Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - LIFE Heads for Space Aboard Shuttle Endeavour

Episode Date: April 18, 2011

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Life Heads for Orbit, 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. Life is the living interplanetary flight experiment. With luck, it will leave for one of the moons of Mars later this year, but life will first get a dress rehearsal on the last flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour. We'll talk with two of the scientists that loaded a variety of microorganisms for this trip. Speaking of life, could it exist throughout the galaxy

on worlds like Saturn's frigid moon Titan? That's one of the topics we'll take up with Emily Lakdawalla. Bill Nye says that 50 years after Yuri Gagarin, commercial spaceflight is finally taking off. We'll wrap it all up with Bruce Betts and What's Up. Who's that celebrity random space fact performer? Don't forget your free tickets for Planetary Radio Live on Saturday, May 28,

are waiting for you at brownpapertickets.com. I hope you'll be able to join us in Pasadena for this show. Emily, let's start with this latest release of data from Cassini. Lots of nice stuff about moons. Yeah, there's always lots of gems to pick out of any Cassini data release. These happen four times a year. The Cassini team, all of the different instruments release all of their data from a period approximately a year ago to the planetary data system, which is NASA's repository for all of their space data from all of their space missions. And it's so much fun to just dig

through each archive every three months. It's like opening Christmas presents again to see what came out. And this particular data release had just an incredible number of really cool pictures of moons, which are my favorite from Cassini. So I had a lot of fun processing both close-up images of Dione and a nice high-res image of Janus and some other really unusual pictures like a thin crescent of Dione and some of these really cool images of ring waves, the waves that are excited in the rings by the tiny moons that orbit in the gaps inside them. And, of course, a lot of these photographic goodies are available in the blog. Let's jump over to the other story that really fascinated me. And not surprising, knowing that this has come from astrobiologist Chris McKay and an associate,

are we going to have to start talking about the liquid methane habitable zone? Yeah, that was an interesting phrase from this particular paper. The paper asked the question, you know, are there other titans across the galaxy? And you know, Titan is a very cold place. It's more likely that you're going to find cold worlds than Earth temperature terrestrial planets. And then another thing that might make Titans more common is the fact that there are smaller, cooler stars called red dwarfs are much more common than sun-like stars. And so what you end up with is an environment in various stellar systems across the galaxy that's much more likely to support planets that have liquid methane and raining methane and ethane, that kind of an environment rather than the watery environment

that we enjoy on Earth. And if you think that's the kind of environment that might support alien life, then, you know, we might need to be looking for alien life on Titans rather than Earth. There is one concept in there that I also want to call attention to, and that is this possibility of wandering Titans. Yeah, you know, Titan is a big moon, but it's pretty small on a planet scale. And so it's not inconceivable that there could be quite a few Titan-sized objects just wandering around the galaxy, which got tossed out of the stellar systems in which they formed as giant planets were migrating through the solar system, as we know happened in our own solar system. And so it's very likely that there are these random wandering planets. And it turns out that for some conditions, if you have a big enough

wandering planet that still has internal geological heat available, you could actually have a wandering planet not attached to a star that was warm enough for liquid methane. So if those kinds of life forms could exist on these kinds of planets, then they might not even need stars. Sounds like good reason to go back once again and visit that moon and maybe spend a little bit more time down on the surface. I agree. I can't wait to see a Titan surface mission that might even float on those titanium methane

seas. Emily, as always, thanks very much for joining us. 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 with a couple of scientists from the ATCC for a conversation about the Shuttle Life Experiment after we hear from Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here,

executive director of the Planetary Society. And last week was Yuri's night, the 50th anniversary of humans in orbit around the Earth. Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet era test pilot, was the first guy to orbit the Earth. He came back, spaceship was rattling a little bit, so he jumped out, guy to orbit the Earth. He came back. Spaceship was rattling a little bit, so he jumped out, parachuted to the ground. It stunned the world, and it was 50 years ago. Also last week, I went to the National Space Foundation Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, here in the United States, in North America. And it was different. I've been before, and it's mostly the military and traditional big aerospace companies like Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, people like that. Well, now there's also these commercial people.

There's Sierra Nevada, Orbital, Bigelow Space. And they've got some fantastic ideas to explore space with people in a more economical fashion. I mean, that's what it's about. They're building rockets and habitats for Earth orbit that will be literally less expensive than is traditionally done with the International Space Station and the other Mir space station, for example. So it's an exciting time just getting a feeling. First of all, the 50th anniversary, and then getting this feeling that commercial entities are entering the space business, I am very hopeful that soon humans will go back into space to new distant destinations. I hope you take a few moments and pause to think

that it was 50 years ago that humans first orbited the Earth, and think about all the weather satellites, communication satellites, all the news you watch that's gathered from the other side of the world, all the global positioning that you might use in your car or in your briefcase. All this comes from space exploration. And at this symposium, the world has joined in not just with governments participating, but with regular entrepreneurs. Oh, it's exciting. I got to fly. Bill Nye, but with regular entrepreneurs. Oh, it's exciting. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy.

Could life on Earth have originated on Mars? The panspermia hypothesis depends on the ability of microorganisms to survive vacuum, cold, and cosmic radiation on a trip to Earth. That ability will be tested when a tiny module loaded with a variety of bacterial and other species is mounted on a Russian sample return mission to one of the red planet's moons. Phobos Grunt is scheduled for launch later this year, but Space Shuttle Endeavour leaves for low-Earth orbit in just a few days. A fully loaded LIFE module is already on board. You can meet the microbes and learn much more

about shuttle life at planetary.org slash life. A key contributor to the experiment is the sprawling ATCC laboratory in Manassas, Virginia. That's where senior scientist Tim Lilburn and biologist Amy Smith recently joined me by phone for a conversation about life. Tim and Amy, I know you're sitting by the speakerphone there together at ATCC. First of all, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's a pleasure. It is a pleasure, as I have been told by Bruce when he goes back there to work with you folks. And this is not one of Bruce Bett's skill areas.

He's an astronomer, not a biologist. So I guess he's had a very interesting time seeing how things are done there. But before we get into Shuttle Life, Tim, if you could tell me a little bit about ATCC, which was not a facility that I knew much about, but you guys really have a reach that goes around the world. In fact, it's called the Global BioResource Center. That's right.

We're a bio-resource center, which means we collect and distribute materials that biologists need to do their research. And we hold quite a few items, all kinds of microorganisms and cell lines. And we distribute them, as you said, around the world. And have been doing this since 1925, more than 80 years. What is the bulk of the work there? It's certainly not preparing organisms for flights on space shuttles or to go to Mars's moon Phobos. preparing organisms for flights on space shuttles or to go to Mars's moon Phobos?

Nope. Mostly we prepare organisms to go to other countries or to locations within the United States. So there's a similarity there, although the journey into space is quite a bit longer and more exciting. Who do you work with? I mean, who are your typical clients? Well, I work in the bacteriology collection, and we work with microbiologists. What we usually do is we get contacted by them because they have a species that they want to share with the rest of the research community, and so they'll send it to us, and we distribute it to people who want it. That's the main role of our collection. On the whole, ATCC will do that for all kinds of different organisms.

Plus, we have a lot of knowledge and research materials that we also share, distribute. And does this go to industry, to the academic world, all of the above? All of the above. We sell things to industry for quality control. We sell things to academia for research and vice versa, academia and industry for quality control. I've been reading about the facility, and we will put up a link to a tour on the ATCC website, which is quite fascinating. I was also fascinated to see that ATCC operates as a non-profit. Yeah, that was how it was set up in 1925. It was set up for the convenience of the scientists by scientists,

and it's always been a non-profit. We try to keep our costs down so that the material can go to whoever needs it. Now, the one thing I couldn't find anyplace on the website is what HECC stands for. Does it stand for anything anymore? It stands for American Type Culture Collection, which goes back to the roots of the organization when they collected bacteria. The idea was for every species,

there's one organism that's designated as the type strain. And if you want to see if you have the same organism, you compare it to the type strain. Does that extend now to doing a lot of sort of comparative DNA research? Yes. The type strains are still considered to be the name bearers for a species, if you like. Having the genome sequences of tight strains has become a goal for biology. Do we see, and I promise we're going to get to shuttle life here, but this is all so very

fascinating, how many organisms now, obviously it's an increasing number, have we actually mapped the genomes of, particularly at the level of the microorganisms that you guys work with? I think there's about 1,200 genome-sequenced strains. Of course, there's multiple genome sequences for some of the more common ones like E. coli. And I think there's about 2,000, maybe 2,500 projects in the pipeline. Speaking of that pipeline, my guess is that not very many of those projects have anything to do with putting organisms in space. No, but that was one of the criteria for organism selection was that they should have their genome sequenced so that if someone wants to sequence organisms after they come back,

they'll have quite a bit of information to compare it with. How did you get involved? I mean, how did you first hear about Shuttle Life? Did it just come down as an assignment? I think the Planetary Society contacted ATCC, and then, yes, it came down basically as an assignment. Are you guys interested in this? Yes, we are.

It has been a long road toward both picking these organisms and designing the appropriate containment. This little disc, which I usually find one of the versions of, one of the prototypes on Bruce Bett's desk when I'm at the Society headquarters. Have you guys been in on that from the beginning? Well, no. We weren't part of the module design. We had some input on what the bacteria were going to go into, because it was a question of whether

it was going to be possible to get the bacteria in there, I guess. Pretty much designed before we were contacted. Other than this criterion that their genomes be mapped, and the other factor that you've already talked about, how were these organisms selected? Was there some attention being paid to having a variety of life forms? I think one of the big criteria was we wanted to select some organisms that we thought wouldn't possibly survive exposure to cosmic radiation. And so we've picked some pretty tough bugs to go on the trip. Another consideration was, have they been part of a space experiment before?

Certainly all of these or close relatives of these have. And so there was some body of data about some of these at least? Yeah, yeah. I know the Bacillus subtilis, for example, is a real space traveler. It was in on the very first flight in 1966. The first flight to take up biological samples? I don't know if it was the first to take up biological samples because, you know, those chimps and dogs that went up there.

That's true, yeah. That's Tim Lilburn, senior research scientist at ATCC in Virginia. He and colleague Amy Smith will tell us more about life in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system.

It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 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. Tim Lilburn and Amy Smith of ATCC are vital participants in the Planetary Society's Shuttle Life and Phobos Life projects.

LIFE stands for Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. The first LIFE module, a 56mm disc carrying 31 tiny sample tubes, is already on board Space Shuttle Endeavour. Tim, an ATCC senior research scientist, helped select the microbes that are about to head for low Earth orbit in those tubes. What is that organism that you just mentioned once again? Bacillus subtilis. Tell us about it and some of the other critters that are going up. Bacillus subtilis is a pretty common organism. Its survival strategy, I guess you could call it, is to form spores, which goes into a very like a resting state with an extra thick membrane around it that helps it survive drying or

radiation or other insults. I like that, insults. And this is not an uncommon strategy for bacteria, is it? No, there are other spore formers, but it's not the only strategy, that's for sure. Another organism on the tryptinococcus, radiodurans, it is extremely radiation resistant and resistant to drying as well, but its strategy seems to be have lots of copies of all your genes and have a really good DNA repair system. Any other organisms you want to call attention to? And aren't there at least one or two that are a bit beyond the level of bacteria? Yeah, there's the good old water bear, the tardigrades.

They're really cool. They're from a collaborator in Sweden, Ingmar Jansson, Kronstadt University. And they're kind of amazing because they are multicellular organisms. They're visible with the naked eye, and they are very resistant to drying. Their survival strategy involves drying and drying actually causes damage to DNA that's similar to the damage caused by radiation. So they're probably quite radiation resistant as well and I think it's just amazing something that big can survive a trip into space

unprotected essentially. It would be nice to think they might have something to teach us about surviving in that environment. Amy Smith, let me turn to you. You are, as I understand it, the person who is actually responsible for getting these organisms into their little tubes. Yes, and they're very little tubes. What kinds of tools do you use? I mean, I've seen on the tour video, it looks like you're surrounded by robots there, but don't imagine those come in too handy in this case.

No. We had to be a little bit innovative in working with tubes this small. I don't know, just our hands and no robots, or even the pipettes and things that we use for our normal vials, which are quite bigger, wouldn't work. What goes in? I mean, is it just the organism, or do they get any kind of nutrient for their trip, or are they on their own in there? Most of the organisms have been freeze-dried,

so all of the moisture has been removed, and they are in nutrient media and a cryoprotectant. When we say a cryoprotectant, is that just because they're going to be exposed to the cold of space? No, it's how we store the bacteria here over long term. It's just our normal method of freeze-drying the bugs for long-term storage. I see. Here you were working with this actual little capsule that is going to be, I guess by now, is on the space shuttle on Endeavor ready to go into space. I mean, was that any more exciting than some of the other stuff you do there?

It is exciting. It's a little bit out of the box from the normal work that we do. So, I mean, it'll be exciting on April 29th when it takes off to know that something that we handled in our hands are taking off into space. What happens after Endeavor returns? Is this coming back to you guys to be decanted and analyzed? It is. back to you guys to be decanted and analyzed?

It is. This is an opportunity to allow us to practice processing these vials so that when the Phobos mission returns a few years from now, we'll have experience doing this before. So we will be counting the amount of cells that survive the trip, and then we will be characterizing them to see if they behave in a certain way that they should behave. Tim, or Amy, I mean, you're going to be doing that with Endeavor. As you said, this is, in a sense, a practice run for the Phobos mission. Do you have any thoughts about what to expect?

I mean, do you think that, particularly on that much longer trip to Mars and back, that you might actually see some changes in these organisms? It's hard to predict. I mean, the environment that they're going to be in is pretty harsh. So I would expect that there's going to be changes, definitely, because if they get hit by ionizing radiation, it's going to cause DNA damage. Because they're freeze-dried, their metabolic rate is going to be extremely low. They won't have much energy to actually repair the damage. So it'll be

interesting to see what happens when we give them something to eat and get them woken up and growing again. That is going to be fascinating, and I certainly hope that we can return and talk to you when we reach that stage initially with the return of shuttle life on this relatively short trip on Endeavor. And then later, if all goes well, with that launch on Phobos Grunt out to Phobos and back, a much, much longer trip. Thank you so much, both of you, for taking a few minutes to talk with us. Thank you. Our pleasure. Amy Smith is a

biologist at ATCC. That's where Tim Lilburn is a senior scientist, senior research scientist. They have joined us from the ATCC headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, where our friend Bruce Betts makes regular visits. We'll be visiting with him once again in just a few moments when we get to this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Batts is here, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Why? Because it's time for What's Up, and we're in your office, and you know what that means. I can give you your gift. Yay! I almost forgot. It's here in my pocket. Here it is. There you go. Yay!

Because whenever I go to JPL, I have to buy Bruce a gift. I almost forgot. It's here in my pocket. Here it is. There you go. Ooh, yay! Ooh, it's got... it's a little... Because whenever I go to JPL, I have to buy Bruce a gift. Rockets and Stars and M.E.R. on the bag. It's a JPL Mars marble! Yay! Say hello, Mars marble. Anyway, now that I'm confused and happy with my gift, shall we move on to the night sky? Something exciting has happened, Matt. Something that hasn't happened since december of 1966 something you've been waiting for t

pixodus has blown up there's a recurring nova and this is the star system called t pixodus and it hasn't gone crazy since december 1966 it has now increased in magnitude from 15.4 to at least 8.5. So it's gotten gajillions of times brighter. You still can't see it with your naked eye, but I point it out because it's a weird thing. And you actually will reach the point where you can see it with binoculars if you use a finder. And it's just kind of cool that it happens. It's got a regular sun type star that's having material periodically sucked off it by a white dwarf. And when it does, then it makes all sorts of boom. And this is a nova, not a supernova.

This is indeed a nova, although it is possible that the white dwarf will accrue enough mass to go unstable and form a supernova at some point. The universe is an exciting place. It is, and it's really good we're not in most of it. Back in our solar system, Saturn's the one easy-to-see planet these days, rising in the east in the evening, setting in the west before dawn. You can still check out Venus slightly before dawn, very low in the east. And the Lyrids meteor shower peaks on April 26th, but it's really pretty lame.

That's a technical term. But theoretically, you will get a slight increase in meteors around midnight. And if you're into such things, go for it. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1972 that Apollo 16 landed on the moon. And it is the 40th anniversary of the first space station, Salyut 1. And Apollo 16, I happen to know, thanks to our listeners, and we'll find out why in a moment, carried with it nematodes to the surface of the moon. Or maybe they stayed in the command module. I don't know. Maybe they couldn't coach them into the LM. There were various things flown as part of a package on first Apollo 16 and then Apollo 17, many of them provided by some of our colleagues

that we're now working with in Germany on Shuttle Life and Phobos Life. Five pocket mice, one of them didn't survive. Ilya Schwartz sent us that. Moving right along, it's time for that special part of the segment, and I think we've got an exciting someone to do this for us. We've had a number of different people do random space fact for us. Here is our first celebrity random space fact. Random space fact. And that was our friend Bob Picardo. Bob Picardo, otherwise known as the emergency medical hologram on Star Trek Voyager and many, many, many other regular roles on television and in the movies. Well, thank you, Bob. I'm kind of jealous now. I'm a little worried about whether I do get to do it again, right? They're just guest stars. They're just guest stars. You own it. Okay, thank you. Alright, random space fact. International Space Station, it has an internal

pressurized volume that is very similar to that of a Boeing 747. That's quite fascinating, and that is a good deal more volume than I would have thought. Well, now we can explain all the nebatoids, mice, and other stuff. Oh my. In our trivia contest, we asked you what were the first animals in space? How'd we do, Matt? This got a huge response. People just came out in droves. They flew to their computers to send us this answer. Random.org chose as our winner this week, Bjorn Gedda. Bjorn has not won for about two and a half years. He is a regular

listener, regularly enters the contest from his home in Sweden. And he said in 1946, now there's some argument about this. Most people said 1947. The USA launched a V2 rocket with fruit flies and seeds to check for effects of radiation. So the very first animals purposely flown into space, so far as we know, fruit flies. Indeed, fruit flies. The fruit flies have it. Now, actually, the goal was just to fly a banana in space, but they ended up with fruit flies.

Funny you should mention that, because Bjorn sent one of my favorite Groucho Marx quotes, and here it is. You know, time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Nah. Say the secret word. Well, that's good.

That's good. You got any more fruit fly jokes? No. Well, we actually do. Funny you should mention. Keith Bowden, he just put, help me, help me, which is for you Vincent Price fans out there.

The rest of you, look it up. Yes, fruit flies from White Sands, New Mexico, on a suborbital journey. All right, let us move on to the next trivia contest. What was the first spacecraft asteroid flyby? Give me the name of the spacecraft and the name of the asteroid and the year it happened. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

Got till the 25th of April, April 25 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer and you might win a Planetary Radio t-shirt as I have on today. Cool. Well, everybody go out there, look up in the night sky and think about your little marble just like I'm thinking about mine.

Think about marbles and what you can do with them and not to put them up your nose. Thank you, and good night. That's a big red marble. Don't do it. I can do it. Don't do it. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

He joins us every week here for What's Up, and it's not pretty. Planetary Radio 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