Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Live at PATS With OSIRIS REx!

Episode Date: September 24, 2012

We're live at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, with JPL astrodynamicist Steve Chesley and Planetary Society Director of Projects Bruce Betts. Steve and Bruce reveal the exciting OSIRIS REx mission to an asteroid and then back to Earth with a precious soil sample. Enter the contest to name the asteroid! Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla check in, and one listener will win a Celestron FirstScope telescope.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're live at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We're back at PATS, the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, in Pasadena, California, with an audience full of astronomers. Let's hear it for amateur sky watchers. Our special guest will be JPL Steve Chesley of the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission. Steve and I will be joined by our own Bruce Betts, who will tell us how you might be chosen to name the mission's target asteroid. Bruce will stick around for this week's What's Up and your chance to win a Celestron First Scope. We're going to give away

another First Scope to a lucky member of our audience here at PATS. First, though, let's check in with Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye. Emily, just a short visit today as we try to crowd in as much of what we recorded at PATS as possible, although the podcast version of the show will have much more. You made what looks like a really exciting trip out to Edwards Air Force Base. Yeah, I'd never been to Edwards before, and so I had no idea what to expect. But we were hustled out to this dirt access road right next to the runway where the shuttle was to land. And of course, before that happened, the Air Force was doing their Air Force things and taking off all kinds of really fun fighter jets right in front of us. So that was enjoyable. But then,

yeah, the shuttle came in, the shuttle carrier aircraft, the SEA came and did a loop around Edwards. So we saw kind of all sides of the shuttle there, right on top of the 747. And you know, it's kind of amazing how large the shuttle is in comparison to the aircraft that's carrying it. And then it landed right in front of us. And we had a chance to walk around it on all sides and see it from every angle. I took a bunch of 3D photos that are on the blog, it was kind of striking, you know, how burned up the tiles on the underside of the shuttle look like this is definitely an aircraft that has seen hard service, although not nearly as hard as Discovery,

which looks a lot dirtier than Endeavour does. Endeavour is the youngest of the shuttles. So all in all, it was a fantastic trip, and you should definitely come to the blog to see my 3D pictures and video. Yes, and bring your stereoscopic glasses. Emily, that's all the time we've got. We're going to move on to Bill Nye, but thanks very much, and we'll visit with you again next week.

All right, look forward to it, Matt. She's Emily Lakdawalla, the Senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. Bill, I'm sorry you couldn't join us at PATS, but you've been on quite a road trip. We find you now in New York. In New York City, but I don't want you all to feel I've been just messing around. I was in Michigan, Ames, Iowa, and then Beatrice, Nebraska. And at each place, Matt, thousands of people, really thousands of people that embrace science, that are excited about science, that are excited about space.

And this is the same week, Matt, that the space shuttle landed in California, the Endeavor. NASA announced its plan for an outpost beyond the moon at Lagrange Point, I guess Lagrange Point number two. So we'd go out there and we'd orbit that Lagrange Point and I guess we'd put fuel tanks out there. And from there, astronauts, maybe some of whom were in the three audiences the last few days, would be out there on their way to asteroids so that we'd learn to deflect asteroids and save the world for humans. asteroids so that we'd learn to deflect asteroids and save the world for humans. You know what I especially love about this? Because I read a report from a park ranger about your appearance before three or four thousand people at this Homestead National Park or monument celebrating this opening of the West, this frontier. And it strikes me that now

the frontier is over our heads. Poetry, Matt. Very well said. Thank you. Let's homestead space, everyone. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. And he's the CEO of the Planetary Society. We will catch him again next week when he will still be on the road.

But that time, he'll be at the International Astronautical Congress in Italy. And we're back at PATS, the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, in Pasadena, California. If all goes well, a very special space rock will receive a visitor in October of 2018. That visitor will be the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, and it will

have taken more than two years to reach this asteroid, known at least for a few more months by a name that couldn't be more romantic. Here it is, 101-955-1999-RQ36. It takes your breath away, doesn't it? Give me a big ooh, ah. We're going to talk about why that asteroid may be given a new name in just a moment or two.

But with leadership from the University of Arizona, name in just a moment or two, but with leadership from the University of Arizona, an international team of engineers and scientists will eagerly await that rendezvous in 2018, and then even more eagerly await the probe's return to Earth in 2023, carrying a few precious grams of asteroid regolith, or soil. To help us learn more about OSIRIS-REx, and especially how it will find its way to RQ-36, please welcome the Jet Propulsion Lab's Steve Chesley. Steve does a number of things. He kind of straddles the worlds of engineering and science at JPL, which, with any luck, we'll hear more about in a few moments.

But as far as the OSIRIS-REx mission is concerned, he's listed as the STI, Science Team Interface, in charge of flight dynamics and navigation. And, of course, he's at JPL. He's with NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, among other things. Right, Steve? That's right. And with his colleague, Don Yeomans, who's a prior guest.

He's been on Planetary Radio a number of times. Steve is also an officer. I noticed, are you a VP in one division, sort of, of the International Astronomical Union? Yeah, I'm affiliated with the IAU. I'm the president of the commission that works on the asteroid orbits. He's an expert in asteroid and comet orbit determination. And that's why JPL put him in charge of making sure the Stardust spacecraft could meet up with Comet Tempel 1 in the Stardust Next mission.

And we'll talk about how you make it, you figure out how to get a spacecraft out to an asteroid or a comet. Also joining us here today, my colleague, Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you. And Bruce is here because, as Director of Projects, the Planetary Society has a role to play in the OSIRIS-REx mission.

What is our role? role to play in the OSIRIS-REx mission. What is our role? We are tied to their education and outreach activities, connecting the public with the mission, all the great stuff they're doing. The first thing that we're doing with them is we're running a contest in partnership with the University of Arizona and the OSIRIS-REx project and MIT

Lincoln Laboratories, the discoverers of 1999 RQ36, to rename the asteroid to something that's a little more palatable and easier to say. And so we've got a contest going that is for kids 17 and under. They need to have an adult submit the contest entry. And basically we're looking for a name that conforms to the standards that are defined for asteroid names, near-Earth asteroid names specifically, and a little essay, short essay, of why they think it should be named that. And the deadline, December 2nd. I don't need an adult to enter it, but it's for kids.

And you can get all the information at planetary.org slash name. And we're already getting some pretty good names. I'm going to put you on the spot. OSIRIS-REx. What does it stand for? Oceansubidibnue. No, I've got this. You told me.

Origins, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security, regolith, explorer, OSIRIS-REx. Yeah. Thankfully, Matt let me know beforehand there'd be a test. I'd give you a T-shirt if you weren't already an employee of the Society. Could you have done that, Steve? Do you know the acronym? Most of it.

The important parts. Let me ask both of you, Steve maybe with you first, why this particular asteroid? What made it such a good target for this spacecraft? That's a great question. There's a lot of asteroids. In fact, something like half a million asteroids are in the catalog. And you have to go through this winnowing process to get to the ones, and you have to go through this winnowing process to get to the ones, first the ones that you can really send a spacecraft to

and get the spacecraft back to Earth with its sample. And that gets you down to really just a few dozens of asteroids. This one we wanted to go to what we call primitive asteroid, dark, that has the more primitive material from the very early formation of the solar system, that gets you down to just a half a dozen or so accessible primitive asteroids. The nice thing about this asteroid is it's very well characterized. We know a lot about it, and so we know what we're going to and not going to be, say, disappointed when we arrive

because we have such a good characterization of the body in advance. This asteroid, there's something else about it. This is a near-Earth object, but not just a NEO that we frequently talk about on the show, but you said this is actually one that we have to keep an eye on. That's right. This is not only a near-Earth asteroid. It falls into the class we call a potentially hazardous asteroid.

It falls into the class we call the potentially hazardous asteroid. And even within that group, there's a subset of asteroids that have confirmed possibilities of collision in the future. So the possibilities are remote, but still within the uncertainty on the orbit determination that we have. In this particular case, 1999 RQ-36, We usually just say RQ-36 for short. We're hoping for something better soon. RQ-36 has several possible routes that it could come back and hit the Earth late in the 2100s. So it's not anything we have to worry about in our lifetime, but it is something that we're keeping a close eye on. And this mission will help us a lot in understanding both what the asteroid is like if it comes

to pass that we need to do something like avert an impact, as well as we'll learn more about its trajectory from the mission and be able to refine our current estimates of its future path. How big is RQ-36? It's a half kilometer in diameter, approximately. Big enough to do some real damage. Well, that's... Ruin your day.

Yeah, yeah. And obviously no chance that nudging it with OSIRIS-REx is going to steer it toward us. So OSIRIS-REx will come into contact with the asteroid. We have checked, and that just doesn't affect the things at the level that we're looking at. The idea here is— Little tiny spacecraft, big, big asteroid. Yeah, right, right. Bruce, it's described as a carbonaceous, which I think Steve was starting to get at,

which I guess in itself makes it a more interesting target. Right, because you've got organic carbon-rich materials as part of this type of category, You've got organic carbon-rich materials as part of this type of category, and so the type of thing that was important in early solar system formation in seeding places like here with things that eventually grew up and became life, but also just interesting because of the primitive, as Steve said, early history of the solar system nature of this object to get a window into the deep past of the solar system. We're coming to you from PATS, the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show,

here in Pasadena, California. We're going to be right back with our special guest, Steve Chesley, and our friend Bruce Betts in just a few moments. This is Planetary Radio Live. Spetz in just a few moments. This is Planetary Radio Live. 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 in 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 Live. I'm Matt Kaplan, and we're at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show in Pasadena.

That's PATS. We're talking about the OSIRIS-REx mission with JPL astrodynamicist Steve Chesley and the Planetary Society's Bruce Betts. Steve, this is not all you do. We already mentioned in the first part of the conversation you were part of the Stardust Next mission. Yes. Well, to understand the Stardust Next mission, you have to step back to 2005 for the Deep Impact mission, which impacted, had two spacecraft. One impacted, Comet Tempel 1, and then the other spacecraft flew by to take pictures of the evolving crater. And one of the surprises from that mission, which was actually very illuminating, was that there was so much dust and such fine dust that they couldn't see the crater as they flew by. It was obscured by dust.

They hadn't expected such fine dust, which told us a lot about comets that we didn't know. Well, we still wanted to see the crater. The Stardust MEX mission had completed its flyby of Comet Vilt 2, where it collected samples in aerogel and then dropped it off at Earth and was looking for someplace else to go. It turned out that we could get the Stardust spacecraft to fly by Tempel 1, exactly one revolution after the comet had been impacted by the Deep Impact mission. Seems like a coincidence of cosmic proportions.

I agree. It was surprisingly unlikely and very fortuitous. So we flew by Comet Tempel 1 again five and a half years later, I guess it should be, and got to see the crater that was left by the Deep Impact mission. And so that answered some of the unfinished or still open questions from the Deep Impact mission. So it's your job, it was then and it is now again with OSIRIS-REx, to get spacecraft and asteroid, or comet and asteroid, to the right place, right time, right velocity. What's involved in doing that? Is it just all Isaac Newton?

For asteroids, the answer is yes. Of course, everything, we're trying to monitor the forces on the asteroid to predict where it's going to go. The nice thing with asteroids is that they just kind of go where they're pulled by the planets and asteroids that affect their orbit. Comets are a much messier game because they have these jets, in fact, random jets that are outgassing and pushing it in essentially unpredictable directions. In fact, with Stardust Next and all of the other comet flybys that I've worked at JPL, we wind up having to sort of chase the comet back and forth

as it has this erratic trajectory through the solar system. forth as it has this erratic trajectory through the solar system. Asteroids like 1999 RQ-36 in particular, they just kind of go in the straight line that they're sent by the planetary influence, and of course the main thing is the sun. 1999 RQ-36, incidentally, has probably the very best, the most precise orbit of any asteroid in the catalog. probably the very best, the most precise orbit of any asteroid in the catalog. We know the period of this asteroid down to a very, very high precision. So you're going to have an easier time with this than you did with Stardust Next. We can already predict where it's going to be at the time of the OSIRIS-REx rendezvous

in six years, I guess it is. We know it's within about 10 kilometers where it's going to be. A comet, on the other hand, we wouldn't know within tens of thousands of kilometers where it's going to be six years from now. I love what you just said about how you really had to chase the comet. There's just no way to figure how that outgassing is going to affect its path? Well, we have models, and we try and use them to better predict. So we kind of, you know, we know that it increases as it comes into the sun,

and then it decreases when it's farther from the sun. By watching it for several revolutions, we have an idea of what it's going to do. But there's these, like geysers. I don't know if that's quite the right word. A geologist may not like it, but there's these jets, and sometimes they turn on, sometimes they run out of gas and move to some other location on the comet. So there's a real random aspect.

Random comet aspect! In the case of an asteroid, especially one with a well-defined orbit, Thank you, Bruce. Sorry, I was trying to contribute. Okay, I'm done now. With an asteroid, like this one where you said it has a well-defined orbit, how much easier is this now? I mean, can you do the computer modeling that makes this a lot easier

than it would have been, let's say, 30, 40 years ago? That's one of the things I've been working on quite intensely for the last year is to figure out the orbit of 1999 RQ-36. Because it's so precise, it requires us to refine our models. And as an example, we always take into account the general relativity from the sun. For 1999 RQ-36, for the first time, we have to take into account the relativistic part from the Earth because it has a couple of close flybys of the Earth, and we have such

a precise orbit that if you don't include that, then you're not going to be able to fit all the measurements that we have. So it's not just Isaac, it's Alba. Wow. That's ridiculous. That's right. That's really impressive. Another thing on the orbit is that not only do we see relativity,

we see the acceleration. It's called the Yarkovsky effect, the acceleration coming from the re-emission of thermal radiation off the surface of the asteroid. That turns out to be very important in the trajectory. And, in fact, we're able to use that knowledge to now we know the mass of the asteroid that we're going to visit with the spacecraft. So you can plug all of these numbers into a program or is there still a lot of art left to this?

For this asteroid is a very challenging astrodynamics problem and there plug-and-play software to work this out. It's a lot of... There's not an app for that? No, no. I'm not doing it on my iPhone. We've already said it's a sample return mission. How is it going to accomplish that? Well, first of all, it's got a whole suite of other instruments, so it'll do a thorough in-situ studying of the asteroid.

But it's got a sample return, goes down to the surface, and basically tags it, grabs some stuff, and that goes into a sample return canister that then is sent back to Earth. And we go ahead and mark the date. In 2023, we'll have samples from that asteroid back. And it's just going to pull up sort of right next to the asteroid? I mean, it's not like even a half-mile asteroid is not going to pull it down, although I'm sure you have to take that into account, Steve.

Well, it's probably better for Steve to say how they do the near asteroid. Well, the way we do it, we call it a touch-and-go. The spacecraft is going to unfold a long arm, and it's essentially a pogo stick. And you're going to go down. You're going to hit the asteroid, bounce away. And the end, when it's in contact with the asteroid, has a little sort of vacuum cleaner device where it releases some gas, and the gas carries the gravel, we call it regolith, into a collector. And then it's going to bounce away.

All that happens in just a few moments. Really? A pogo stick? This is spring-mounted? It is a spring. It's a vacuum for pogo stick. It's a vacuum cleaner on the end of a pogo stick, that's right. This is great. Where's the Wham-O Company when we need them? You talked about some of the other instruments, though. I mean, because I guess it's going to approach the asteroid but not touch it right away.

It's got some other tools it's going to use, Bruce? Right. It's got, obviously, cameras, spectrometers, and fields measurement stuff, so a suite of other instruments to do all those things that are in that giant acronym. Steve, five years after it picks up those samples, between then and when it gets back to Earth, no way around that? Can't speed that up a little bit?

No, the celestial mechanics is unforgiving about some of these things. We're all familiar, including the folks at the Planetary Society, about how planetary missions take time to get to your target. And, in fact, I have to say, getting from Earth in 2016 to the asteroid in 2018 is actually pretty remarkable. It's unusual to have such a short. Now, the asteroid, when the spacecraft arrives at the asteroid, it's going to do its mapping. It's going to get the sample. It actually has to wait more than a year before it starts its injection back to Earth

because you can't just jump on the escalator and go any time you want. You have to be in the right position. Planetary exploration, it's just not for the impatient. We're going to maybe talk a little bit about another piece of your job, which has more to do with those space rocks that we might have, one of them probably will, will have our name on it at some point. But I want to tell our audience, we're just about at the point here where we're going to start taking your questions.

Steve, you've also spent a lot of time, I mean, you are with the Near Earth Object Program that's based at JPL, and you work with Don Yeomans, as we said earlier. You've become something of an expert as well, keeping an eye on these guys and maybe how we're going to deflect them. Has our knowledge become more sophisticated? Are we able to track these better than ever? Well, the tracking problem is something that is just a long-term job

that we have to keep doing. We have to keep on searching for these things, discovering new objects, and then when you discover them, you're not done because you have to keep track of them because eventually the orbits become stale and you need to refresh the information. As far as the deflection goes, I think the Deep Impact mission that we already discussed was perhaps a real watershed moment, showing that we do have the technology to hit a celestial body hard with a spacecraft. And in the case of an asteroid, a regular sized asteroid that we might have to deflect, that's a perfectly viable approach. But probably avoid the nuclear bonds.

So that's the course of last resort, of course. And I'm quite sure if we find them early, which is the number one thing in asteroid search, then you don't need to resort to nuclear weapons. If you have decades to deal with it, then it's really a pretty straightforward technological problem. I know observations, therefore, are very, very important, and it seems like an increasing dependence for those observations is on amateur astronomers, which, Ruth, you've had a lot to do with a program the Planetary Society runs. Yes, the Planetary Society is run.

We're now celebrating our 15th anniversary of our Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object Grant Program. And we've given out grants to more than 30 different, mostly amateur astronomers, all over the world, 15, 16 different countries around the world. And a lot of what they do is the follow-up tracking. So more and more of the professional surveys are doing the finding. And these groups help contribute to giving you more points on the orbit so people like Steve can figure out where they're going. If you just find it, then you don't know its orbit and you don't know if it's going to hit Earth.

But they also do characterization. They also have done some nice discovery work, these NEO grant winners. So, yeah, it's a place where amateur astronomers are making a real contribution to the continue to in the tracking of dangerous asteroids and learning about them. Steve, have you seen evidence of this, the role that amateurs are able to play? Yeah, I second that. In fact, I think on our risk page that we keep at our website, neo.jpl.nasa.gov, you'll find some of the asteroids that have potential impacts were discovered by amateur observers.

In fact, one that comes to mind was discovered by a Shoemaker grant recipient. So they're definitely making a contribution. All right, good on us. One with a close flyby in February was discovered by one of our grant recipients in Spain. So we've got one coming by about the altitude of geostationary satellites, roughly. Steve can tell us exactly where it's coming from. Well, that's 2012 DA14, and, in fact, that's the one I was thinking about. It was discovered in Spain, as I recall.

Right. And it's on the risk page with potential impacts after the 2013 flyby. What happens is it's so close that the potential orbits get scattered in a wide swath, and so it's really hard at this point to know where it's going to be after 2013, and that's why there's a possibility of impact in the later years. I assume the tracking, especially the close flyby and everyone staring at it as it goes by, will allow you to define the orbits better, or is there so much perturbation that that's hard to do? No, once we see it coming in in the next—well, it's coming where already?

So once we see it coming in, we'll know exactly where it passed the Earth and exactly where it will be deflected in the later years, and so we'll be able to see much farther into the future than we can now. Right. Let's see if we've got a question from the audience. Hi out there, folks. Who's got theirs? A hand up over there.

Hi, sir. Introduce yourself. I'm Matthew Oda with the South Bass Astronomical Society and also the Telescopes and Education Foundation. I have an engineering-type question about this OSIRIS-REx mission. I have an engineering-type question about this OSIRIS-REx mission. The method of collecting this sample off of the asteroid, the vacuum mechanism, sounds very much like what JAXA did with the Hayabusha-Itokawa mission.

Was there any kind of consultation as far as engineering is concerned, tapping into their expertise on that mission to assist us with this upcoming mission? Steve, Bruce, who should tackle that? The method that the Japanese used on their Hayabusa mission to asteroid Irokawa was actually quite different. They had something that looked like a vacuum. It was a cone that went into contact with the surface, and they fired a bullet into the regolith that caused debris to go back up the cone into their collector. So there was no gas released in that particular case.

I don't know whether or not there's been direct consultation between the folks who designed the OSIRIS sampler and the Japanese, but they're so different in their manifestation that I think maybe there wasn't. Steve, what got you started on this path? Oh, a lot of good luck. I was studying celestial mechanics in graduate school as a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Very theoretical stuff. at Austin, very theoretical stuff. And then I had a postdoc in Italy at the University of Pisa where I worked on asteroid orbits.

And so sort of the combination of theoretical celestial mechanics and very practical asteroid orbit determination work led me to JPL, which was a big win for me. There are a few of you guys that I've met, but not many, who kind of straddle the worlds of engineering and science. I mean, you're on the science team for OSIRIS-REx, right? That's right, and yet all of my degrees are in aerospace engineering. And the reason for this is that there's two things you can do with astrodynamics, right?

You can worry about spacecraft orbiting the Earth and where they're going, or you can worry about asteroids. And so in some universities, this is an engineering problem. In other universities, it's viewed as an astronomical problem. And yet both of these communities keep in pretty close contact, and so I have close ties to both. We've got time for one more question. Hi, sir.

Hi. My name is Mark Blodgett. I have a question concerning the explosion that was observed this past week by an amateur on Jupiter. Was that an asteroid? Do you have any information on that? I heard about it.

It's probably more likely to be a comet than an asteroid, but I really don't know that that's been ascertained at this point. We're just about out of time. Bruce, remind everybody once again how they can get in on giving this asteroid a respectful name. Go to planetary.org slash name, and you'll find out how to enter in a lot of gory detail

because you do have to pick things that will have a chance of being selected. And then we, along with our partners, recommend names to the International Astronomical Union, the nomenclature groups, and then they make final decisions. You're going to stick around because we're going to be up with what's up in just a few moments and give away some T-shirts here and a couple of telescopes, one for the audience at home and one for the folks here at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show. Steve, thank you so much for joining us here today at Planetary Radio Live.

Steve Chesley is at JPL where he's an astrodynamicist working with near-Earth objects and helping us to find them before they find us. But he is also making sure that OSIRIS-REx, this spacecraft that will launch in 2016, will find this asteroid soon to get a much better name in the year 2018. Again, Steve, thanks so much. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live at PATS, the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show. Remaining on stage with me is the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Dr. Bruce Betts, because it's time for What's Up.

Welcome back. What's up in the night sky? And if you can't tell us, the people out here can. We're filled up with amateur astronomers here. Well, they can. They could tell us better than I, but I'm sitting here with the microphone. So I'll go ahead and as usual, I'll focus on easy to see things in the night sky. We've still got low in the west in the early evening. You can still catch Mars and Saturn, but they're pretty low down. You have to get it shortly after sunset. But Jupiter coming up in the middle of the night now, very bright in the east. And in the pre-dawn, it's high overhead,

and you've got Venus super bright over in the east in the pre-dawn. Can't miss it. October 5th, the moon is playing with Jupiter in the sky. And October 12th, it is hanging out next to Venus, making for a lovely sight in the pre-dawn. All right, we're going to get to Venus, making for a lovely sight in the pre-dawn. All right, we're going to get help from our audience for this next segment.

On three. One, two, three. Random Space Facts. They are good. They are very good. Very, very good. You all deserve T-shirts. So I know that at least both of us were out yesterday staring at the sky, checking out the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour flight.

We've got an Endeavour fan right behind the wall here, apparently. That are giant rats. So anyway, it was flying around on the shuttle carrier aircraft 747. So I've got a little fact about that because I was wondering. I mean, the shuttle seems awfully big compared to that poor 747. And indeed, an empty orbiter is over half the mass of an empty 747 carrier aircraft that carries it. So it's a big, big stack. Okay, we're going to move on to the trivia contest.

And I asked you, who was Gale Crater named after? The crater where the Curiosity rover is currently hanging out. Who was it named after, and where was that person from? How did we do, Matt? Really well. This really took off. Random.org chose Greg McCarran. I think he's a first-time winner.

Greg McCarran of Manning, South Carolina. And he said that it was Walter Frederick Gale, G-A-L-E, amateur astronomer, from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. See, it was not Dorothy Gale. No, no, not even a relation as far as I know. But Walter, that was good enough to get you an engraved Fisher Space Pen. It says Planetary Radio, the Planetary Society on it. You know what else I love

about this? What? This is not why he won. That was Random.org's doing. Remember we talked about our favorite, you said favorite statue. Think about your favorite statue. He came back with one. His favorite statue, Zephyrm Cochran, as described by Geordi LaForge in Star Trek First Contact. Wow, Geordie LaForge in Star Trek First Contact. Wow. Nice. Very nice. Let's go on to our contest for the people at home,

the people listening to this on the radio and the podcast version, because we have a super prize for them. As of September 20, 2012, how many near-Earth asteroids are known to exist? Approximately, we'll give you, you know, get within 200 or 300. Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. Get this, our prize. We've got one sitting right here on stage, courtesy of our good friends at Celestron, a Celestron First Scope telescope with the accessory package that includes a little finder

and a couple more eyepieces and some other very cool stuff. So big contest this week. That is really impressive. Yeah. And you know what? What? We've got one for the folks here. Really?

Yeah. Now first we're going to... For every one of them? I assume you have some trivia questions for people here. I do indeed. Excellent. For the Celestron Firstscope, name all missions, spacecraft missions, that have previously visited near-Earth asteroids.

Back here. Hi, sir. Give it a shot. He's thinking... Near Shoemaker and Hayabusha. That is correct. Wow. Congratulations.

Give him a hand. You've just won a Celestron for a scope. Here, let me throw it to you. I'm participating in the outreach this evening at Paseo Colorado, and I'm going to be giving that away to, let's see, whatever child asks me a question I can't answer. That's good. Very generous. Thank you. Very nice. Nice touch.

Very, very nice. Thank you. All right. We are done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what asteroids you think you can see. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. He joins us each week here at the end of Planetary Radio.

We've got a big planetary thank you to everyone with the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, and especially its leader, Alex McConaughey, and certainly to all of you who've joined us here for this Planetary Radio live, light version of our show. Our audio engineer has been Mike Stokesbury. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies, everybody!