time for another woman to be in space because this is such a great anniversary for the first, well, the first Russian, first Soviet woman and the first American. Was that 50 years ago? 50 years ago for Valentina Tarascova and 30 years,

of course, for Sally Ride. And so I just reflect, of course, on my mother, who really was on the vanguard of what I guess for a general term would be the woman's movement or getting women get equal pay for the same amount of work. This is really quite gratifying. However, perhaps frustrating that it's taking this long to get this kind of equality. But on the other hand, the longest journey starts with but a single step. Speaking of people in orbit, we want to go out farther and deeper into space. We want to find new adventures. the humans are women, so half the scientists ought to be women, and why not half the astronauts be women? And we'll go have a look out there farther and deeper and find out more about what I love to call our place in space. Matt, thanks for taking the time to listen. Everybody, if you're inclined, check out the political machinations that are going on in the world's largest space agency, and we'll see if we can change the course of history.

Thanks, Matt. To say nothing to the world. Thank you, Bill. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Back in a moment with one of those planetary science explorers, one of the best, Matt Golombek's laugh may be nearly as famous as his geology skills and his ability to guide the choice of landing sites on Mars, finding just the right balance of safety and science on the red planet. This senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab

is also the Mars Exploration Program landing site scientist. He was the project scientist for the brilliant Mars Pathfinder mission, and now he is also the project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Program. I'm always happy to visit JPL, and that's where I went to spend a few minutes with Matt just a few days ago. Matt, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It is a great pleasure. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So I was talking a couple of days ago, actually as in last week's show, Emily Lakdawalla, my colleague and I, were talking about opportunity,

continuing to do amazing things on the Red Planet. And she talked about 10 years ago, almost exactly, standing with you and a bunch of other people at the Kennedy Space Center, watching that spacecraft leave for Mars. And what an exciting experience. What a tremendous event that was in her life. I imagine you feel the same way. Oh, yeah. Both rovers have actually been part of our lives now for over a decade, and some of us worked on the development for three years before that.

So it's getting to be almost as old as my kids. Did you, even for a moment back then, 10 years ago, suspect that you'd still be talking about science coming from these machines? No. I mean, the projections were that by Sol 70, there'd be enough dust on the panels that we wouldn't be able to move, that by Sol 80, we wouldn't even be able to take a picture, and by Sol 90, we couldn't communicate. So the fact that we're still going after nine years is unprecedented.

So thank the gods of Mars for dust devils. Dust devils and other things, too, that may be removing the dust from the panels, right? You have been such a big part of selecting landing sites for our Mars visitors. I mean, ever since Pathfinder. How do you think we've done with the site selection? What grade would you give us? A plus. But that's tough because you've asked me to grade myself. I understand. You're a little bit biased. But still, I mean, it's gone pretty well, hasn't it? So the fact that I still have the job after how many years implies it's gone pretty well. And, in fact, it's been a rather amazing progression from Pathfinder when we really did an educated guess.

We had so little information. We had no images at the scale of the lander. No Mars reconnaissance orbit. There hadn't been any new data since Viking 20 years before. No, there hadn't been any new data since Viking 20 years before. And the only thing we had was a better understanding of how the Viking data from the landers fit into the global view of Mars. So we could try to make correlations and inferences. And from that to go to then the two MER landers, where we really had more information. We had an MGS and we had the Mars orbiter camera at about three meters per pixel.

We made much better guesses, I would say, but we were still a little bit uncertain. And so my proudest moment was when Opportunity landed, and that was our first lander in the relatively dust-free areas of Mars. And the prediction was that this would be a place that would be dark-colored. There would be no atmospheric dust on the ground. And I still recall the first image looking down the camera, down the mass cam assembly. It was still – it hadn't been unfurled yet. And there was this dark surface that exactly as we had predicted. Not bad, kind of a bullseye. And then from that to what we encountered with Phoenix, which where we didn't quite have MRO at

the start. And there was quite a bit of falafel about finding a location that was rock-free enough for that lander. But by the end when we landed it was pretty close to what we expected from those high-rise images. And now let's take us to MSL. There were just no surprises at all. I mean outside of not knowing you know exactly what the rocks were going to be, we landed in a place that was predicted to be rock free. The closest rock was, you know, 800 meters away. And you looked at that plane after we landed, there was no rocks there. Everything was actually as we expected. So we feel that with the current tools we have from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,

that we can do a really good job of addressing all the important engineering constraints that a landing site requires. And these landers, you're dropping them down so much more accurately than we used to be able to. With MSL, the ellipse that we worked through during the process was 20 by 25 kilometers. And the best we did when we started MERS, they were in the 300-kilometer range to 150 kilometers. And so that's the difference in the technology between ballistic entry and having a guided entry where you actually fly out the errors in the atmosphere, which is what MSL did. MSL at the end, its ellipse was down to 1520 by 8. It was teeny, teeny, teeny.

So we like the small ellipses because then it's better, easier to find places that are smooth, flat, and in quotes, boring, because that's what you want for your engineering. And you can place them next to real exciting science areas. I'm going to come back to this landing site selection process, but let's really talk about opportunity now, because it's only a few days since the most recent press conference that announced not just the next phase in this portion of this mission, but really a pretty remarkable discovery. I mean, what is special about this rock called Esperance?

So Esperance is a rock made of clay. Just to carry a bridge to the previous conversation, this is like a new landing site. We just landed in a completely new area. It's Milwaukee. It's from the most ancient era on Mars. So that's the first era in which the water on Mars, where we thought it was warmer and wetter, was neutral in pH. That is, you could drink it without tasting bad. Whereas, basically, what Opportunity has been driving through for the past 35 kilometers has been dominated by a younger, just younger than this Milwaukeean period, in which the waters were incredibly acid-rich.

They were as acid-rich as your battery acid in your car battery. Nobody wants to drink that. And although there are unusual things that actually live in such water, it's not generally considered to be the kind of stuff that life would start at, not thought to be an incubator. So we finally, the first mission ever to get ground truth of what is almost certainly water that coursed through this rock and changed, basically chemically evolved these minerals from the previous probably igneous minerals to things that require water to form. And these are clay minerals.

And the mineral we found is probably montmorillonite, which is an aluminum silica clay. And even our tools aren't quite as good as they used to be. But they point directly at this sort of a composition. And there's two things that are so cool about this. One is, hey, we're in a totally new landing site, and we're the only mission to be looking at the Milwaukee in this earliest phase on Mars, and to look at what the environment was like. But the second thing is we went there because the remote sensing data said this was the spot to go. So we had weak spectra from CRISM, our orbital imaging spectrometer, that said this was the pixel where we would find clay. And we went there, and there it was.

So that gives you an idea of how good our site selection is now. We can use tools like that to pinpoint locations, and then we can go on the ground and we can find them. That's a remarkable achievement. That is really remarkable, yeah. Okay, so neutral pH water, didn't really find the water, just the evidence that it existed. Potable, drinkable, but still no evidence one way or another whether there might have been at one point little mars crobes, I think my boss Bill Nye calls them, we'd have to chlorinate that water. Honestly, Opportunity would have no way to know whether

there were biogenic elements in that rock. We don't have the tool set to do that. That's something that, you know, Curiosity could do with its laboratory instruments. And in a sense, we're from two eras before, two launch opportunities, three launch opportunities before. These are sort of ancient creaky beasts that are well past middle age, and things don't work. So our mineralogy instruments are long gone, our Mossbauer spectrometer and our mini-tests. And that's a blow to us because now we simply have our imaging system and our chemistry. And it's actually a testament to how resilient we are

to be able to still say with some confidence that we have clay minerals in this in this area even with the tools we have and it's a really a statement about how good old-fashioned geology field work can get you an awful long way and we just in the right place at the right time to be able to address this new fundamental science. That's Matt Golombek of JPL. We'll spend some more time with him after the break, and we'll learn why some call him the czar. 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. I'm Matt Kaplan. Among other things, Matt Golombek is the project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Program at JPL.

the project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Program at JPL. He was telling us before the break about the big new discovery by Opportunity of ancient clay formations that indicate the long-ago presence of drinkable, neutral pH water. It's a momentous find for this little rover that left for the Red Planet almost exactly 10 years ago. Aren't there parallels now between the work that Opportunity is doing and what's happening a ways away with Curiosity? Yeah, I would say. Now, we'd have to go back and try to figure out exactly when the downlink from the Chem Min came back to show that they were clays that they had come up with in their rock.

But I'm saying they're pretty darn close as to whether we beat them. up with in their rock, but I'm saying they're pretty darn close as to whether we beat them. And it certainly was an opportunity's fault that she landed in this acid prison for the first 35 kilometers. So I'd say we're right up there in terms of dibs of first to find clays on the ground. And it's always nice to have corroboration of your data, right? Well, I think it's tremendously interesting. It's saying here's two locations that basically we found clay. That's the remote sensing says there's lots of these locations in the ancient highlands of Mars. And if you pick your place correctly, there's an awful lot to be learned there.

So Cape York, been an awfully nice place to stay for a good long while. But now we're off to, is it, am I pronouncing it correctly, Solander Point? Solander Point. Although I'm guessing we could probably pronounce it differently. I'll go with you guys, whatever you guys come up with. But this apparently is another very intriguing, very promising target. Why? Actually, scientifically, not so important as it is engineering-wise, although it's in the direction of our next big science target, which is Cape Tribulation, which is just south of Solander Point. And the reason we need to go to Solander Point is our panels have been dusty,

and they keep getting dustier. So although they get cleaned on the short term, there's been this monotonic increase, if you will, in the dust on the panels. And we can't survive another winter unless we are tilted towards the sun. We need a 15 degree north slope. And Solander Point is the biggest 15 degree north slope. That would in a sense be like Endurance or even Victoria at Duck Bay, where we were on a north facing slope for the entire winter. We didn't even, you didn't know it because we were tilted and we could move around and drive and do whatever we wanted. And if you have a rover on Mars with wheels that move, it's really not what you want to do is to sit stuck in one spot on this teeny little itty bitty 15 degree slope that you can't move on. It's not that we didn't do interesting stuff there, but, you know, look, we have wheels and the idea is to move around. stuff there. But, you know, look, we have wheels and the idea is to move around. So the intent is to get to Solander Point to be on a big area that's tilted 15 degrees north to enable us to

do science throughout the winter. That is, we can move around on that slope and investigate different things. And then once the winter's over, we can continue our traverse south to Cape Tribulation. we can continue our traverse south to Cape Tribulation. And what's so interesting about that is Cape York was our first landfall on this ancient Milwaukeean crater. But the real signatures for, I would say, significant occurrences of these clay minerals are at Cape Tribulation, which is further south. And the hope there is to really hit the mother load of the clay and get broader expanses of these rocks that are outcropping to enable us to better define the environment that you know how did they were these laid down in a lake water was this underground in which

liquid water coursed through the ground and replaced the, what was the environment? How did these things get there? What can we say more about that aqueous environment that we probably can't from our itty-bitty exposure at Esperance? Is there a fair comparison between Tribulation and some of the sites that really are driving through the southwestern deserts, for me anyway, so beautiful because you see these outcroppings and layer after layer after layer. We don't know. So we do have some initial images from the ground that show interesting possible layering on the north side of Solander Point. We haven't seen layers from orbit in Cape Tribulation yet, but we certainly see what looks like fairly steep exposures on the inward rim of this massif,

if you will, towards the Endeavor Crater. So the hope is that when we get there, we'll be able to see exposed rock and better, you know, better be able to investigate. You're already at more than 36 kilometers, nearly 23 miles, nearing this record that's been held by that Soviet lunar rover for a long time. The years have taken their toll, not just on the instruments, as you've mentioned, but even on Opportunity's joints, a little arthritis there, I guess. You know, how much life does the old girl have left in her? You know, I would say the fact that she survived nine years with just, I would say, minor aging ailments.

I don't see any reason to expect she won't go another bunch of years. any reason to expect she won't go another bunch of years. So we're all optimistic, and we'll all be horrendously sad if and when she says goodbye to us. I promised another of my colleagues, Casey Dreyer, that I would bring up the next Mars lander with you, and that is this lander InSight that looks a good deal like something we've seen before, Phoenix, but carries a very special tool. And again, you are very much involved in deciding where this spacecraft is going to touch down.

How's that going, that process? So the InSight mission is a Discovery class mission that was competed among everyone in the community, and we were overjoyed to win the competition. It's to place an inexpensive lander that is a rebuild of the Phoenix lander spacecraft that went to the Northern Plains several years back. It's proven hardware. Proven hardware, only the payload's very different, and it carries two real instruments, a quite capable seismometer that is deployed to the ground,

and it has a windshield that keeps it sort of environmentally quiet, if you will, as well as a heat flow probe, which is a little self-propelled mole that sort of hammers its way down beneath the ground, hopefully getting three to five meters deep beneath the surface, that not only measures the thermal conductivity of the soil as it goes down, but measures the heat flow over a full seasonal cycle, a full year, and that would then allow us to derive the amount of heat that's coming out of the ground. So this is really the first mission that looks at the interior. And if you think about it, you know, Mars is this big planet, and we're looking at these little itty bitty places on the surface. But in some sort of global sense, you'd like to have some idea of what the interior is like.

How thick is the crust? How thick is the mantle? Is the core liquid? And could it still be convecting, in fact? These are the kinds of questions that we can answer with this geophysical package. In addition, it has one additional instrument, which is really the telecom system. It's a precision tracking system. And this goes back to one of my first loves is Pathfinder.

One of our results from Pathfinder that we didn't even know we could do when we started the mission was that by simply tracking the spacecraft carefully from Earth, you could define its location quite precisely, because that spins. From that, you can derive quite well the pole of rotation. That pole precesses around, okay, just like the Earth does, and the precession is determined by the internal mass distribution of the planet. So by tracking the InSight lander for a year, we'll be able to tell quite well how thick the crust, the mantle, the core, the density distribution within, and whether or not we actually have a nutation which would result from a liquid outer core.

So that's pretty important basic stuff to learn about Mars. And it really fills in this sort of missing piece about our knowledge about the red planet. Is InSight then going to tell us not just more about Mars, but more about maybe our own planet and other planets? Yeah. So Mars is, as we say in our biz, the Goldilocks planet. So it's not too big and it's not too little. So the big terrestrial planets like the Earth and Venus are so big and they had so much heat from accretion and differentiation, and they've been so active throughout their geologic histories that they've destroyed any evidence of their early history. So there's no ancient rocks. They've all been churned up, and there's mostly very young rocks on both of those planets. The other extreme are Mercury and the Moon, which have rather undistinguished geologic histories that really didn't last much beyond several billion years ago. They weren't quite big enough to have enough heat to hold on to doing geology, if you will, throughout its history.

Mars is just intermediate in size, just the right size, that it's been active enough to have terrains that cover the entire history of the solar system on its surface available for looking at, but not so active that they destroyed all the early ones. And that means we have a sample of the early differentiation of these terrestrial planets. It really tells about the starting building blocks and how you get the iron differentiated into the core, what you leave for the mantle, where the water goes, all of those sort of fundamental questions are the kinds of things that we're trying to answer with InSight. So it's a pretty exciting project to work on. You always sound like a very happy geologist.

Are you looking forward to continuing to explore this planet? If you like doing planetary science and you like working with the world's absolutely best engineers on the entire planet, making maybe the most complicated thing that humanity builds to go and discover something new about a neighboring world. What's not to be happy about? It's one of those questions that I was pretty sure I knew the answer to. Matt, thank you very much. You're quite welcome. It really is great to have you back.

Matt Gollenbeck, he picked up from NASA the Exceptional Service Medal in 2012. He's a senior research scientist at JPL. He is the Mars Exploration Program landing site scientist, has been doing that for 13 years now. He's a co-investigator on InSight that we just talked about. Also now the project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover project. One of my favorites though, you have to tell me, is Czar an official NASA classification? No, I don't think so. Oh man, I'm not sure the other theme group leads that would actually call them. So we're basically a scheduling czar. Okay.

Well, there you go. Geology science theme group czar from ever since 2002. Thank you. It's a pleasure to meet my first czar as well. We're going to meet, he's not the czar. He's sort of a prince here at the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts. He'll be up with our What's Up segment for this week in just a moment. Boldly going where public radio has never gone before, this is What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Boldly going where public radio has never gone before. This is What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are, tell them where we are. We're at the Dog House restaurant in Pasadena. That would be Dog House. And we just had our dogs, and they were delicious. Very tasty. It's a great place.

We asked them a long time ago if we could do What's Up here, and they said, sure, yeah, what the hell. We're just not going to turn down the music for you. So here we are talking over the music. Tell us, what's up Bruce? They actually said no, but we're hiding in the bag. We've got in the evening sky low in the west, we've got Jupiter, not Jupiter, Venus. Venus looking super bright low in the west and also you can check out right near Venus is Mercury. Mercury's dropping down towards the horizon, but you can watch it go close past Venus from one night to the next. It'll be lovely.

You can check out Saturn near the moon on June 20th. We move on to this week in space history. This week, 30 years ago, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Former contributor to this radio show. May she rest in peace. Our thoughts are with her and all she's touched, which is a lot. Also, 1908, big explosion,

Tunguska, Siberia. Big boom. Boom. Yeah, okay. So, we move on to random space fact. We should have gotten Sean behind the counter to do that. Maybe next time. So, Sedna, a weird object in a very long orbit out in the outer solar system,

even when it approaches its perihelion, its closest point to the sun. In 2076, the sun would appear merely as a bright star in its sky, only 100 times brighter than the full moon as seen from Earth, and too far away to be visible as a disc to the naked eye if you were hanging out on Sedna. Sedna goes all the way out 11, has an 11,400 year period. Goes out to 976 times the Earth-Sun distance. We live in a big place, big neighborhood. We do live in a big neighborhood or a little neighborhood in a big place depending on how

you look at it. Speaking of neighborhoods, we move on to the trivia contest. And we ask you the all-important question, how many jellyfish flew on the space shuttle flight STS-40? How'd we do, Matt? Didn't they swim? They didn't fly. Well, they flew and swam. They swam while they flew. How'd we do? We had a lot of entries. I think one of the reasons we had so many, of course, is that this is the contest where we're

giving away the HD space selfie from Planetary Resources, the people who eventually want to mine asteroids but are planning to fly the ARCID 100 telescopes, including that public telescope. And they've got that Kickstarter campaign going right now that the

Planetary Society has a piece of. So kudos, thank you to Chris Lewicki for making this HD space selfie available. To our winner, who is Christian Peele. Christian Peele of San Jose, California. He said that there were about 2,400 jellyfish on that space shuttle. They were. That's close enough. 2,400, 2,500. One source says 2,478.

Yeah, we got that exact number from quite a few people. So, Christian, congratulations. I had a whole bunch of other funny comments here. Did you want to add something? No, I just want to hear the funny jellyfish comments. There were a ton. I'm surprised nobody said jellyfish on a shuttle. Is that anything like snakes on a plane? But here's Stephen Porter. He he said appropriately for space travel they were moon jellies how appropriate voitek navaleck voitek this is a little gross but but accurate he says ever wondered how a

jellyfish might behave like in microgravity when out of On land, they look like phlegm, but in zero-g. They look like floating phlegm. I suppose that's actually true. Adam Brown said, more jellyfish than people have gone to space. That just seems wrong. Yeah, but they were little jellyfish. Here's my favorite. This came from Kurt Lewis.

He says, jellyfish are great, but I would have taken crawfish. Boiled in a gumbo at the end of the mission? Mmm, good. Tasty and so good for you. Do they serve those? I think they have a gumbo dog here at the dog house. I'm not sure. We move on to the next trivia contest inspired by a question I was asked by an elementary school student this last week. How many Plutos would fit inside Jupiter? If you squished them up, how many Plutos would fit inside Jupiter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to enter. That's fascinating. You have until the 24th of June, June 24, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

And you know what we're going to give people? The winner of this one will get the first to get in the brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt. Be the first on your planet. Wow. That's cool. I may answer. Say goodnight, Bruce. All right, everybody.

Go out there, look out in the night sky, and think about maple syrup, drenched scrambled eggs on a hot dog with bacon and king's hawaiian rolls i am not kidding folks he just had that and it's lunchtime he's bruce betts the director of projects for the planetary society joining me here at the doghouse for what's up planetary radio is produced by the planetary society in pasadena california and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the Mars Happy members of the Planetary Society. Join us next week for Planetary Radio Live! Clear skies!