Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Living Under the Sea With NASA Aquanaut David Coan

Episode Date: August 18, 2015

Mat Kaplan talked with engineer and NEEMO Expedition 20 team member David Coan while he was hard at work with astronauts and other engineers living in the Aquarius undersea habitat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Come with me to the bottom of the sea, 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. Sometimes that final frontier includes inner space, which in this case means an undersea adventure in preparation for the exploration of Mars and other destinations in our solar system. We'll talk with engineer David Cohen as he was in the middle of spending two weeks with three astronauts and others 62 feet below the ocean's surface. Casey Dreyer drops in with a space advocacy update, while Bruce Betts will have his own underwater encounter in this week's What's Up.

We begin with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, this is a little different from what we normally talk about, about a visit that you made, some work you did, volunteer work, for your daughter's school library. And I want to say, first of all, I think they were lucky to have a school library that had six or more feet of planetary science books. It is a fantastic public school library, and I'm very grateful for that. I will say that at least a foot, maybe two, are due to me donating them all of my extra copies of review books. They are lucky people.

What did they ask you to do? The librarian asked me to go through the shelf and check to see if there were books that shouldn't be there, either because they were just bad or because they were woefully outdated. And I know that a lot of people kind of winced on Twitter when I talked about getting rid of books from a library. But children's books, they're really focused, a lot of them, on facts. And so once the facts in those books get outdated, then you really need to replace them with more recent books. What were the results of your search? Well, it was kind of interesting. It sort of depended upon the planet,

which books seemed more out of date than others. The Moon was a really interesting case, because a lot of the books, they didn't incorporate modern discoveries with the most recent orbiters. But that wasn't really the focus of the book anyway. One of my favorite books that I found was about you are on the moon, you are an Apollo type astronaut exploring the surface of the moon, what would it look like if you were there? And that hasn't really changed since the book was last updated in 1984. What else did you notice as you perused all of these books? Well, the first thing I noticed is that you should never use your precious words in a children's book to say the number of moons that an outer planet has. That's a terrible mistake because it keeps changing. But another thing that I noticed

that I thought was kind of interesting was that the books that were illustrated with art tended to have a longer shelf life than the books illustrated with photos. And I don't think that's necessarily because art makes for better illustration. I did love the art that I encountered in the books. I think it has to do with the kinds of things you tend to illustrate with art, things like the concepts of orbits and of the phases of the moon or of what you might find if you were standing on places that we've never explored with Landris before. Those kinds of things hold up over a long time. Whereas a photo, putting a photo of Mars and saying, this is the best photo ever taken of Mars, well, that's going to be supplanted pretty soon. Is there an opportunity suggested here for others in our

audience who tend to be pretty science savvy people? Absolutely. I think that this is a service that a lot of libraries could use and not even in science, just whatever your area of expertise. It's great to go into a library and look and say, these books are outdated and say, these are areas that are not covered in your library that you really need to get some new books for. For instance, I noticed that they had several books that were about Mercury, but none of them had been published since Messenger got there, and they all used Mariner 10 images. Mariner 10 was a great mission, but the kinds of pictures that were available to publishers are really just terrible. They really don't do Mercury justice, and they don't even do Mariner 10 justice. I've seen much better work with Mariner 10 photos than the kinds of photos you

see in kids' books. So, I told the librarian that she definitely needs new books on Mercury and definitely Mars. I didn't find a Mars-specific book that mentioned a mission more recent than Pathfinder, so that was pretty terrible. But then there is a funny section on Pluto, which, of course, every book that's ever been written on Pluto needs to be replaced. But nobody's written those books yet. So I left the Pluto books on the shelf, and I'm going to wait until next year to see what's available for kids. It is a surprisingly enjoyable read, Emily's visit to the school library and the review of those books there. It's an August 13th entry in her blog at planetary.org.

And while you're there, you can find her latest update on the Curiosity mission. Emily, thanks so much and happy reading. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, Bill Nye has the week off, so we brought in Casey Dreyer with one of his periodic updates on advocating for planetary exploration. Casey, welcome back for a quick conversation about where things are with advocacy. And, you know, we've already been celebrating New Horizons around here for a long time, but you've given us more reasons to celebrate.

Yeah, New Horizons is exactly what NASA does best. Our founder, Bruce Murray, used to talk about this. He called these types of missions purple pigeons, ones that have incredibly good scientific return, but also that reach out to the public in a way that a lot of scientific missions just don't. There's an innate excitement. People get it when you're exploring Pluto for the first time. And so it's peaking above most of this media noise that we mostly see every day.

And people are aware of NASA. And they're aware of NASA knocking a mission out of the damn park. It's been fantastic. They did this mission on time, on budget, and it's working almost perfectly. This is exactly what the public loves to see from NASA and what I love to see NASA doing for the public. This tremendous success makes it all the more amazing that this mission went through so many trials and tribulations. There's an article in the Planetary Report, the quarterly magazine for the Planetary Society, by our colleague Jason Davis, that traces this amazing evolution that this mission had

to go through. I mean, there were several times when it could just have ended up in the dustbin, right? Four versions of this mission ended up in the dustbin. And the fifth one that was New Horizons was canceled multiple times. It really canceled multiple times in the early 2000s. The Planetary Society ran an award-winning campaign of advocacy to help get this mission back on the books. You had really key people like Barbara Mikulski, Senator from Maryland,

inserting the money to keep this mission on life support during those early years. Without that, this mission would have never happened. We would not be seeing these pictures of Pluto today if we hadn't taken those really aggressive advocacy actions 10 years ago to save the mission. And this is what's always so maddening about this stuff, right? You're working real hard for this payoff that's a decade away. And now everyone's celebrating it. Everyone at NASA is happy for it. Everyone in the administration is happy for it. Everyone in Congress is falling over themselves to congratulate NASA for it, rightfully so. But at the same time, it took 20 years to get this mission off the ground because it kept getting canceled.

No one wanted to pay for it. This is the essence of the problem we face in advocacy for space. The payoff is so far away. there's no immediate political payoff. It makes these things easy to cancel while they're still in the crib. This is just the beginning of the story, or one more chapter in the ongoing story. There's so much more issues that we're facing right now, missions that we hope are going to happen but still need support. What we've done here really is just tease because we have a much more comprehensive conversation. It's going to happen, but still need support. What we've done here really is just tease, because we have a much more comprehensive conversation.

It's going to be available on the show page for this week's show at planetary.org slash radio, and you can hear really what keeps Casey busy nowadays, and there's a lot. Yeah, my plate is full. But one thing I want to leave your listeners with is I draw this parallel between Pluto and Europa, where right now we've been fighting for this mission to Europa for years.

It kept getting canceled. We're in this very nascent early stage where it can still be canceled easily. But the payoff is going to be huge, and there's going to be a huge public relations payoff from it as well. But we need to keep that in mind, and we need to stay vigilant to keep this mission to Europa going and to use Pluto as an example of what it will be like 10 years down the road from now. Thank you, Casey. Happy to be here, Matt. Casey Dreyer is the Director of Advocacy for the Planetary Society. He checks in with us periodically here to update us on fighting the good fight in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere for space exploration.

There were no yellow submarines available, but our guest today did live very happily under the sea for two weeks. He was hardly alone, as you'll hear in the background during my recent conversation with NASA engineer and NEMO 20 aquanaut David Cohen. NEMO, that clever acronym stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, a program that has been conducted periodically since 2001

in the Aquarius habitat, now operated by Florida International University. Dave and his five colleagues were about halfway through their two-week mission when he sat down at a console to talk with me via Skype. It was almost as surreal as talking with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, though Dave was just 19 meters, or 62 feet feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and about 5.6 kilometers or 3.5 miles off Key Largo, Florida, in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

You may be surprised to hear how well it allows NASA to prepare for human missions to asteroids, the moons of Mars, and the red planet itself. Dave, it's Matt Kaplan of Planetary Radio. Thanks very much for joining us from down there under the Atlantic Ocean on Aquarius. Sure, happy to talk to you. So there's a lot going on there. Just a few moments ago, I was watching one of your webcams. They were making use of one of the things that I hope to ask you about.

Who was it that had that head-mounted display? That was Luca Parmitano. He's our commander for the mission. He's an Italian astronaut who actually flew on the International Space Station a couple of years ago. So he had on the head-mounted HoloLens, and that's allowed us to do some what we call telementoring. He can connect virtually to a computer up on the surface, we call it telementary. He can connect virtually to a computer up on the surface, where he had a Navy diving medical officer talking to him, talking him through a medical exam of Serena Nunn, astronaut on the crew. Very cool. I mean, it's not too hard to see how that kind of technology might be pretty useful, not only under the ocean, but on a long-duration spaceflight.

Oh, absolutely. You can have a world expert that you can't necessarily launch into space on the ground, and he can or she can talk you through something that you have to do that's complicated that you may not have ever seen before or you may not remember. And you can get the absolute information you need real-time while you're doing something. I'm told that you've been supporting the NEEMO program, which, of course, has been going on for many years now, for a long time. But this is your first time actually joining one of the crews. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah, I supported the past five missions with a couple of different roles. I'm an extravehicular activity EVA officer, so I do spacewalk training and flight control.

an extravehicular activity EVA officer, so I do spacewalk training and flight control. And I also look at advanced hardware and operations concepts for future exploration missions. So I'm doing that role from the surface. So I'd be designing and planning and directing the EVA activities and also as a topside support diver. But, yeah, this is the first time they let me come in and stay, stay for a while. So it's been great. So they didn't have to force you into this? No. I'd always threaten to come in and just stay on my own hands. Tell us about the situation down there. What's the living environment like, and who else are you spending a couple of weeks down there with? It's actually surprising. Someone asked me what my biggest surprise was.

I think it's the fact that it's so, it's nice living down here. It's not bad at all. You know, the habitat itself is not very big. It's just maybe slightly smaller than a school bus. And there are six adults living in it. So, you know, ahead of time, I figured this is going to be a really cramped thing that we'd all get tired of each other, but not at all. There seems to be plenty enough room and we're kept busy enough and everyone gets along so well that it hasn't been a problem at all. To answer your question I'm down here with five other people including myself. There's Luca Parmitano, as I mentioned, he's our commander from NASA of the mission. He's an Italian astronaut who flew on space station a couple of years ago. Yoshige Kanai is our Japanese crewmate. He's a Italian astronaut who flew on the space station a couple of years ago.

Yoshige Kanai is our Japanese crewmate. He's a Japanese astronaut. And Serena Nunn is a NASA American astronaut. So the three of them plus me make up the NASA side of it. We have Mark Holzbeck and Sean Moore, who are our professional habitat technicians who work for the Aquarius Reef Base. So they're down here to keep us out of trouble and to keep the habitat actually operating. I'm glad things are working out so well, because that's quite a crowd. I mean, as many people down there as they have up on the International Space Station,

but I suspect you guys have less room, which makes me wonder, is NEEMO, in some ways, maybe even a better test of what it'll take to fly to Mars or fly to an asteroid than the ISS is? I think that for evaluating how we're going to go to Mars, both definitely have a good role. And I think you can learn different things from both places. But, you know, one thing Aquarius gives you is that smaller area. I think more than likely, I bet the spacecraft we take to Mars are going to be smaller than the ISS. I mean, the ISS is, you know, relatively speaking, a huge spacecraft. Yeah. Down here, it's much smaller. You know, we have much less room. We're stacked three high in bunks when we sleep. You can't even sit up in your bunk, it's so short.

Where we're situated, it's almost like we've landed on a remote terrain on Mars itself. When you look out the window, when you go out on our EVAs or our dives, you're walking amongst rough sand with rocks everywhere and coral heads that just look, other than the marine life, a lot like rock outcroppings you might see on Mars. So down here, it's a great analog, great simulation of a Mars mission.

I was going to ask you about that. You're an EVA guy. That must be a big part of what is going on down there. Are there EVAs virtually every day? Yep, absolutely. That's one of our prime focuses, this mission, is to see how we're going to work out EVAs on these future flights. For the most part, our experience has been on engineered surfaces. So we've worked on spacecraft. The space station has been built to do EVAs.

So it has handrails, handholds where we need them, has places to secure yourself where you need it. But when you go to an asteroid or Phobos, like the large moon of Mars or even Mars surface, you're not going to have that. It's going to be more like you're on a rough terrain that hasn't been planned for you to go out in a spacesuit and do work. So it's been good to evaluate techniques here as to how we might be able to operate in a place that wasn't really set up for that. Yeah, I noticed that out there, one bit of the terrain you've got seems to be artificial. There's a webcam dedicated to a rock wall, which I think is probably there for more than just recreation. Yeah, that's right.

Oh, and I didn't answer the other part of your question. Yeah, we've been doing EVAs every day. Actually, the first five days, we did two-hour EVAs, so all four of us would go out at some point during the day and then starting on day six through now we've been doing longer four hour EVAs where two of us will go out for that EVA and then we alternate every other day so quite a few EVAs. But the rock wall yeah we we set up the rock wall it's a it's about a 45 degree angle it's actually made out of rock climbing panels like you'd see in a rock climbing gym, but we attached real rocks to

it. We did that to give us a little bit of a vertical aspect to what we were looking at, especially for our asteroid kind of day. That's where we were focusing on that. So we had a boom that we'd work off of, much like you'd work off the robotic arm on a space station, and we wanted a vertical surface to help give us that third dimension to work through and also to do the rock chip sampling. We have a power tool that knocks off chips or rocks. We're trying to figure out how to knock those off and capture them without any gravity because normally on Earth they just fall to the ground and you pick them up.

Without gravity, you have to have some way to grab them before they float away. So we're using that rock wall to simulate that, kind of chipping from below and having the rock chip fall and be able to grab it in our mechanism before it hits the ground. Let's come up for air before we continue our conversation with NEMO 20 Aquanaut David Cohen. Someone want to pass me a towel? This is Planetary Radio. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy.

The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice? It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts, including a journey to Europa and the Opportunity rover on Mars. I need you to join me and stand up for space. Sign our petition to Congress today at planetary.org slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning.

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. NASA engineer and NEMO 20 aquanaut David Cohen is talking with us from the Aquarius undersea habitat off the coast of Florida. The NASA program has been putting astronauts and engineers down there since 2001. They spend up to three weeks practicing intensive exercises that complement efforts on the International Space Station and elsewhere. that complement efforts on the International Space Station and elsewhere. Dave spent years supporting NEEMO missions from the surface before he got the chance to join this team. You can hear a few extra minutes of my conversation with Dave in the online version of the show at planetary.org slash radio. So you've been supporting NEEMO, as we said, for quite a while.

for quite a while. Would you give me your opinion of what you think maybe are the most valuable or useful things we've learned from this activity under the ocean as we prepare for long-duration spaceflight? It's funny. I've been thinking about that pretty much every day. I try and kind of do a little bit of write-up each night as to some of my initial observations of what happened for the day and where we're going with the mission, how things are going. We're getting really good evaluation of the hardware and the tools we've built. It's the engineer side of me. I have a great team that's put together a lot of good stuff, and being able to evaluate that, it's a really good exercise out here

because, again, we're trying to take samples of coral, very delicate coral with tools, and not mess up the coral and how the tools operate. So it's been great from that perspective. We're trying to evaluate operations concepts. So how are we going to operate an entire mission from end to end? That's been really good, having to actually go end to end here. And then being in situ in this extreme environment, I think the integration of people with hardware and crew with a mission control that's far away, that whole people side of it has been probably the most interesting aspect of actually having to integrate that.

Because down here, it's not just a day facility. We're running 24-7. Literally, your lives are on the line as far as keeping the habitat running. You know, literally your lives are on the line as far as keeping the habitat running. When you mess up stuff down here, it has significant impact because people put a lot of planning and time into developing this stuff and we can't just go home at night and start over the next day. We have to deal with what happens here. So, that whole end-to-end aspect and all the people that are integrated with things like

the hardware and the plan has been really good. How about communication issues? Are you talking real time with folks up on the surface, or is that also part of the simulation of being really far away from Earth? Oh, that's absolutely part of it. We've changed that throughout the mission. Our first full day, so our mission day two is our first full day here, we were simulating an asteroid mission, that asteroid retrieval type mission. So for that, we had pretty much real-time comm.

Those kind of EVAs would take place probably in a cislunar environment, and it would be pretty close. So we were able to do more of a standard interaction with MCC how we do now. As a matter of fact, we have the intravehicular, the IV crew member that usually talks to EV crew members through the EVA. We have that person stationed on the ground as the ground IV, like we do for space station spacewalks now. But then the next two days, we simulated a Phobos EVA. And for Phobos, the time lag, the time latency between Earth and Mars changes throughout the year as their orbits and their relative position change.

For this exercise for Phobos, we elected for a five-minute one-way calm latency. So having that conversation take five minutes one way, have them think or develop a plan in five minutes back the other way has been pretty interesting. And then actually when we stepped up, what we're doing now is the Mars service days, we chose a 10 minute one way comm latency. So it's actually any video, any comm we send, any message we send, it takes 10 minutes to get to Earth. They need some time to figure out what the response

is gonna be and then respond to us. So it's a good 25, 30 minutes for you to get any sort of response from MCC. So a huge part of our simulation here and what we're evaluating is how effective can MCC be during an EVA when you have limited time outside. Seems like very good practice to me. You're an engineer. Have you read the book The Martian by Andy Weir? I am halfway through it. I actually, I got the book and I saved it to bring it down here. It was hard to save it, but no, I specifically brought that down to read it.

So I started the first day I was down here, I started reading it, and the very little bit of free time we have is late at night. So I've been reading a few pages a night. Now, it's been very interesting to read that book, you know, sitting next to the galley viewport, reading a couple pages, looking out, seeing this, what looks like a very remote landscape, you know, and then looking back inside and seeing this very small habitat. It looks like a spacecraft that we're living in. So yeah, halfway through. At least you're not stuck there by yourself as his astronaut was. We don't want to give too much of the book away. But I'm just wondering,

that led me to thinking, if you have much opportunity to improvise solutions down there, engineering and otherwise. Yeah, we've had to do a few things. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. Being the instructor part of me, and we have some instructors topside, wanted to throw in artificial malfunctions or MALs, which we do all the time back for training the astronauts. But here, we have a few of those, but here you almost don't have to. The environment itself is going to hand you a bunch of problems. So one that we were dealing with is, one of my goals for EVA was to not just have things we brought to evaluate, but I wanted to make a lot of what we do useful to as many people as possible. So we've integrated the Florida International University, their marine

science department, and we are doing some marine science for them that is directly analogous to kind of geology we do on Mars. In that vein, they have some specific things they want us to do, and a lot of it's focused around certain depths. So we need an accurate depth measurement in order to know what samples we're taking for their later study. However, we were having some problems with our depth gauges. We had got some replacements from some topside divers that weren't working. So we used our pneumo-favometer, which is a reading that the dive system we use can read. And it's not typically done the way we're doing it, but we're taking our pneumo tubes

and holding them next to the sample, having the Aquarius habitat blow air through it and get an accurate depth reading from the habitat. So using that depth measurement of the system itself to get a depth of a particular target and then interact, you know, coordinating that from the EVA crew to the habitat technician and back and forth, it was sort of a pretty good improv of collecting some data we need for the marine science. That's a great example. I bet those Apollo 13 people who may be listening to this will be proud. Listen, you've been very generous with your time. I've just got one other question for you, and that is about any educational activities that may be going on down there,

just as they happen up on the ISS. Are you spending time, you and your colleagues on the NEEMO 20 team, talking to kids? Oh, absolutely. I think pretty much on a near daily basis. We have some sort of educational public outreach event. Get out there and talk to kids as much as possible. Yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact, I did a four-hour EVA and I came in and grabbed a quick bite to eat and then had a Skype call with some students at the FIU Eco Academy summer camp. So they're kind of a STEM group.

Gave them a nice tour of Aquarius with the camera, and then they asked me a bunch of questions about the science we're doing, and then they started asking about space station life, so I was actually able to pull in Luca and let him talk about his experience there. So definitely trying to reach out to as many kids as we can pretty much most every day. Dave, this has been a blast. It really could only have been better if they had allowed me to go down there and interview you in person. Thank you so much.

It's really fun to be able to talk to you, and not only that, but to hear some of your team members in the background going about their day. Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. No problem. We've been talking with Dave Cohen. He is part of the NEMO 20 team. That's the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations Team, which is, as we speak, a little more than halfway through a two-week stay in the Aquarius Station, about 60 feet underneath the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Florida.

Great fun. And we're going to have some more fun when we go to Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up in just a moment. Just time enough this week for a quick visit with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Let's get right into it. What's up? Planets, but not many. We got Saturn in the south hanging out near the reddish star in Scorpius and Taurus, and Mars really low in the east in the pre-dawn sky, but it'll get better as time goes on. We move on to this

week in space history. It was 1975 that Viking 1 was launched, and 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched. Let's move on to random space fact. Matt, I hear you have something for me. As you know, I was just talking to some people underwater, and a few of them got together, three astronauts and an engineer, our guest Dave Cohen, and here's what they had to say. This is the crew of NEMO 20. Under the sea in Aquarius. We are ready for your random space fact. Not bad, huh? Very nice. That's really cool.

So were they underwater when they said that? They were absolutely underwater, though relatively dry at that moment. It makes it easier to speak. So the sun and the solar system along with it oscillate up and down, so to speak, out of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and back through the plane of the galaxy in a pendulum-like motion. As it gets farther from the plane, the mass of the plane pulls the solar system back down, and then it goes through the plane and comes back up. The period of this is about 64 million years to complete one cycle, compared to about 240 million years for our revolution around the galaxy center.

We are just moving in every way possible, it seems. All right, on to the contest. I asked you, what is the only Apollo lunar module whose ascent stage still probably survives in space? How do we do? We had a gigantic response, one of the biggest ever. What is the correct answer? Because a lot of people got this wrong. The ascent stage from the lunar excursion module Snoopy from Apollo 10 that was jettisoned in space and went into a heliocentric orbit, sun-centered orbit, whereas all the other lunar modules were either left in lunar orbit to eventually crash, intentionally steered into the moon to get readings from seismometers or burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. And apologies to those of you who said it was Apollo 13.

The majority of folks did get it right, and among those is this week's winner, Mike Bird, who has also been hoping for months that we would be able to send a shout-out to Topher Bird, I think his son. Bill Nye's biggest fan, he says. Mike indeed said Apollo 10's Snoopy module. And so, Mike, you are the winner of this Planetary Radio t-shirt and a beautiful Chop Shop store New Horizons print, part of the new series from Chop Shop. They are absolutely gorgeous, and they commemorate the greatest planetary exploration missions of the past. I just want to mention this, a very interesting message from Mark Little in Britain. He called up a friend of his, Nick House, who's a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, who started an effort to find Snoopy back in 2011. And apparently, here's a little hint, something that I don't know if it's getting publicized much,

that there may be something in 2022, there is an object that they'll be able to examine more closely, and it could be that we'll have found Snoopy. Snoopy, come home, as some listeners told us. Go fly around, Snoopy. Have fun. On to the next question. How many hexagonal segments will make up the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope? So its total diameter of the primary mirror will be 6.5 meters, but that will be made up of several hexagonal segments.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. And this time you have until the 25th. That would be the 25th of August at 8 a.m. Pacific time. We'll give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And how about one of those 200 points worth about $200 American? iTelescope.net accounts for a worldwide viewing through their network of telescopes. There you go. All right, everybody, go out there.

Look up in the night sky and think about lids. Thank you, and good night. Did you know that right around the corner from the Planetary Society's new headquarters is a wonderful hat store? It's a great place to buy a lid. I'll go shopping right now. It's a great place to buy a lid. I'll go shopping right now. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its deep-diving members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear Seas and Skies.