Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - LightSail Triumphant! A Mission Press Conference

Episode Date: June 16, 2015

After a roller coaster ride that included a maddening eight-day silence, the LightSail test mission finally achieved all of its major goals. Leaders of the mission team gathered on June 10th to take questions from the media, and share their thoughts and emotions with the general public. Today’s show presents highlights of that briefing. Emily Lakdawalla is seeing things on Pluto, and she’s not alone. Bruce Betts takes Mat Kaplan on a walk in space during this week’s What’s Up segment.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LightSail Triumphant, 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. After taking the world and its technical team on an emotional roller coaster ride, the low Earth orbit test of a tiny CubeSat, known as LightSail, was declared a success. We'll listen to highlights of a press conference that included many of the major players, including Bill Nye. Out at the other end of the show is Bruce Betts with this week's What's Up segment. We begin with senior editor Emily Lakdawalla, who has a brand new and intriguing view of Pluto,

the best ever seen by humans. Closer and closer to Pluto, Emily, what is the news this week? The news is that we really are seeing features on Pluto that we haven't seen with any instrument before. And lo and behold, it's a line, it's a canali on Pluto. Okay, now that's a pretty charged term. We don't want to make the mistake that Percival Lowell did. No, that's right. But I think it's really awesome that our images of Pluto that are beginning to come into focus are kind of recapitulating the history of exploration of the planets. When we first developed instruments that could see features on the surfaces of other worlds, we didn't see them very well. And they looked like lines to us, and people even called them canali. And later on, we found out that's not what they were. And it's happening

again here with Pluto. We see the first feature you can spot on New Horizons images of Pluto looks like a dark line across the surface. I think it's great. But as we get closer over the next month, leading up to the flyby, we're going to see so much better. Now tell me about this. You call him an image processing magician who did this work. How did he do it? It's not actually terribly complicated. It's the kind of analysis that astronomers do all the time where you take multiple images and then you stack them together. And by stacking them, you can tease more resolution out of the image than you could get out of just a single picture. It's a pretty common operation, and he sees this stripe on the surface of Pluto. The thing is that New Horizons has gotten closer

in the last couple of days, and you can actually start picking out this stripe with the naked eye on a single image now. So it's really getting exciting. And this is, how do you say his name, Bjorn Johnson? Bjorn Johnson from Iceland. He's just a great contributor to the amateur image processing community.

He's written software that's made it easier for us to access NASA data. His contributions have been tremendous, and I'm just glad that he's still working on Pluto images. So I guess it won't be long before we find out if this canali is a real feature on Pluto, the dwarf planet, or just an artifact of some kind. It's definitely a real feature, but it may not be a stripe, and I'm willing to bet you anything that it's not an artifact of an alien civilization. But we'll see in just a few days as it begins to come into focus what this thing actually is. And I think it's important that you added the last line in this blog post that you were joking when you talk about it being a canal because we know the Internet, don't we? We do know the Internet, but I also know the internet is very creative, so I'd like listeners to imagine what is it that the alien civilization on Pluto would use this

gigantic canal for? Oh, good. All right, well, send us those thoughts, folks. We'd love to see what your ideas are. And Emily, I'll be talking with you again next week. We'll get an update on what Curiosity has been up to. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, and she's got an article in the current issue about new horizons approaching Pluto. We'll be right back to take you to the press conference that came right after declaration that light sail, that little solar sail mission, is a success.

I'm amazed and encouraged by the worldwide attention that has gone to a small, inexpensive spacecraft launched by a small organization with big dreams. On Wednesday, June 10th, the Planetary Society originated an audio press conference that was also streamed live to the public. A link to the YouTube recording is on this week's show page, reached from planetary.org slash radio. I've pulled my favorite moments from that briefing for today's show. Here's how it was started by Arizona State University planetary scientist Jim Bell. The president of the Society traced the recent history of solar sailing,

including Society co-founder Carl Sagan's embracing of the concept and co-founder Executive Director Emeritus Lou Friedman's many years of leadership in its development. Lou's and our society's dreams of solar sailing did not fade away, absolutely. And indeed, there's a current revolution going on in small and relatively inexpensive spacecraft called CubeSats and other very small spacecraft that have provided an opportunity for us to restart that effort. And in 2009, I believe it was on the celebration of Carl Sagan's 75th birthday, in memory of his birthday, the Society announced plans for a project called LightSail, this new leaner implementation of our efforts to demonstrate solar sailing.

We had a lot of member enthusiasm and very generous funding from our members. They made it possible to make this a two-stage process. First, we'd launch a light sail test flight to low Earth orbit to work out any bugs in the spacecraft and the deployment systems and instrumentation. And we knew this mission would be relatively short because atmospheric drag would cause the sail to reenter the atmosphere relatively quickly from such a low orbit. But it would be a test mission, and if it succeeded, it would pave the way for a follow-on light sail primary mission next year to a high orbit, like the one planned for the original Cosmos 1, to truly sail on the solar wind. So

that's a little bit of the history of this project and of our organization. And now to tell you a lot more about the mission of light sail and the Society's larger goals of enabling solar sailing as a viable means of propulsion in the solar system and beyond, I want to turn it over to our CEO, Planetary Society CEO, William Sanford Nye, also known as Bill Nye, the science guy. Take it away, Bill. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, indeed. Hey, everybody. I am so excited because this mission is a success. First of all,

we're able to qualify to launch. We're a non-profit organization funded entirely by members and supporters around the world who think space exploration is a worthy use of our intellect and treasure. And we qualified to get on a great big rocket, an Atlas V. So you've got to pass vibration tests, you've got to pass thermal tests, heat and cold five. So you've got to pass vibration tests, you've got to pass thermal tests, heat and cold especially, and you've got to be in a vacuum. It's interesting to note that there is no thermal vacuum chamber in the world big enough to hold all four of our sails, even though they came out of a very small box.

The NASA standard called a CubeSat, which is 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. But ours is a three-unit or a three-U CubeSat, so it's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters. And that sail deployed, you know, bigger than most living rooms. And so we're very pleased because the sail really did deploy, and we got some very nice images, and one so far that just really has my heart. It's beautiful. And this goes back for me all the way to the disco era

when I was in Carl Sagan's class on mechanical engineering and I took astronomy. Well, he talked about solar sailing in 1976 and 1977. And if you've seen our website, we have video of him showing a model of a solar sail spacecraft to Johnny Carson. Now, that model resembles our light sail so very much because we solve the same engineering problems. How do you deploy a large sail in space, hold it rigid? We had to solve the same problems, and so far we have. And so we are fulfilling at least a 39-year-old dream.

It's really, it just means a great deal to me. Solar sailing is worth doing because it has the potential to democratize space. It will allow small organizations or organizations who don't want to allocate too much money to a space mission to build a small solar sail, deploy it the way we deployed ours, and go to, well, you can pick almost any destination in the solar system if you have time. You can get there because you never run out of fuel. The sun shines all the time. You know, this mission was not without trouble. I'm sure if you were following it, a couple of just really unforeseen and very troublesome problems came up. But I'm an engineer, but the people who solved this are just extraordinary engineers.

And they were able to figure out very diligently this subtle, subtle problem with the software, and they made it go. And so I'm just very, very proud because we at the Planetary Society, since the early days, have been charged with engaging people around the world in the exploration of space, to advance space science and exploration. That's our mission, to enable citizens of the world to know the cosmos and our place within it. And the LightSail program is consistent with that. This mission is part of our mission. Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society. Doug Stetson was up next. Doug is the LightSail project manager. He's also principal partner in the Space Science and Exploration Consulting Group.

We've passed a number of milestones with LightSail over these last just about two weeks. The most important of those milestones were just last Sunday when we deployed the solar sail, and then finally yesterday when we were able to downlink the full image, confirming that, in fact, the solar sail was out and looking good. Actually, I'd say the solar sail is looking great. We just could not be more pleased with the way it turned out, especially after all the ups and downs that this project has been through. So to see that image come down the way that it did and the sun in the background was just very moving and the entire team is thrilled about it. So basically what that image does is confirm that the solar

sail deployment system worked as designed. It worked as planned even after going through all of the vibrations and the stresses of launch as well as the thermal cycles after being in orbit for a little over two weeks, opening up of the solar panels and the change in the spacecraft state that that gave us, not to mention all of the ground testing that we put it through before launch, and the fact that it was kept in storage for a couple of years before that. So this particular solar sail and its flight systems has been through an awful lot, and the fact that we could tease this thing into working and deploying as planned was a real triumph of the engineering team. What we've really tried to do, and we think we've demonstrated,

is a very robust and reliable solar sail system that, coupled with small spacecraft like CubeSats, can really open the door to really an entirely new class of low-cost exploration missions. And as Jim and Bill said, that's what's been driving the Planetary Society's interest in solar sailing for all these years. There were some real worried nights there, sleepless nights. And we also knew that with the panels open, the spacecraft was going to be subjected to greater torques and forces during each orbit, which would gradually start to make it rotate faster and faster.

And we saw that happening. We knew that this rotation would eventually become a problem for our communications as well as for the sail deployment. We didn't know exactly what rate of rotation would really interfere with sail deployment, but that was becoming a real concern. So the clock was ticking, and we were forced to start thinking of some very tough choices. Fortunately, shortly after that, with some really good detective work by the team and a little bit of luck, we began to understand what was happening with the batteries and power system, and we were able

to restore communications and get some data back from the spacecraft. So then at the first opportunity, we gave the command to deploy the solar sail. The deployment was not successful for reasons that we're still analyzing. We decided to spend the day on Saturday gathering a little more data and trying to get into a good orbital configuration and try again on Sunday. The first attempt that Sunday, this past Sunday, was also not successful. And we really thought we had one more chance that day, and in fact not a very good chance, before things would start to get pretty dicey. But that third time was the charm, and we saw the sail motor start to spin, so we knew that the deployment was at least beginning. Then, of course, just to give a little more drama

where we didn't need it, the communication pass ended before we could see the deployment go all the way to completion. So that's why we had to wait until yesterday for the real confirmation, which is the image you've all seen, and that was quite a thrill. So this has really been a roller coaster ride of emotions, a lot of sleepless nights for the operations and engineering team. But they're very dedicated, they're very smart people. And of course, getting that beautiful picture of the sail yesterday really made the whole thing worthwhile. So everybody's just very pleased. Light Sail Project Manager Doug Stetson. More highlights of the LightSail press conference are just ahead.

This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck, is that right? Planetary TV.

So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org.tv. Random Space Fact!

Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is

released each Friday at youtube.com slash Planetary Society. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. By the time you hear this, the first light sail is very likely to have ended its life in low Earth orbit. Vacuum or not, there are still too many molecules of air at that altitude, and they drag a big sail down. The success of this test effort was celebrated with a press conference on Wednesday, June 10. We've already heard from several of the participants. Next up in this series of highlights is Barbara Plant, president of Boreal Space. You may

remember Barbara from the launch coverage in our May 26 show. Barbara was asked about the challenges encountered by the team as it attempted to communicate with LightSail. We're dealing with essentially radio frequencies in the amateur bands, UHF, VHF, so there's some properties of being in that band that sometimes get a little iffy. Atmospheric disturbances, bad weather, but also from the aspect of space, if one has any rotation inherent to the spacecraft as we're passing over. And we've seen a little bit of this with our light sail test flight. The ground controllers can see the slight fade in, fade out of the signal.

Again, the properties of the spacecraft, the physical properties of it rotating, and LightSail did start rotating faster in one axis after our swing through perigee. We learned a lot about that behavior, and certainly the folks at Cal Poly and Georgia Tech handled that admirably. Rex Ridenour was also on the press conference phone line. He is CEO of Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation, where invaluable and tireless support was provided for LightSail. Rex dove deeper into why the accelerating tumbling of the spacecraft was

keeping the team awake at night. To put some numbers on it, when we came out of the ejection mechanism from the rocket, our highest spin in any axis was around seven degrees per second. And over the next 10 days or so, that built up naturally to about 15 or 16 degrees per second. After we deployed the solar panels, just the four solar panels, we dropped down to about 10 degrees per second, maximum spin. But then those panels, we believe, served as basically little propellers during perigee passes. And we were building up a rate of six degrees per day, roughly, five and a half to six degrees per day. So by the time we finally popped the solar sail out, we were spinning up around 32, 33 degrees per minute,

which was one of the concerns Doug alluded to, is that we didn't want to keep increasing up to 60 or 70. We didn't know what would happen. So as soon as we popped the sail out, the aggregate spin rate of the entire spacecraft dropped way down to like three degrees per second, which is what you'd expect in the ice skater analogy. We threw the arms out and everything slowed down. So that was a pretty dramatic piece of evidence that we successfully deployed the sail when the spin rate came down. Rex Ridenour of Ecliptic Enterprises. Now the team is looking to the future, and especially to the late 2016 light sail mission that will go much higher on top of the first Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX.

Here's project manager Doug Stetson again, followed by Bill Nye. This one will go to a higher orbit, about 750 kilometers circular orbit, and that will allow us to actually be high enough to conduct real solar sailing on a mission that should last for at least three months, maybe as long as six months. Basically, we're not going to go anywhere. We're going to stay in Earth orbit. This is a relatively small spacecraft with a relatively small sail compared to the sizes that would be required to really venture farther into the solar system. Again, it's more of a proof of concept. What we'll be doing in 2016 is deploying the sail

virtually identical to the one that we've deployed this week, learning how to fly it, and that's a pretty intricate process. That requires fairly precise movements of the sail, That requires fairly precise movements of the sail, changing its attitude with respect to the solar radiation pressure, so that you can gain some momentum from that radiation pressure. So our real objective is to demonstrate the process of regular, every single orbit, turning the sail to get the most benefit from the solar radiation pressure. In doing that, at the particular altitude that we are with our size of the sail, we won't see much of a change in the actual size of the orbit. What we will see is a change in its inclination

or the angle of the orbit with respect to the Earth. That's something that's easier to change with a sail of our size. So that will be sufficient to prove that we are actually intentionally modifying the orbit due to solar sailing, and it allows us to demonstrate this process of every single orbit turning the sail to its optimum angle to the sun to get the most bang for the buck, so to speak. I've received emails from people all over the world. You know, the people who are enthusiasts, the engineers and scientists who are enthusiastic about solar sailing,

it's a little bit of a niche. But I've heard from a lot of people from Europe, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, including the Icarus Sail, and they're all giving us a big thumbs up because we pulled this off. You know, the Icarus Sail is great, but the thing is huge. It was a 600-kilogram spacecraft, and it was not the primary purpose of that mission, whereas ours is just we're just trying to solve this one problem. It's really gratifying.

It's a great question. Yes, I was surprised. I was troubled, but I'm proud to know these people. They solved the problems while I was on orbit, while I was flying over at 28,000 kilometers an hour. The best is yet ahead. This is Jim Bell. I'll just add, you know, I've been involved with Mars rovers and big NASA projects. And it's not a surprise that problems crop up in projects like this involving space exploration at all scales, whether it's a giant billion-dollar NASA mission or a little spacecraft like ours.

And I just echo Bill's pride and delight in our team, our professional engineers, our technical staff people, students that are involved. I mean, this is what Bill and other engineers do. They solve problems, and problems will always crop up no matter what the scale, and it's just been spectacular to see that all happen so successfully. If our mission can help enable others to mount similar missions or improve upon the technology, I think that's a win for everybody. Again, we've got the entire audio recording of the June 10th LightSail press conference

on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. And there's much more about LightSail at sail.planetary.org. What's Up is up next. Here's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts on the close of this celebration of light sail. Welcome back. Thank you. I see you're wearing your light sail polo. I am indeed.

I just randomly put it on. Well, I have my light sail T-shirt. I wish we had enough of these to give away because these are pretty cool. I like this better than the polo. Well, I like the polo better than that shirt. Marco. Polo. See, it's lame.

I don't know what that meant. But the sky is not. The sky, not lame. Going to be talking about it for a few weeks. Venus, Jupiter, super bright, low in the west in the early evening, getting closer and closer together until June 30th, July 1st, when they will be 0.3 degrees apart. So very cool, very exciting. Also can catch Saturn in the early evening over in the south. And Mercury making an

appearance in the pre-dawn east, and it will be getting close to kind of near reddish aldebaran you know how you and i were just talking about how you can find anything on the internet how much do you want to bet there's a site out there right now that claiming this conjunction of jupiter and venus is going to cause earthquakes or some god-awful horrible thing here on earth oh it is and now they'll reference this show as proof. No, no, it won't. But it will be cool looking. And on the 20th, if you're picking this up early enough, we'll add the moon to the mix.

So we'll have the moon, Venus, and Jupiter. Gosh knows what terrible things may happen. Or you may just see a pretty sight in the sky. You may trip over something while you're looking up at this beautiful sky. Stand still, people, when you look up. On to this week in space history. It was this week in 1963 that Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, and 20 years later, 1983, that Sally Ride became the first American in space.

Former contributor to this program. Still miss her very much. Yes, definitely. We move on to... Space fact. Oh my gosh. That's good. Alright. I'm going to try to use the word apropos as much as possible in this show. I know how to spell it use the word apropos as much as possible in this show. I know how to spell it. Don't question me.

Apropos of solar sailing, Mariner 10 used solar radiation pressure on its solar panels and its high-gain antenna as a means of attitude control during flight. It was the first spacecraft to use active solar pressure control. I didn't know that. I thought Messenger was the first to do that. Nope, nope. It was the previous Mercury mission was the first to do that. Now MESSENGER used it, I believe, even more in adjusting its orbit, whereas it was, I believe, Mariner 10 was mostly for attitude control. So, our message here today, light sail, no big deal. No, no, I think you misconstrued.

Oh. LightSail is testing a mode of propulsion for CubeSat-sized spacecraft, so it goes far beyond what they did. But, yeah, using solar pressure, not new, but still cool. I sit corrected. Yeah, yeah, you do. On to the trivia contest. We asked you, so I had kind of complicated one, to phrase Soviet Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk or extravehicular activity. What chronological number was the next Soviet spacewalk? How'd we do? Did people understand? More or less, yeah. People got

a little bit confused, but I don't think it was how you stated it. I think you stated it in probably the best possible way, at least in English. Let's mix it up a little bit. What's the correct answer? And then I'll give you the winner. Eleven. Ah, then Nathan Hunter, you must be a happy person because that's exactly the number that you gave us. And there's such an interesting story behind this. I guess you probably know what happened, right? It's interesting. I'll let you share the story. I just thought it was

interesting that two through 10 were Americans. And there was this huge four-year-ish delay between the first spacewalk for the Soviets and the next one. Then they had another huge delay before the one after that. Well, as we heard from Nathan, who comes out of Portland, Oregon, to us, he said that this was an interesting, because it was a two-man spacewalk, and they moved from Soyuz 4 to Soyuz 5. We did hear from one or two people that this happened because they had trouble getting through the hatch. They were going to do it internally, but they had to don spacesuits and, you know, climb outside in the vacuum.

And yeah, probably they just wanted to do that, but they claimed the hatch wouldn't work or something. I think they dropped something. Well, anyway, that's the story. And we heard that story from a number of people, but it was Nathan who was picked by Random.org and is going to get the light sail swag and a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Just had one other that I wanted to tell you about. And this came from Rennie Christopher up in Vancouver, California.

He said back in the 50s and 60s, the Soviets did most things in space first. First satellite, first man in space, first woman in space, as we just heard from you, first spacewalk. And they tended to do it all backwards and in high heels oh please tell me that that makes sense it's a fred astaire ginger rogers joke you had to be there i guess ginger rogers wasn't a soviet no no move on i'm so confused well you've told me that uh we have we have no new question this time you won't let me do another one. That's right. Yeah, this is the second time. Next week, we'll go back to coming up with a nice contest and even better prizes for you folks.

So I think we're done. And why is this, Matt? Because I'm going on vacation. Such a disappointment. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up the night sky and think about Matt on vacation. Thank you. Good night. The host has left the building, but he's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and

Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. I may be on vacation, but that won't keep us from bringing you an all-new show next week as we return to the Aquarium of the Pacific to talk about exploring Earth's oceans and the seas of other worlds. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the Society's triumphant members. Daniel Gunn is the associate producer. Josh Doyle created our theme. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.