Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Lightsail Update and Haute Cuisine in Space

Episode Date: December 21, 2009

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. Solar Sailing and Haute Cuisine in Space, this week on Planetary Radio. . Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons. We have some great gifts to unwrap. First up is Emily Lakdawalla with the best of her blog. Then we'll go to Bill Nye the Science Guy for an update on LightSail,

the Planetary Society's new plan to set sail on the light of the sun. Next we'll visit the Zero-G kitchen with International Space Station astronaut Sandy Magnus and NASA food scientist Vicki Klaris. But wait! There's still our weekly report on the night sky and a new space trivia contest from Bruce Betts. Why it's almost too much for one little show about the universe. And speaking of the universe...

3, 2, 1. We have ignition and lift off of a Delta II rocket and WISE. Searching for stars and galaxies never seen before. WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and now in orbit. Congratulations to this new space telescope's team. Time to check in with Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. We select the most interesting stories Emily has written about on her blog in the last week, this time beginning with a long-awaited discovery by Cassini. Emily, the light off that lake on Titan is just beautiful.

It's beautiful, and more than that, it's a welcome sight. People have been looking for that kind of glint for decades, and it's kind of a relief finally to have it, although we wound up getting lots of other proof of liquids on Titan before this specular reflection off of a lake, which was supposed to be the smoking gun way back when people first proposed liquids on Titan. Well, what's the story here? I mean, there were some really pretty radar images, one that I remember that sure looked

like a lake, but people really wanted this bit of glint. I think they really did. The radar images, I don't think there are very many people out there who doubt that we're looking at lakes of ethane and methane, because just based on how much methane there is in Titan's atmosphere, you really have to have a liquid source on the surface. And there are these dark features and radar images that look for all the world-like lakes. So we didn't need this specular reflection, but the specular reflection should have been the easiest piece of evidence to get of liquids on Titan. It's what you get when you have light reflecting off of a mirror-like surface where

most of the light is reflected on one particular path. And if your spacecraft happens to pass through that path, you get this nice glint. The problem is that all of Titan's lakes are at the poles. And so you actually have to have the spacecraft in a kind of a bizarre geometry in order to get the glint. And that was unexpected. The fact that the lakes were only at Titan's poles was the, I think, one of the big unexpected results of the Cassini mission. Well, we got it now. Let's move two planets in toward the sun to Mars. Do you ever see the movie My Left Foot? Yes, I have.

Well, I think it should be My Right Front Wheel. I think it would be My Six Wheels for Spirit because this is so bizarre. The right front wheel on Spirit has not worked for years. Spirit has been dragging it, making a trench wherever she roves for years. And now she's stuck at Troy. And so while they're trying to get free at Troy, they decided, you know, let's just check. I mean, who knows? Weirder things have happened. Let's try running the right front wheel. And by God, it it actually rolled which is amazing however there is a problem the reason that they wanted to check this was because it was a last ditch effort

because the right rear wheel is now not working so we seem to have traded a a functional wheel that was buried for a non-functional wheel that's that's on the surface and so the one that's on the surface can roll the one that's buried can't. And this is actually worse than it was before. So as good as the news is that the right front wheel works, it's not a trade, I think, that any of Spirit's engineers would have wanted her to make. All right, well, we'll still keep pulling for her.

Emily, happy holidays. Thanks, and you too, Matt. Emily is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and the keeper of the Society's blog, and we'll have links to both of the terrific entries that she did on our two topics covered in today's commentary. I'll be right back with Bill Nye in a conversation about LightSail. It was just a few weeks ago that we unveiled the LightSail project on this show. LightSail is the Planetary Society's attempt to fly the first true solar sail.

It's a follow-up to the attempted launch of the Cosmos 1 solar sail five years ago. If all goes well, there will be three LightSils, each with a more ambitious goal than the last. Cosmos 1 was a giant compared to Petite Light Sail 1, which will be built in part by students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo along the central California coast. Members of the light sail team convened last week at the California State University campus and nearby offices of Stellar Exploration Incorporated. Our regular commentator Bill Nye the science guy made the trip. I spoke to him at his hotel not long after the team had returned from its first day at Cal Poly. So Bill you've completed one day

up there in San Luis Obispo. What's on the agenda for today and what were you up to yesterday for that matter? Well yesterday we went to what I'm going to call an early design meeting. You know, there's official expressions, preliminary design, final design, intermediate design. Let's call this an early design meeting. So the students are designing the spacecraft. It's called a CubeSat, a cubicle satellite. And indeed, a typical cubicle satellite is 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. And 10 centimeters is somewhat less than 6 inches. Smaller than a breadbox. It's much smaller than a breadbox.

It easily rests on the palm of your hand. But in order to launch the solar sail, the light sail, we're planning a three-cube or three-unit spacecraft. So it'll be 30 centimeters by 10 by 10. And so it's a very cool, unbelievably small thing. And the way I'll describe it, it is like a breadbox, Matt. And inside is a beautiful, very thin and long stainless steel coil spring. We send it a telemetric signal. We send it a radio signal telling it to deploy.

This tiny little heater burns through a piece of fishing line, and then the spacecraft shoots out of this thing like a jack-in-the-box. I mean, it's that simple, or if you will, that complicated. And the surface is coated with anodized aluminum. Anodized is where you use electricity to impregnate aluminum with a ceramic aluminum oxide. But wait, wait, there's more. It's impregnated with a little Teflon to make it really slippery. So we all got to handle this thing yesterday.

But before that, in the big meeting, we went over or they showed us the scheme or the plan for the electrical circuits. And so this includes the power supply, which right now they're planning to use lithium polymer batteries. They've looked at lithium ion. We're discussing that and so on. It's going to be a near real-time Linux software. It's very cool. And the students, who are somewhat less than half my age, are just fluent in this stuff. They're just like ready to go. They're very well supervised, very knowledgeable professors, and they're just cranking this thing out. Today, I am very excited as a mechanical engineer with a license to see the struts. And these would be, for listeners, we're making a sail that's considerably larger than the room you're sitting in.

If you're sitting on a park bench, well, it's not that big. But it's an enormous thing that will come out of this little bread box. And the struts, the sails will be held apart and ready to catch photons by struts made of Stanley brand Fat Max tape measures. Now, I presumed, I just thought going in, that they would have bought the steel from the same factory and that they would be somehow using the steel that was later to be manufactured into tape measures. They'd be using that same stuff in some creative way. No, they're using tape measures with the yellow color and black markings on it. I mean, it is the same. Apparently, the yellow coating helps it in some way,

and damping makes it a little more slippery, and you don't have to modify it. You just buy the stuff, and then my listening, viewing friends, it is in the metric system. Centimeter tape. I hope somebody's talking to Stanley. I smell an underwriting opportunity here. Oh, yeah.

Well, we really want those guys, the Stanley Tool people, to get on board with this. I mean, their tape measures are so good. How good are they? They're worthy of space flight as chosen by NASA, if you will, in the traditional advertising jargon. Oh, wait, wait. There's more. As chosen by the Planetary Society. I mean, is there a greater endorsement? I think not.

So how about these young people, the ones who are less than half your age? Are they pretty excited to be involved with this project? Oh, yes. Very well said. They're very excited. Now, the thing is, though, I will say as an observer, oh, yeah, done four or five of them. I don't remember. How many have we done? These guys, they're not all boys. These guys, men and women, have spent so much time with these cube sets that they're very comfortable with it. The antennae, there's two little rabbit-y antennae things that come boink, boinking out. They are made of another piece of tape measure, a piece of steel tape measure, just like you'd use to put up your shelves or whatever the heck. It's really amazing, and they're so good at it. And the electronics is just elegant. So our goal at the Planetary Society, we're paying for it, and we have a bunch of old engineers like me and our executive director, Lou Friedman,

who's hired this very competent guy, Jim Cantrell. We just want to make sure everything's as simple as it can possibly be, but then, of course, no simpler. So right now, it looks like we're going to have to manufacture our own reaction wheel. And those of you unfamiliar, what you do, you use the Earth's magnetic field to find out where north and south is. Then you drive a little electric current through a coil and you straighten the spacecraft out. But then to hold it there, you have a spinning wheel. And the word wheel, it looks like it's a little cylinder, like an oversized film canister. And for those you remember film, and it spins crazy fast, and then you react against that you that thing has inertia. And so then you push your spacecraft against or away from that inertia. It's very

clever. And so this been around a long time, but this one has to be just so because this CubeSat is a very small thing, but the sail is a very big thing, I mean, in space in relative size. And so it's a very cool problem, and we're going to just watch these guys solve it. And if you're a Planetary Society member, it's very exciting. You are part of this. We're making our own light sail, solar sail spacecraft, which will be pushed through space with the pressure of photons. And we have a very good chance of being the first people ever to do this. So it's very exciting being made right here at a university in California by people who have a lot of experience with making very small,

specific mission spacecraft. And more meetings today, which I guess we've got to let you get off to. Yes, exactly. More design meetings today just to make sure these guys are on track. And the students are so enthusiastic, as our old leader Carl Sagan used to say, when you're in love, you want to tell the world. The students are just fantastic. They love to show you their remarkable gizmos. Bill, thanks for the update. Thank you, Matt. Just stay tuned to Planetary Radio because this is just the start of things with LightSail. It's going to launch about a year from now. In the most amazing case, it would launch in November of 2010.

In the case that everybody's sort of expecting, it'll be February of 2011. But in space terms, that's not very far away. When you've got to build a spacecraft from scratch that's never been made before using Stanley tape measures, it's not that easy. But we're going to pull it off. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening. Measure for Measure. He's Bill Nye, the science and planetary measures. It's not that easy, but we're going to pull it off. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening. Measure for measure. He's Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy. He's also the vice president of the Planetary Society. And he's taken a very strong interest, as you can tell, in the LightSail project, which,

as he said, is just getting underway. As you can tell, I was in the midst of a bad cold when I spoke with Bill. I still had it when I visited with astronaut Sandy Magnus and NASA food scientist Vicki Claris. That conversation is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society.

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

Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Who hasn't seen astronauts and cosmonauts playing with their food? It must be hard to resist. Everything is fun in microgravity. But the development of nutritious, appetizing,

and safe meals for spacefarers has been a very serious 50-year effort. And it has a long ways to go before we're ready to send humans a lot farther than the Moon or low Earth orbit. When Sandy Magnus was on the International Space Station, she seemed to have more fun making food than playing with it. I highly recommend watching her slideshow about some of the cuisine she whipped up, borrowing a can of Russian chicken and veggies, very carefully chopping up onions, and adding it all to a prepackaged menu selection from the NASA kitchens.

That menu selection was almost certainly developed by food scientist Vicki Klaris and her staff. Vicki manages the United States food system for the ISS. She has been working to keep astronauts well-fed and healthy for many years. Sandy and Vicki joined me on the phone for a brief conversation last week. Sandy and Vicki, welcome to Planetary Radio. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. It is an early morning. Sandy, what was for breakfast often? What did Vicki have ready for you up there on the International Space Station? Well, one of the things that was my favorite was the oatmeal with brown sugar. There were also scrambled eggs for people who liked eggs with various types of

spices in them. Breakfast sausage links, sausage patties. There was quite a variety. Granola bars, so you can have either a fruit in a pouch, so you can have quite the variety for breakfast. Judging from your slideshow that we'll link to at planetary.org slash radio, you really got to be more creative. It looked like with dinner, working with the ingredients that Vicki had provided, but you were pretty creative up there, the Rachel Ray of zero-G. Well, you know, Vicki and her

colleagues in the lab really helped me plan well for the mission up. I like to cook. It's something that relaxes me, so I planned ahead to be able to do some of that on orbit, just to kind of have fun and experiment, but also just to relax. How long were you up there on Expedition 18? Four and a half months. And that included the holidays last year? That's correct. Any recommendations for the pair of astronauts or the cosmonaut and astronaut who are up there right now for holiday meals?

Well, I left my recipes on board, so they have everything they need to create what I had. They can also go off in their own direction. But Vicki has a nice standard menu with smoked turkey and candied yams and cornbread stuffing and things along these lines if they want to take the easy way out. Sounds extremely appetizing. Vicki, I guess we've come a long way from the days of tubes and cubes. Absolutely.

I came here near the beginning of the shuttle program, and even in the time I've been here, the food system has changed enormously, much more variety and much more Earth-like than it has been in the past. Are we anywhere near being capable of keeping astronauts well-fed on, let's say, a trip to Mars? Well, we're not totally unable to do that, but there's certainly a lot of additional work that needs to be done because for a trip to Mars, especially the initial trip, you're probably going to need foods that have about a five-year shelf life because the foods will have to more than likely be launched ahead of the crew.

So we do have some foods that have that kind of shelf life, but certainly not enough to support the variety that we need. So there's work to be done shelf life-wise. Is work also still underway on the foods that they'll be able to grow along the way? There is some work in that area. The thing about growing foods in microgravity is that what you grow along the way is probably going to have to be more of the pick-and-eat variety. You're not going to be able to do things like mill wheat or process soy in microgravity. It's just going to be too difficult. soy in microgravity, it's just going to be too difficult.

So that kind of stuff will be once you get on the surface of the moon or Mars. Sandy, I've got to say that as delicious as some of the titles sounded, and you certainly were creative with them, looking at the food in the plastic bag at first did not appear to be very appetizing. Then I thought of my mother's noodle kugel, and I felt a lot better about it. Yeah, they don't look very appetizing at all. Because, you know, if you think about what you have in your kitchen, a lot of the bright colors that you get from food in your kitchen comes from fresh food. You know, the nice red of tomatoes and the nice green of lettuce.

And we didn't have any fresh food, so I was working from processed food or canned food and it doesn't look that attractive but it was very tasty. How much of a challenge was cleanup? I mean did you have a problem with crumbs? I know that Vicki and her staff did their best to to minimize that which is why you ate a lot of tortillas instead of bread. Yeah the tortillas were huge. We really enjoyed having the tortillas. And, yeah, when you're cooking, the way I did, or mixing, really, and space, of course, the food wants to fly all over the place, so you have to be very careful. And dicing onions, I think, was probably the graduate level of cooking that I did,

because for the space salsa, I diced the onions quite small, and they really just wanted to go everywhere. How about that shrimp cocktail? Shrimp cocktail's great. I think we're out of time. I know that you've got a whole bunch of conversations you're having with folks today. I'll just wish you a very happy traditional holiday meals here on the ground. And any final advice for those folks up there staffing the International Space Station?

No, I think, like I said, the recipes are up there, and they're welcome to try them, but it takes quite a lot of time. Thanks very much, Sandy and Vicki. You're welcome. Bye-bye. Sandy Magnus was part of Expedition 18 on the International Space Station. She was a flight engineer. Vicki Kleras is a NASA food scientist. She manages the U.S. food system for the International

Space Station. We'll be right back with more Planetary Radio, and that'll be time for What's Up with Bruce Betts. We'll finish up today as we do, with Bruce Batts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. We've got him on the Skype connection, but not in the usual place. You're down south in Coronado. Nice place. It is. It's quite lovely. How about the lovely night sky? Tell us a little bit about that. Ah, the lovely night sky. Well, Jupiter is lovely in the evening sky over in the west, looking like a bright, bright star-like object. Mars getting brighter and brighter

coming up in the mid-evening in the east, and then looking reddish by the middle of the night, high up in the east. And it's just going to keep getting brighter through the end of January when it is at opposition. Saturn's coming up and visible high in the east in the pre-dawn. Quite lovely as always. Very good. Hey, you know what else is up? Orion. It's the winter constellation with those three bright stars in the belt. Check it out in the early evening over there up high in the east. It's cool looking. Yeah, it's one of the three constellations that I can actually point out, and as long as they don't ask me for a fourth,

people think I really know the sky. That's a good gimmick you got there. Don't tell anybody. Shh. No one will know. All right, so this week in space history, let us go on to that. A couple of famous dead dudes born this week. We had Isaac Newton in the 1600s and we had Johannes Kepler in the 1500s. Yeah, about 70 years apart.

Nicely done. Thank you. We also had Apollo 8 launching 1968, headed off for the first ever humans around the moon trip and we also had the finding in 1984 not surprisingly a alh 84 001 which was the meteorite which is still to this day and even new research about it debates over whether there's evidence of past fossil life in this Martian meteorite. You know, I saw some of that stuff that's been done since then, and there are these people who think, yep, those are critters in there. They're more confident than ever.

Yep, they're putting out a new paper with more evidence, they say, in favor of critters. And there are lots of people presenting evidence against critters. And there's quite the scientific debate still raging over critters in that meteorite found in 1984, but not recognized as Martian meteorite for many years later, by the way. OK, we're going on to... Random Space Facts! Let it ring out in this holiday season. There you go.

Random Space Facts, Random Space Facts, Random Space Facts, Random Space Facts. So I was looking. I was looking at asteroids. I wasn't literally looking at them. I was thinking about them. And, you know, I just wanted to comment in this random segment

on the amazing variation in size. Of course, we have dust particles that hit the atmosphere, but even say, take Tunguska, the impactor that hit there. There was tens of meters and still getting refined, but say 30 meters ballpark. Apophis, with its close flyby in 2029, it's one in a quarter million chance of hitting in 2036, about 300 meters. So about 10 times bigger in diameter, which means if we go to the cube of that, or proportional to the cube in diameter is what your volume is, which is proportional to mass, which is probably what we really care about in addition to velocity velocity since it determines both momentum and energy.

So basically my point, Tunguska leveled like 2,000 square kilometers of trees. Apophis would just be much more heinous. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I'm not listening. I'm not listening. I don't want to hear this. And the one that killed the dinosaurs, I want to make sure you can get your sleep. Thank you very much.

Anyway, the good news is still low probabilities. We're finding more of them. We at the Planetary Society, as well as others, doing our work to try to save the world, as Bill and I would say. Keep it up. All right, on to the trivia contest. All right, in the trivia contest, because there were only two people on board the International Space Station, I was inclined to ask you, when was the last time there were only two people on board the International Space Station. I was inclined to ask you, when was the last time there were only two people since we've had these six-person crews?

How'd we do, Matt? I hear it was challenging. Well, man, you know, we got fewer entries than we've gotten in a very long time and a lot of confusion, a lot of people coming up with different answers for this. So we're pretty much leaving it to random.org because there was a consensus that came up with what Dwayne Jones did. Dwayne Jones of Kenmore, Washington. Longtime listener, although I have no record of him ever having won the contest. Dwayne said March 30th, 2006, with the arrival of Expedition 13, Dwayne said March 30th, 2006, with the arrival of Expedition 13,

the last time two people spent any substantial amount of time on the ISS on their loads. Quality time together? Quality time, absolutely. And so, Dwayne, congrats. We're going to send you, actually, he's getting the very last, at least for a little while, Mars Hug-A-Planet. Okie dokie. All right, for our next one, we're going to do planetary definitions. I know, it's a fun game. In the context, and this part's

important, in the context of planetary science, what is a palimpsest? What's a palimpsest? Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter. One of my favorite words, you've got until the 28th of December, the very last deadline of the year 2009, Monday, the 28th of December, the very last deadline of the year 2009.

Monday, the 28th of December at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your entry. By the way, the contest that we're going to come up with an answer for next week, the one about chimps. Yeah. Huge response. Dogs and monkeys. Yes, I know. They're not really monkeys. Please don't write. Dogs and monkeys are always going to generate a gigantic response in the space trivia contest. So stay tuned, folks. All right. Well, we'll come up with more dog and monkey trivia. Did they ever send any dogs and monkeys up together? Because I think we'd probably break the mail server. Not to my knowledge.

That would be a good question, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no. There have been a lot of combo animals that have gone up, but I don't think they've done that scale. Usually it's one dog or monkey-sized animal with some very small animals. Well, I think it's up to the Planetary Society to make this happen. The Dog and Monkey Show. Say goodnight, Bruce. some very small animals. Well, I think it's up to the Planetary Society to make this happen. The Dog and Monkey Show. Say goodnight, Bruce.

Goodnight, Bruce. Alright, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about palm fronds. Thank you, and goodnight. Oh, swaying in the breeze, no doubt, down there on Coronado Island, which is not an island, but a peninsula, but we've already given you too much information. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great holiday and keep looking up. Thank you.