Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking Back, Looking Forward: Beginning a New Year In Space

Episode Date: December 31, 2012

Planetary Society experts review the challenges and triumphs of 2012 and look forward to a new and exciting year. You’ll hear Bill Nye the Science Guy, Emily Lakdawalla on new missions, Casey Dreier on “Saving our Science,” and Bruce Betts’ review of great projects, as well as a musical rendition of “Random Space Fact.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking back, looking forward, 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. Extended visits with all our regulars as we say goodbye to 2012 and hello to, you know, the one that comes next. We'll also hear from Casey Dreyer about the outlook for support of planetary science by NASA. There is much to celebrate. Hundreds of newly discovered planets dot our galaxy, and some of them may be much like our own. Messenger revealed Mercury as Dawn pulled the veil

from asteroid Vesta. Astronomers pushed our knowledge of the cosmos even closer to its beginning, and Curiosity began to uncover more of the red planet's secrets. Much closer to home, a commercial company, SpaceX, flew cargoes to and from low-Earth orbit for the first time. Chinese taikonauts flew another mission, while space travelers of other nations visited the International Space Station. So much more happened than we have time to talk about,

though our shows from throughout the year, along with the blog entries from Emily Lakdawalla and others, provide a surprisingly good record. They're all available at planetary.org. The first of our conversations today is with the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, I'm glad to use you as the lead-off hitter in this little retrospective, looking back at 2012, but maybe more important looking forward to 2013,

and getting, you know, the big picture, the CEO view. Yes. Well, the big picture is we want to foster a community of people who support space exploration. People around the world think space exploration is fantastic. Everybody is so very excited about our recent landing on Mars. Everybody, when they stop and think about it, would like to find out whether or not there's life on the oceans of other worlds like Europa and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system.

To that end, I cannot help but think back on when the Planetary Society was formed in the winter of 1979-1980, these guys were very concerned about the situation in which the public support of space exploration was very high, whereas government funding for it was waning. Dwindling. Dwindling, well said. And so we're at that same crossroads right now. So you put a rover on Mars, now what? Well, now we're going to explore and maybe find something that will change the course of human history. We have to support that. And one of the things the Planetary Society does is advocacy.

I've been to Capitol Hill a few times this year. We had a lunch and learn for staffers and congressmen, congresspeople, where we talked about the importance of space exploration and how it brings out the best in us. These extraordinary missions to other worlds are so demanding that we, humankind, comes up with things. We wouldn't have the Internet. We wouldn't have smartphones.

We wouldn't be able to feed 7 billion people on a planet that once fed barely a billion people because we have global positioning. We have extraordinary weather forecasting, we have knowledge of our place in space, how the Earth is but one planet among many, many, perhaps billions of planets. And so that's exciting, and you'll hear from Casey Dreyer, our political advocate about that. And then since the beginning of the Planetary Society, we have done projects. Since the beginning of the Planetary Society, we have done projects. This year we tried to send very carefully chosen microbes to a very carefully chosen destination, Phobos, the moon of Mars.

It crashed in the ocean, but we were out there trying. Space is very difficult. We monitor near-Earth objects, asteroids that could change the course of everything in a beat, in a way that apparently the ancient dinosaurs had their day ruined. We support that because we have people around the world who just think it's cool, just thinks exciting, and they want to be part of it. And the other thing that we do is educate people in a unique way about this extraordinary business of exploring space. And you'll hear from Dr. Bruce Betts about the projects, and you'll hear from Emily Lakdawalla, a planetary geologist who works with us, for us, part of the staff,

about the exciting missions and the details of them that will, I hope, inspire you. I hope give you something to think about, about how wonderful this business is that we are all in. So it's an exciting year, Matt. The discoveries that are going to be made on Mars, you just can't predict, but they're going to be amazing. The discoveries made on the missions to asteroids are going to be amazing. The mission messenger at Mercury is going to be amazing. And keep in mind, the next few years, we got a mission going to Jupiter, Juno, and we got a mission going to Pluto. And we got to keep those missions going. We have to keep that process, that pipeline flowing,

so that we continue to bring out the best in humankind. We continue to educate people around the world about our place in space and what an extraordinary thing it is to be made of star stuff living in the cosmos. It's an exciting time. Thanks, Bill. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Glad the world didn't end. Yeah. Didn't expect it to, but I'm glad it did. Up next is Emily Lakdawalla, the senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. Emily, happiest of New Year's. Thank you for joining us from the road. I know that rather than looking back at 2012, you have a lot to look forward to in 2013. You think we all have a lot to look forward to.

Absolutely. There are three missions launching and one returning to Earth in the coming year. So it's going to be an exciting year. I love this. In the note that you sent me, you said it's Laddie, Maven, and Mom, which sounds like a warm family comedy for the holidays. It really does. And I do kind of wish that people would come back to some more traditional sounding mission names like Voyager and Pioneer and even Magellan and Cassini. They're all great one word names. These are getting a little odd with the acronyms, but still, they're all great missions.

They are going to be slightly, missions that are a little bit tougher to explain to the public than say a Mars geology rover. LADEE is going to be studying the dust and atmosphere of the moon. Yes, it does have an atmosphere. There's almost nothing there, it does have an atmosphere. There's almost

nothing there, but it's worth studying. MAVEN will be studying the uppermost atmosphere of Mars, which again is something that's rather important and hasn't really been covered before. Nozomi was supposed to do that, but Nozomi didn't make it into orbit. The Indian Mars mission is really probably just a first of its kind thing for the Indians. And I actually don't know what the instrument component is going to be for that one yet. So there are three rather small missions with fairly tightly constrained science missions, but still, it's always great to see a rocket go up. And these are going to be kind of interesting launches, especially LADEE, which is going to be on the maiden flight of the Minotaur V, which is the latest in Orbital Science

Corporation's rocket family derived from the Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile. And I'm excited about MAVEN, this dip into the Martian atmosphere. And is there a relationship between this mission and the science that is being done by Curiosity? Only insofar as the fact that MAVEN will at least bring the capability of relay from a ground mission to Earth, which, of course, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has, and Mars Odyssey is the one doing most of Curiosity's relay. But Odyssey is really not expected to last a whole lot longer,

certainly not to be relied upon. And so only having one Mars Orbiter in place for relay is really kind of a scary situation when you're talking about a mission as big as Curiosity and also as the 2020 rover they're now discussing. So we need more assets up there. Speaking of Curiosity, are you expecting great things from that mission over this new year? I'm expecting that mission really to get underway in this coming year. Up to this point, they've really just been testing out the instruments and they really have yet to begin their science mission. They're going to begin it in earnest. And they're also likely to begin their great road trip this year. And probably it will be toward the end of the year that hopefully we'll be reaching the foothills of that gigantic mountain that's waiting for us in the middle of Gale Crater.

Mount Sharp. Anything else we should be looking toward around the solar system? Absolutely. I think the other big thing to keep in mind is that Juno, which is a Jupiter orbiter, is going to be coming back to Earth in October for an Earth flyby. It needs a gravity assist to send it on to its three-more-year cruise to get to Jupiter in July 2016. And that one has a camera on it that is specifically designed to take pretty pictures. It's on there for no other reason. And so I'm really looking forward to the Earth photos that this Jupiter orbiter is going to take pretty pictures. It's on there for no other reason. And so I'm really looking forward to the Earth photos that this Jupiter orbiter is going to take as it flies past.

Okay, before we say goodbye for this week, I just wonder if you have anything you'd like to add about Cassini, because as you know, that's a favorite of mine. We're overdue for talking about that mission again. Well, Cassini is going to be spending the coming year in a very high polar orbit looking down upon the rings, which means, you know, I'm a huge fan of geology, so I don't get to see as many pictures of my beloved icy moons, but we are going to be getting great photos of Saturn's rings throughout the year. So it's really something to look forward to there. And

we'll get Linda Spilker, the principal investigator for that mission, back on the show very soon. Emily, you'll be back next week. So thank you and enjoy that vacation that you're on and have a great new year. Thanks. You too, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and a planetary evangelist for us, for everybody, really, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. That's my colleague, Emily Lakdawalla.

There's more ahead. We'll visit with the Planetary Society's Casey Dreyer right after the break and get a year-end project review from Bruce Betts as Planetary Radio continues. 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. 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. I'm Matt Kaplan. We'll hear from Bruce Betts in a few minutes, but first we have a report from someone who is making his debut appearance on our show. Bill Nye told us up front that rallying support for space exploration was one of the reasons Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman started the Planetary Society more than three decades ago. Advocacy, especially in Washington, D.C., remains a key part of the organization's mission. It is now largely in the capable hands of the newest addition to the staff. Casey Dreyer is the Society's Advocacy and Outreach Strategist.

He sat down with me last week to talk about the challenges faced by everyone who wants to see great missions of exploration continue. Casey, I'm not sure that the story is as happy a one in the area of advocacy as it has been in just accomplishments in space over 2012. Yeah, 2012 was a really rough year for planetary science. Back in February, the president released a proposed budget, which included this disproportionate cut, about 20% or about $300 million, to the Planetary Sciences Division of NASA. That's the part of NASA that does Voyager, that does Curiosity,

all Mars exploration, all planetary exploration, just got slashed by 20%. What's the current status at the end of the year? Are we kind of on hold right now, in a sense? That's exactly where we are. The Congress back in the spring restored some of the funding, different amounts in different houses, but some of the funding came back. But then Congress never reconciled those two bills and never passed a budget for 2013.

So we are in something called a continuing resolution, which funds all the federal government at 2012 levels. However, NASA's not allowed to spend beyond what was proposed in 2013. So the cut effectively went into effect October 1st. We're beginning the new year. What is the Planetary Society, and not just the Planetary Society, but a lot of other advocacy groups that are interested in planetary exploration, what do we want to see happen? Well, the big thing that we're fighting for, Planetary Society, with our partners at the

AGU and the Vision for Planetary Science and the AAS, is a restoration to the 2012. We should say American Astronomical Society. The American Astronomical Society, correct. We're advocating for a return to 2012 levels. And we've done the numbers on this. If you return to 2012 levels, which is $1.5 billion a year, you can do a big Martian sample return mission. You can send a mission to Europa, and you can start doing these smaller, faster, they're called discovery class missions every 36 months. You can do a lot more science

with that. You can keep a lot of the scientists and students employed and making great things and doing great discoveries. I'm pulling for that Europa mission, of course. But how about this rover, which NASA kind of threw out at the end of the year at the AGU, the American Geophysical Union Conference? Sounds pretty good on the face of it. It is. And again, everyone was totally surprised by this. No one expected NASA to announce this new rover a few weeks ago. So what it is, is that they're saying in 2020, we do a copy of Curiosity, basically, and we send it to Mars. We have yet to determine what the science goals of this mission are going to be and what exactly it's going to be looking for. So in the first months of next year,

there's going to be a science definition team that will come together and decide what the goals are. The big thing that we feel that it really has to have is what's called a sample cache or a little place, a bucket, to put pieces of Mars to be retrieved by another robot and sent back to Earth. That's the big goal, and that's what it really has to do to keep moving forward, Mars science. So I get the feeling that you and probably other people are going to be racking up the frequent flyer miles between here and Washington.

Yeah, absolutely. Next year we're going to be, we have two budget bills that will be passed, 2013 and 2014, hopefully. The whole sequester thing and getting this money back for planetary science is such a high priority that people like me, Bill Nye, and other employees from the Planetary Society will have a very big and consistent presence in Washington, D.C. next year. Let's finish very quickly with just one piece of good news that came out of the government, and that's it's of a radioactive nature. Yes. So Plutonium-238, which powers deep space probes out to beyond the asteroid belt, they

started to make this stuff again. And they hadn't made this stuff for about 20 years. And we had been using stuff that we had made years ago, plus plutonium we had purchased from the Russians. So that's what powers Curiosity, for example. But that's what we need to go to places like Jupiter, places like Europa, places like Saturn, where the solar power is just too weak.

So for the first time in 20 years, they irradiated the first few hundred grams of plutonium, which is the first step in showing that we can do this again. So this was a kind of a dark horse, but incredibly important policy issue that had been left alone for way too long. So that was a very bright spot in 2012. Are people going to be able to follow your, our, everybody's progress on the website?

Front of the U.S. that, yes, they can. Planetary.org slash SOS is the main homepage for all of our advocacy efforts. I encourage everyone to go there and follow along. We'll be asking and requiring a lot of people's help in contacting their representatives next year to make sure that funding comes back for planetary

science. Thank you, Casey. Happy to be here. Casey Dreyer is the Planetary Society's advocacy and outreach strategist. Last, but certainly not least. Of course not least. Is Bruce Betts. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

Now, we're going to get to the regular what's up content here. But we wanted Bruce to give us a little review of the projects that he takes care of, that he coordinates, manages on behalf of the Planetary Society. So, welcome. Where would you like to start? Why don't we start with a project that's ending because of its success, which is Pioneer Anomaly, looking at the strange, what were thought to be strange decelerations of the Pioneer spacecraft that were observed and caused all sorts of people to come up with all sorts of theories. But with more data that was recovered, thanks to Planetary Society members, they were able to do a more thorough analysis and do some thermal modeling using some other spacecraft data that was recovered. And basically, you can explain it, perhaps not surprisingly, through mundane explanation,

primarily through heat that got radiated primarily in the forward direction, so slowed the spacecraft by that little tiny bit. Good science. Maybe not quite as exciting as some people might have hoped, but certainly not surprising. But I'm excited that it's good science. Yes, me too. What's next? Projects in planetary defense, near-Earth asteroid studies, and the like.

We've continued to have lots of our Shoemaker-Neo grant winners tracking and discovering near-Earth asteroids, particularly doing the tracking. But it's the discoveries that get noticed. And I'll mention one of them, 2012 DA14, discovered by one of our winning groups in Spain. And that will be flying about the distance of geostationary satellites flying by the Earth on February 15th of 2013. Something to look for in the new year. Wow. And then I know you also want to talk about this other project where once we find one of these rocks that's not going to miss us, it might be one of the ways we would make sure it misses us anyway.

Right. We're trying to look into another possibly very effective way to nudge these asteroids and move them. And the cool part is it involves zapping rocks with lasers. That's what the Scottish researchers that are doing it have dubbed laser bees because it would be a swarm of spacecraft doing it. But the first steps are to zap rocks in the laboratory, which is, of course, fun and tells them how practical this is, how effective it is, and how much thrust and momentum you generate and how nasty it is for your optics to do it.

So we're still very active research going on with that. By the way, I should say, before I forget, you can find more information on all of these projects at planetary.org. One of those projects you can learn more about is one that I think we basically have our thumb out waiting for a ride. Exactly. So big milestone with LightSail, our attempt to fly solar sail spacecraft, CubeSat spacecraft. Spacecraft construction has been completed. There's still some more testing that will be done when we pull them out of storage.

But we're looking for a launch, thumb and a ride to try to get to an appropriate orbit to do that. Life in the universe, and is there intelligent life out there? We have not discovered aliens, but we're still looking. And the Planetary Society's Optical SETI telescope, run by Harvard University and Paul Horowitz and his group there, has a major electronics upgrade that they've put on in the last very few months that will allow them to much more efficiently sift out false signals, so false aliens, and get rid of those because they're super impressive back-end electronics.

The last of these, looking for that planet that E.T. might be living on. Exactly. We've been sponsoring various exoplanet research studies over the years. And in recent years, we've particularly been working with Deborah Fisher at Yale University. And so they're continuing to do hardware development, including at Keck Observatory in Hawaii. But also this year, we started working with them on their Alpha Centauri search. This year, we started working with them on their Alpha Centauri search, so nearest star system to us, looking for planets, including utilizing upgrades, fiber optic upgrades to their system,

facilitated by Planetary Society. And, of course, there was a discovery by a Swiss group of the first planet around Alpha Centauri, in this case, Alpha Centauri b. It's a multi-star system. Now that was a hellhole with a little over a three-day orbit around its parent star, but it's a good sign because the statistics so far have shown if you find some rocky planets, you'll probably find more. So they're continuing that search, and we look forward to what they find.

As they continue to find with their other searches, lots of Neptune and Jupiter jupiter type sized objects as well you know what i love most about these last two that you've mentioned that we may have the people at yale find the world and then the people at harvard help us talk to them aliens bringing the world together from harvard and yale oh my i want to mention one other thing matt that you were heavily involved with all of of us, which is Planet Fest. Great party. Maybe I've mentioned that, but it was two days of fun festivity and lots of great speakers and excitement with 2,000 to 3,000 people hanging out together watching the Mars landing.

And we actually arranged for it to work. Wait, no, no. I guess we didn't. But we thought good thoughts. We provided moral support. And 2,000 to 3,000 there with us at the Pasadena Convention Center and many, many more watching remotely around the world, watching our webcast. Sorry.

Watching you on stage much of the time acting as the emcee. Fun, fun, fun. All right, we move on to our more normal, regular, well I don't know if it's normal, but our regular segment of What's Up. Jupiter, of course, still bright starry object dominating in the evening. Just look up there in the east.

Look up high in the early evening. You'll see bright Jupiter. It's near a reddish star, which is all Debaron. And we've got a meteor shower coming up, as we mentioned last week, the Quantron Tids meteor shower, an above average shower, maybe 40 meteors per hour at their peak. Usually it should peak around January 3rd or 4th. So if you're picking this up early after it goes out there, you'll still be able to check it out. But there are meteors, increased meteor activity

a couple of days before and a couple of days after. There is some last quarter moon to interfere with that some, but still, if you can get to a dark side and stare at the clear night sky, you'll be in good shape. We move on to this week in space history. 2004, speaking of Planet Fest, we had a big one back then for two different events. One, of course, the landing of Spirit on Mars this week, 2004. But also, within a day of that, the Stardust encounter with Comet VILD 2. So the sample return, the layer return, lots of samples from a comet. Random space fact, random space fact, random space fact. That's the first time I've ever joined in.

I couldn't restrain myself. You just can't help yourself. Speaking of New Year's, Martian New Year's, though not really celebrated quite like Earth's various New Year's celebrations, would probably be viewed by scientists as the day of the beginning of northern spring. It's when the solar longitude, which I mentioned last week, used to discuss seasons on Mars and called L sub s, is taken as the zero degrees point. So the year is measured from that, so I'm going to declare that Martian New Year. So happy New Year then to the Martians and to us, and let's go right on into the trivia contest.

I'll let you know when Martian New Year next occurs. We move on to trivia. And I asked you, investigators from what country provided Curiosity's Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS, a weather station-type set of instruments?

How'd we do, Matt? Quite well. In spite of this being the holiday period when usually entries go way down. Peter McKenna is our winner this week. He didn't give us his address, but he's in the 616 area, if that's any help. Peter said that REMS was contributed by the Spanish government, by Spain. It was, and then I kind of hadn't thought about it, but I know some of our contributors pointed out there were also contributions to it from Finland as well. But the primary contribution of the instrument was from Spain, the lead investigators in Spain.

I do want to mention that Mark Wilson in San Diego mentioned that the Spanish contribution known as Penelope Cruz, he actually feels as a far superior package. I don't want her to take this wrong, but there would have been serious mass issues with flying her. I suppose so. It's nothing to do with her, just the fact that she's a human. Yeah. One more that I'll

mention. Ilya Schwartz, who sent quite a detailed description of the REMS instrument, and mentioned that one of the wind speed monitors, or meters, it has two, fortunately. One of these was broken, possibly by a rock that was picked up on descent, or, I believe, thrown by a Martian. What is that thing? Hey, you kids, get away from my spacecraft.

So anyway, we're going to send Peter one of those terrific 2013 year in space calendars, wall calendars. They're beautiful. And let's do one more of those. For the winner, a person who correctly answers this next question from Bruce. Hey, Earthling, can we have our ball back?

Get away, you little green kids. You bother me. Sorry. Okay. Moving to our trivia question. Who was planned to be the third person to have an extravehicular activity, EVA or spacewalk, in space? After Alexei Leonov, who had the first, Ed White had the second. Who was planned to have the third, and why did he not do it?

Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. What an interesting way to put that. You have until the 7th. That would be Monday, January 7th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this particular answer. Okay, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what resolutions you really might as well not make because you're not going to keep them anyway. Thank you and good night. I resolve to

continue to have a great time doing What's Up with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society throughout 2013. Happy New Year, Guy. Thank you. I'll go for that one too. Happy New Year. That's it for this week and for 2012. What a year.

I've never had more fun, learned more, or talked with a greater group of scientists, engineers, and space visionaries. I'm so grateful to everyone who made time to talk with us. The outlook for 2013 is just as bright. For example, in two weeks, we'll take you to the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California. Whether you're new to our show or a Planetary Radio veteran, I'm also very grateful to you for joining Emily, Bill, Bruce, and me on this journey of discovery. I hope you'll stay with us throughout the year and that your own voyage of discovery takes you wherever you

hope to go. 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 members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies, everyone. Thank you.