Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Live at the Planetary Defense Conference!

Episode Date: April 22, 2013

Planetary Radio host Mat Kaplan joined Bill Nye and four passionate planetary explorers on stage at the Planetary Defense Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Live at the Planetary Defense Conference, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this week to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. and this week to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and last week I joined Bill Nye, Bruce Betts, and several hundred scientists at the PDC, the biannual Planetary Defense Conference. Today we'll begin two weeks of special coverage, beginning with excerpts of a panel discussion I moderated

in front of nearly 1,000 rabid fans of planetary science and Bill Nye. The hardest part of creating our show each week is deciding what to leave out. It was an especially difficult task this time, since I only have time to share about a quarter of the outstanding discussion with Bill and four passionate scientists. You can hear and see much more almost the entire evening at planetary.org slash radio. We videotaped the event, which included not just the panel, but special presentations by both Bill Nye and Jeffrey Notkin of the great Meteorite Men reality show on the Science Channel.

Our own Bruce Betts hosted the night, and Bruce announced the latest winners of Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grants from the Planetary Society. You'll hear Bruce and me with an onstage version of What's Up in a few minutes. We weren't the only people on the road. Let's check in with planetary evangelist Emily Lakdawalla. As you'll hear, we could only connect with Emily by cell phone this time. Emily, I think we've caught you on your plane as it's just about to leave New York City. Tell us about this press conference that you hosted this morning in New York. It was a group of dreamers who called themselves the Mars One Project.

They think they're going to get humans to land on Mars in 2023. Aren't they proposing a one-way trip? They are talking about a one-way trip, and that's a little scary to contemplate. I'm not volunteering, but there are an awful lot of people who are interested, and so that's actually what they were announcing today, is the opening of the astronaut application process. So how did you end up hosting this? They invited me, and I was pleased to do it,

because they are certainly a bunch of excited, passionate people who believe in the cause that they've started here. And I've had a pleasure of talking with them over the last couple of days about their ideas and their plans. They do have to get going quite quickly, though. They're talking about the first launch with supplies being in 2016, and that's right around the corner. Tell us a little bit more about what they plan to do.

Well, they have to launch several supply ships first, and they'll wind up with two rovers on the surface before they get human fare. Set up some basic, very tiny habitation. They're going to use larger inflatable modules once they get people there. But of course, they also have to do this astronaut preparation process. They say it's going to take seven years to train their team of astronauts. And they're looking for about 40 people in the end who are going to go through this process, and teams of of four and only one of those teams is going to get to launch. Tell us, what do you think? Is this just crazy or is this the most exciting thing to come along in a long time?

I don't think they're crazy and I do think that the first mission to Mars is going to look something like this one. But I'm not sure if this is the group that is going to accomplish it. We'll just have to wait and see. It's really all about money. Will enough people believe in them to give them the billions of dollars that it's going to cost in order to get this going? They say they're going to fund it through essentially reality TV programming surrounding

the selection and training of these astronauts. I think that the devil's in the details. We'll just have to wait and see if other people believe in them enough to write really big checks. Are you going to be writing a little bit more about your experience with the Mars One team when you get back? Yes, I will. Excellent. We'll watch for that. And we'll also point out that you can read something from Emily right now about Mars. It's a walk among some very interesting, strange terrain.

How do you pronounce this term for these mesas? They're called menses. It's just a Latin word based on the Latin word for table. And that's what a mesa is, is a table. So it's all the same thing. It is an April 19 entry in the blog, in Emily Laktawalla's blog, at planetary.org. And we invite you to take a look. Emily, have a great trip, and we'll talk to you soon after you get back.

Thank you, Matt. She is Emily Lakdawalla, the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, as well as a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I will be right back with the first of our coverage from the Planetary Defense Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, just last week. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. We're at the Planetary Defense Conference on the campus of Northern Arizona University here among the pines. Here in beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona. Go Lumberjacks!

So you can hear them. More than 900 people have crowded into Procter & Gamble Auditorium to hear the meteorite men and the CEO of the Planetary Society, my boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Welcome, Bill. Thanks, Matt. It's a fantastic room. Fantastic, may I say, energy. Yeah. Really appreciate everybody coming out.

I think we have the future of near-Earth object exploration here, and I think we will, dare I say that, change the world. You just finished a great presentation. It will be, along with everything else from this evening, on the Planetary Society website at planetary.org. Bill, you and I are joined on stage by four outstanding young men and women of science, each

is already a leading light in humanity's effort to understand these millions of smaller objects in our solar system and making sure that we don't suffer the fate of the dinosaurs when we find one of those big rocks that happens to have our name on it. We've got a very few minutes to talk with them about their work and what drives them. So I'm going to start introducing them, beginning with somebody who's from right here in Flagstaff. That's David Trilling. David, please.

David is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northern Arizona University. Much of his research focuses on the formation and evolution of planetary systems like our own solar system. He relies on both ground and space-based telescopes and on archive data gathered, some of it many years ago. David's work on near-Earth asteroids includes observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope, the infrared-seeing sister to the Hubble. Just last week, his team obtained data for a new Spitzer program that will find small near-Earth asteroids. And small, in this case, is a relative term. A small asteroid can ruin your whole day.

David heads the local organizing committee for the Planetary Defense Conference, which brought all of us here this week. He's teaching a class on planetary defense this semester. Please welcome David Drilling. Thank you, Matt. David, I get the feeling maybe a few of your students are here with us tonight. I think so. Are they also attending the conference? Many of them are.

The ones from the class I'm teaching are also attending the conference and talking with people from around the world, learning a lot, I hope. Nice opportunity, isn't it, to talk to all these experts from all over the world? It was very convenient for all these people to come all around the world to help teach my class this semester. And there will be a quiz after this evening? Yes, that's right. So let's move on.

Bill, you'll be glad to hear there's a fellow engineer with us on the stage. Brent Barbee is a flight dynamics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He also teaches in the aerospace engineering program at the University of Maryland. He recently edited a report on an international workshop called Target NEO, N-E-O. report on an international workshop called Target NEO, N-E-O. And he co-authored the Near Earth Object Human Spaceflight Accessible Target Study, or NHATS. Do I have that right, Brent? Actually, the correct pronunciation is NATS. NATS. They're flitting around. Which has provided a baseline for a human mission to an asteroid or comet. Among his many presentations is Get Rich or Go Extinct, the Asteroid Business Case. Please welcome Brent Barbie to Planetary

Radio. Brent, the title of that presentation leads me to ask, are you encouraged by the presence of now not one, but two private companies that intend to get rich mining asteroids? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think one of them said, I think it was the one that formed more recently, Deep Space Industries, they said, you know, one company trying to do this is an anomaly,

two is an industry. And competition to drive it as well. Kathy Plesko is a research scientist in applied physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She uses the supercomputers there to study what happens when asteroids and comets hit a planet and how to prevent them from hitting one in particular, our own. She was a teenager when she became interested in asteroids and comets. Kathy was awarded her PhD in geophysics and planetary sciences just four years ago. That was at UC Santa Cruz, where she studied the effects that large asteroid and comet impacts had on the climate of Mars early in the

history of the solar system. She has also studied asteroid impact mitigation and uses those supercomputers to model how we might use a nuclear explosion, you've seen that in the movies, right, but not to break up a huge space rock, but just to deflect it just enough so that it misses our home planet, something that Brent Barbee has also worked on. Kathy, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thank you. It's great to be here. How important is the role that supercomputers play in our ability to understand near-Earth objects and what we can do about them?

That's a great question. So supercomputers are actually really important for studying the impact hazard mitigation problem. So with a supercomputer, we can make these beautiful, sophisticated models of exactly what happens during an impact, and we can look inside of it in ways that we could never do with actual instrumentation or we couldn't send people to it.

And so it's like having a big crystal ball but with real math and physics. It's awesome. We can use them to model things that are too risky to do. We can model things that are too far away. Using a supercomputer, I've actually been for a walk on Mars. It was the coolest thing ever. We got some of the rover data from Endeavor Crater and we fed it into a virtual reality room that we have at Los Alamos and four of my colleagues and I actually got to go walking

through Endeavor Crater as if we were really there, except it was warm and comfortable and we had coffee. The holodeck is here, apparently. there, except it was warm and comfortable and we had coffee. The holodeck is here, apparently. And obviously supercomputers are so powerful now, you don't need one that's more powerful than what you've got, right? That's a joke. The computers we have are great, and we have wonderful ways of tricking them into being even faster than they really are, but, you know, if you're driving a Ferrari and you've got a chance to get the keys to a Learjet

or, you know, maybe a self-bomber, you take the chance. More to come. Let's hope Moore's Law holds up for a while longer. The last person for me to introduce is sitting next to me. Amy Mainzer didn't know it until a few minutes ago, but she's already been on Planetary Radio a couple of times in the last few months, most recently when she was part of a NASA press conference about the NEOWISE mission. She is principal investigator for this effort that builds on the success of an amazing spacecraft called WISE. That's the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer.

And Amy has been its Deputy Project Scientist for 10 years. She's a Principal Scientist in the Astrophysics and Space Sciences section at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where she's also Principal Investigator for another mission, a prospective mission, I guess. That's NEOCAM, or the Near-Earth Object Camera, which was selected for technology development funding in 2011. Maybe we'll hear more about that a little bit later. NASA gave her its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2012. Please help me welcome Amy Mainzer.

So this is one of those questions that we broadcasters ask, even though we already know the answer, because it's such an impressive answer. How many asteroids and comets has WISE discovered? Well, WISE was, I like to say, it's small but mighty. And in one year of surveying, we were able to discover about 34,000 asteroids. Never before seen, never before known about. We have a lot of names to give out. And there's so much more that we could say about WISE, because this thing has done all this work with little objects in our solar system, but it's done things out at the outer

reaches of the universe, right? Yeah, that's one of the fun things about making a map of the entire sky. You never know what you're going to find, things all the way at the edge of the universe and things that are literally right next door to us. It's been a fun mission. So you can see a very distinguished group that we have up here. What is the project that you're involved with

or hope to be involved with very soon that really has you fired up? And Amy, I'm going to start with you, because I think you may already have alluded to this. AMY KASS- Well, sure. I mean, I would like to go out and survey for more hazardous asteroids. That would be a wonderful thing, and I think it'd be sort of useful to do.

But that said, I'm just really happy and so grateful that I have a career working with some of the coolest stuff and coolest people on the planet. So thank you. Brent Barbie. One of them you already mentioned, which is the NATS project. So NASA has a wonderful near-Earth object program

website, neo.jpl.nasa.gov. It has a lot of great information on it. And one of the things on that website is a webpage for our NAT study. So we're looking for all the asteroids out there that are potentially accessible for future spaceflight missions. So this is very analogous to the way that we monitor the population to be sure that we're aware of all the ones that pose any threat of impacting the earth. Now we're also monitoring the population automatically every day for all those that present opportunities for exploration, just like we monitor for those that present the risk of impact.

So I'd encourage you guys to check that out on the website. That's a project that I enjoy a great deal. And the other project that I'm working on is funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, or NIAC. And I'm working with my colleagues at the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University. And we're working on designing a hypervelocity asteroid intercept vehicle, which we hope to one day put through its paces in test flights and prove that we've got what it takes to stop a hazardous asteroid before it hits us. With a nuke, paging Bruce Willis here. That was a great presentation that

you and your colleagues made earlier today. So, that was Brent Barbee of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Kathy Plesko, Los Alamos. Planetary defense is it. This is so exciting and such an amazing time where we're not just talking necessarily anymore about, oh, we should maybe do this if we get the technology, but Brent's building the spacecraft,

Amy's looking for these objects, and I'm modeling what to do if. And so, I mean, we can observe an earthquake. We can predict where a hurricane's going to land. We can stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth. This is the first time in the history of history that we can actually prevent a natural disaster. Yeah. Yeah. And David Trillian of this university that has hosted us this evening. We have a little bit of science ADD in my group. We're doing everything we can think of here, there.

Asteroid discovery, characterization. Somebody discovers it, the next night we want to go and observe it and find out what it's made out of and get us on that path to understanding more about that asteroid. But there's a bigger picture, which is that here in Flagstaff and in every other town in this country, asteroids have been on the front page of the newspaper a lot of times already in 2013. And so as long as people's awareness is up and people are interested in talking about asteroids, we'll continue to do fun and interesting things. David Trilling of Northern Arizona University. Bill, I'm going to get some closing words from you in a moment, but I hope that all of you here who, first of all,

that you were as impressed and excited to hear these folks as I have been, please help me thank our outstanding onstage guests, Brent Barbie, Amy Mainzer, Kathy Plesko, and David Trilling. Just a sampling of my terrific conversation with Bill Nye and those four great explorers on the evening of April 17 in Flagstaff, Arizona. The public event was part of the Planetary Defense Conference. You can watch all three and a half hours of that amazing night on the Planetary Society YouTube channel and in our multimedia section at planetary.org.

We'll hear more from the conference itself next week, and we'll return to that Northern Arizona University stage in a minute for What's Up with Bruce Batts. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the

worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out.

We're at the Planetary Defense Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, where it's time for What's Up. in Flagstaff, Arizona, where it's time for What's Up? Here's the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Bruce Betts. Welcome, Bruce. Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. And Flagstaff is where we are. It's a great town, beautiful setting,

but you and I were from Southern California. It does not... And there are other people as well. And apparently there are other people as well. Apparently they are too. Or they wish they were. I don't know. It doesn't snow in Southern California in mid-April. Yeah, that was kind of weird.

I wasn't sure what those white things were. Tell us. What's up in the night sky right here above us in Flagstaff or anywhere else? When it's not cloudy, this is a heck of a place to be to look up in the night sky. I don't know if you've been checking out how clear it is, but I'm envious. Last night it was beautiful. Envious. But simple things that even we Southern California folks can see in the night sky. We've got Jupiter up in the southwest in the early evening looking like a super bright star. Then coming up a little bit later in the nine o'clock, ten o'clock zone over in the east, we've got Saturn looking yellowish. And now it's time.

Let's get some help. Oh, you've got that already? I'm ready for that. What happened this week in space history? Nothing happened this week in space history. The Planetary Defense Conference happened in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2013. The Planetary Defense Conference happened in Flagstaff, Arizona. They like that.

I'm just trying to trim a little time, but okay. He's trying to save time. I don't give a damn. He's the overall moderator, so he's got to save time. All right, I'm turning over here to Zach. Hi, Zach.

Welcome. Hi. How old are you, Zach? Eight. And who are you here with today? My dad. Yeah? Is he out there now?

Dad, give us a wave. There he is. Do you remember your job, Zach? Are you ready? Here we go. Really loud. One, two, three, go. Random space fact. Well done, Zach. Thank you so much. You can walk back over there and rejoin your dad now. I can see the eagerness in all your eyes. We're going to give you a shot, too. You ready? One, two, three. Random Space Fact! Wow.

That's awe-inspiring. That is awesome. So speaking of asteroids, as we're doing all this evening, and near-Earth asteroids, those that come within 1.3 AU, or astronomical units, or at sun distances of the sun, they're estimated to be about 20,000 near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 100 meters, something to ponder.

Yeah, and be frightened of. Well, I wouldn't lose sleep tonight, but we need to do stuff about it. We should have a conference. All right, we move on to the trivia contest, and we asked you last time about the mirror coatings of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. What is the coating material of the mirrors on Chandra X-ray Observatory? How did we do, Matt? Excellent response. A lot of people who

wanted to get, because the prize for people who listen to the show is currently Bill Nye's voice on your answering system. Personalized, of course. Do you remember where our winner was from last week? No. Norway. Getting a test.

Do you know where our winner is from this week? Chosen by Random.org? No, of course I don't. Norway. Wow. That's fre of course I don't. Norway. Wow. It's freaky. We're huge in Norway. Scandinavia in general. They do seem to like us there. Ellen Kjellman, Ellen Kjellman of Vinterbro, Norway, who said that the reflecting surface on Chandra's mirrors is a 33 nanometer coating of iridium.

Indeed, iridium. Excellent. Well, Ellen, I don't think he speaks Norwegian, but you're going to get Bill Nye's voice on your answering system. I've got to mention Kev Knowles of New Zealand, the land of the long white cloud. He actually got it right as well, but he also considered answering unobtainium, kryptonite,

and not iridium, but the crushed remains of 100,000 iridium satellite phones. You know, those were all under consideration. They opted not to. All right, now, you need to tell me, do you want the radio contest for next week question first or the audience questions? Let's save the radio one

and give away some stuff to these people here. All right. Oh, Matt is now modeling a lovely recent version of the Planetary Radio T-shirt. Give us 30 minutes. Soon to be a collector's item because the new one is being designed right now. Yeah, they'll be worth a fortune. But we're not only giving away that. Each winner of our contest this evening will also receive a copy of the Planetary Report,

the Planetary Society official magazine that goes to members. But wait, don't order yet. They're all autographed by Bill Nye. All right, let's go. Alright, here's our first question and we've got some local ones so I just went out to your beautiful meteor crater today.

Approximately, how long ago did meteor crater form? Ballpark. If you have a degree in the space sciences or related, you are not eligible. What about David Trilling students? Oh, that's up to you.

We got somebody. Hi there, what's your name, sir? David. David. What's the answer? Oh, God. Oh, God. No, that is not the answer.

Let's go over here now. Thank you. 50,000 years old. I'm sorry, what? 50,000 years old. That is correct. Yeah! Give that man a shirt and a planetary report.

Continuing on in our meteor crater theme, the object that came slamming in and forming Meteor Crater, what was it primarily made of? Hi, sir. Iron. Yes, iron. Iron, nickel, meteorite. Congratulations.

Sticking with the Flagstaff theme and moving a little farther out, what is the symbol for Pluto? So the astronomical symbol for Pluto. It's a doghouse, isn't it? I'm sorry. Pluto, the planet dwarf, planet Plutoid. So where are we? Back over on this side. Hi there, what's your name?

My name's Margaret. And Margaret, what is that symbol? It's a combination of a P and L for Percival Lowell's initials. It is indeed a P and L for Percival Lowell or Pluto. So the question, not for today, but to get your answer in, Matt will tell you when. What is the name of the pioneering planetary geologist who did the first detailed geologic mapping of Meteor Crater and was instrumental in determining not only its origin for sure as impact,

but also lunar craters and lots of other stuff? We'll mention that later, but for those of you listening to the radio show, go to planetary.org slash radio contest to submit your entry. You need to get us that entry by Monday. That'll be Monday, the 29th of April at 2 p.m. Pacific time. We are done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about big, giant things flying down and slamming into the Earth. Thank you, and good night. He is Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Remember that you can watch that What's Up session

and all the other great stuff that happened on stage during the April 17 public event at the Planetary Defense Conference. Our special coverage of the conference continues next week when we'll talk with astronauts Ed Liu and Rusty Schweikert of the B612 Foundation, laser bees researcher Allison Gibbings, and astronomer

Carolyn Shoemaker, widow of the great Gene Shoemaker. We'll also join an exciting simulation of how humanity may meet the challenge of a killer asteroid. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the highly defensive members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.