Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking Forward to a Year of Exploration, with Emily Lakdawalla

Episode Date: January 3, 2011

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A big new year of space exploration with Emily Lakdawalla, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I hope your 2011 is off to a great start. No one knows exactly what's in store, but I can promise you the next 12 months are full of promise and wonder among the planets and stars. Emily would agree. She'll take us on a quick tour of what's in store, including new missions to Mars, an extended stay at our solar system's second biggest asteroid, and much more. Later, Bruce Betts will join us with the year's first tour of the night sky.

We've also got a special contest in store, one that the Wikipedia is not likely to help you with much. And we'll wrap up with a special treat from John Boswell's Symphony of Science. I'm beginning to hope I'll get to see the last launch of Space Shuttle Discovery after all. We learned just before New Year's Eve that NASA engineers have discovered more small cracks in the beams than ensure the integrity of the big external tank. The agency believes it will take no more than two or three days to repair them, but you have to wonder how close to that first available launch date of Feb 3 the shuttle will be ready to go. Now, I would never hope the launch would be delayed till the end of February or beginning of March, just because that's when I have to be back in

Florida, but I think I'll bring my press pass along just in case. Bill Nye is up first on this special edition of PlanRad. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Society. Happy New Year 2011. This year, I hope a conflict is resolved. lake in California in North America on Earth, where these bacteria have apparently, apparently replaced the phosphorus, the hand railing on the spiral staircase of their DNA with arsenic, which would nominally be poison to people like you and me, organisms like you and me. This is Felisa Wolf-Simon and Ariel Anbar, these two scientists who have messed around with these bacteria. And they think they've got the bacteria not to coexist with arsenic, not to somehow ingest and excrete arsenic.

No, no, they've used the arsenic for the structure of their DNA. This is crazy. And it's so crazy that other scientists are poo-pooing it. They can't possibly be true. These people don't know what they're talking about. Well, I don't know the answer, but I've spoken with Ariel and I've read the paper as best I can.

It seems like there's something to it. I think this is true. So we at the Planetary Society are very hopeful that we will be able to get a sample of these bacteria and fly them on what may be the last space shuttle flight, STS-134. And then we can see if these bacteria behave any differently from other bacteria that have regular old phosphorus in their DNA.

Now, I'm not saying we're going to discover something amazing and change the world, but it's one more datum that we need that would be great to have. And wouldn't it be cool if these bacteria really do this and it changes the way we think of living things and it changes the way we explore life in other parts of the universe, go looking for life in other parts of the universe. And it changes, dare I say, this world. It's a very exciting time this year. So stay tuned. We'll see how the paper shakes out.

We'll see if we can get these bacteria a ride in low Earth orbit. And we'll see if we can ever so bacteria a ride in low Earth orbit. And we'll see if we can ever so slightly change the way we think about everything. I gotta fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Have you heard the pundits and politicians complain that NASA and others are doing nothing in space? These guys should wake up and smell the liquid hydrogen. Okay, we all want more human exploration, but after all, didn't humans build those robotic explorers? A bunch of our machines are going to be very busy in 2011, and we've got Emily Laktawalla on Skype with a preview.

She's the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator and editor of the Society's popular blog. Emily, we decided there was just too much to try and cover. It's coming up in 2011 in our usual three minutes, so we're going to take a few extra minutes today to let you expand or expound on some of the most exciting things that are coming up out there around our solar system. Where would you like to start? Well, I think I'll start with the three big events that are happening next year that I'm looking forward to. The first comes up on Valentine's Day, February 14th, when the Stardust spacecraft flies by Temple 1. And this will be the

first time that a comet has been revisited after one perihelion passage. I have to admit, I've been saying that'll be the first time ever a comet has been revisited, but a reader pointed out to me that many spacecraft visited Halley. So it's not technically the only time that a comet has ever been visited more than once. But it's the first time that a comet has gone through a perihelion passage and come back and we're going to look at it with a different spacecraft. So I think this is very exciting. This second look is also significant, isn't it? Because we've taken a chunk out of Temple 1. That's right. And you know, one of the points of the Deep Impact mission was it crashed, as you may recall, it crashed an impactor into the comet in order to throw some stuff up that

the spectrometers on the spacecraft could measure the internal composition of the comet. And that part was very effective. But another thing that they wanted to do was to see the crater that the impactor created. And this isn't just for vanity purposes. The shape of that crater will tell them a lot about how the comet is put together, how it's constructed. And it turns out with the original impact that there was so much dust thrown up that was so lit up by the sunlight that they never were able to see that crater. So this will be a chance, hopefully, for Stardust to get a chance to see that crater that Deep Impact made,

although it's actually not completely certain that we'll see the crater, because, of course, the right side of the comet has to be facing the spacecraft when we fly by, and we don't perfectly know its rotation state. They think they know. They've tried to time the flyby so that they'll get a chance to see the crater again. But if they miss the timing and we don't happen to see the crater, the crater's size will remain forever mysterious, but at least we'll get a chance to see the opposite side of the comet

that we didn't see with the original deep impact flyby. So it's a win-win, although one side is a bigger win than the other, and we'll hope that we get lucky with this. I also find it to be magnificent that we can have two different missions observing the same comet in our solar system. And yes, okay, so it's not the first time. That just makes it more impressive what we're able to do out there in space with our robotic spacecraft. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And, you know, I kind of always wonder how much the individual instruments on a mission influence what we've understood about a body.

And, you know, going back to Mars and the Moon over and over again, we've seen how different instruments get different views on a solar system body. So I think it's going to be fascinating to view this tiny solar system body again with a different suite of instruments. be fascinating to view this tiny solar system body again with a different suite of instruments. Speaking of visiting a single body more than once, we've already had three passbys of Mercury by MESSENGER, but this year things really get interesting. That's right. On March 18th, MESSENGER will, after an incredibly long cruise, finally settle into orbit around Mercury and begin its mapping. And as you mentioned, we've had three looks at Mercury, and MESSENGER has actually managed to get photos of practically all of Mercury's surface.

But it's been under a variety of illumination conditions, which isn't the greatest for doing systematic geology. So now with the orbital mission getting ready to begin, we'll finally get a really beautiful map of Mercury. And on top of that, we'll finally get topography for Mercury. MESSENGER carries a laser altimeter just like MOLA that was on Mars Global Surveyor and LOLA which is on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the power of topography to help us understand the geology of another planet is just, it's immeasurable, it's so important. And with MESSENGER's three flybys all we've gotten is single topographic profiles

along the surface of Mercury, usually around the equator. And so we still don't really have a good sense of the topography of Mercury. And that's really going to be the, I think, the biggest news to come out for geology on Mercury will be this topographic data set. But it's going to take a while for them to build that up. So we're going to have to be patient, wait several months, at least maybe a year after their orbital insertion to see the real fruits of that topographic mapping. And I can think of a mission principal investigator who's going to be very excited as well to be able to watch what's going on with the magnetic fields around Mercury and its magnetic and other plasma interaction, I suppose, with the sun over a long period of time.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to what Sean Solomon has to say about the mission. All right, let's go much farther out into the solar system for what will just be the first stop of a spacecraft at an asteroid. This, I think, is probably the biggest event as far as what I am looking forward to this year, and that's Dawn arriving at the asteroid Vesta. Dawn's going to be creeping up on Vesta slowly. It's an ion-powered spacecraft. It doesn't do these long silent cruises and then major burns. It's matching its orbit with Vesta and will kind of drift into a distant mapping orbit before going

down for a closer look. So there's not really one day of its arrival. It's going to be July and August. It'll be approaching and getting our first views of this world that's going to be very different from anything we've ever seen. It's a fairly large body as asteroids go. It's maybe roughly the size of say, Mimas. It's about 600 kilometers across, a little bigger than Mimas. But it's made of rock. And so it's not totally round like these icy moons of the outer solar system are. We know enough from Earth-based mapping that it has an enormous crater in its south pole. You can see a big bite out of the shape of the asteroid and the peak at the south pole. But apart from that, we don't know anything about what its surface looks like, and I just

really can't wait to see it up close. You obviously had this in mind when you opened the last door of your Advent calendar on New Year's Eve. That's right. I did an Advent calendar that looked at geologic surfaces across the solar system. And, you know, Vesta is a surface that we haven't seen yet, and we really haven't seen anything like it yet. Oh, and we better mention that this is just the first stop for Dawn. That's right. It's going to map Vesta, go into orbit, high orbit, then a low mapping orbit, and then it's actually going to depart and go on to visit Ceres, which is just an amazing mission profile.

So here are a whole bunch of climaxes to look for, but there are also some significant beginnings for missions. That's right. Later in the year, we switch from these big arrival events to departures. In August, we'll see Juno launch to Jupiter. It's been a long time since Jupiter had an orbiter. This one is not designed to map the moons so much as it is designed to map the interior of Jupiter to help us understand how gas giants are put together. So it's going to go into a polar orbit and study the gravity field, the magnetic field, and things like that in great detail and hopefully give us insight to how these great planets work. It will carry a camera. The camera is really only on there for public outreach purposes. So we should get some really nice shots of Jupiter. The first really good looks down onto

the poles and those pictures should be spectacular. But it doesn't arrive until July 2016. So we're going to have to be patient. How about another one of those beginnings? There's a whole pile of beginnings that happen in September and November. In September, we have GRAIL launching to the moon. That's actually a double spacecraft that's going to be mapping the gravity field of the moon and, again, help us understand its interior. And then in November, there's a pile of spacecraft launching to Mars. First, there's NASA's Curiosity, otherwise known as Mars Science Laboratory rover. We don't know where Curiosity is going to go yet, so they're going to be selecting the landing site sometime early this

year. And then at about the same time, the Russians are planning to launch their Phobos sample return mission, formerly known as Phobos Grunt, and hitching a ride with the sample return mission to Mars is going to be the first Chinese orbiter to leave the Earth-Moon system, which is Yinghuo-1. Excellent. Emily, we're going to be following all of these missions as 2011 unfolds, and I look forward to many more conversations with you over the course of the year as well, as I know our listeners do. Yeah, and of course, I'll be mentioning all the ongoing missions, you know, lest we forget that there's still Cassini and Opportunity and Venus Express and Odyssey and

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And of course, the Voyagers are still way out there and approaching interstellar space. And it's just an exciting time to be watching robotic space exploration. Still very good times in our solar system. Thanks a lot, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lactuala is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Back in just a moment with a special edition from Bruce as well. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine.

That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Bruce Betts is on the Skype connection. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Happy New Year. Happy New Year, Matt. It's good to be talking to you. Hope I get to see you again sometime soon.

Please tell us what's up in the new sky for this glorious new year. We've scrubbed it clean. Start started over again. You get that chance once a year. And yet we've still kept Jupiter in the evening sky because I just thought it was nice. So Jupiter, bright star-like object, evening sky in the south. And in the pre-dawn, Venus, super bright star-like object over in the east. And above it is Saturn. Also, we have a couple special events I mentioned last week, but I'll mention again now for those picking up the show right after we put it out. The Quantretids, the hardest to pronounce, meteor shower of the year, peaks on the night of January 3rd with a new moon. So good to look at. We'll have an increased

meteor activity for a couple days afterwards, but it's a relatively sharp peak. And for those of us who aren't here, a partial solar eclipse on January 4th that will be visible from Europe, Africa, and Central Asia. The peak is at 850 UT over northern Sweden. So I will meet you there in a couple days, Matt. I don't think I want to fly anymore. We were coming through Denver yesterday, returning from our visit to in-laws, and it was 12 degrees in Denver with the tarmac and runways covered with ice.

I'm going to stay right here for a while. And I'm guessing that was 12 Fahrenheit. Yeah, that's correct. It wasn't Kelvin. I thought he must mean Kelvin. No, centigrade. But I was wrong. No, it was 12 degrees F.

F. We move on to this week in space history. Degrees F. F. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2004 that we gathered this week for what turned out to be the successful landing of Spirit on Mars. Yep. And far as we know, might still be alive.

We also had back in 1610. So 401 years ago, Galileo discovered those Galilean satellites. It was so convenient that they happened to be named just like his name. So the large moons of Jupiter, he spied them through his telescope. We also had, I know a date that you're enamored with, the first power tool in space this week, 1964. Yeah, because NASA realized early on that if guys were going to be happy in space, they had to have power tools.

So let us move on. You got something for us? Well, you know, it was so good that I decided as a special treat for you and me and the listeners, let's hear Brandon Cook tell us how we ensure that those space facts are random. It's time once again for Random Space Fact.

How do we know it's truly random? Well, first, each fact is assigned a number. That number, in turn, is fed into a random number generator. The number is then divided by pi and then multiplied by Planck's constant. The results are baked at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. The numbers are processed at supercomputers at Kaplan University. The results are then fed into a mass spectrometer. Nice work, Brandon. Keep us entertained. Send more. I still can't figure out how I figured out our secret method. I told you it's WikiLeaks.

Frustrating. Anyway, this week, I just wanted to, we did the happy new year partying on our Gregorian calendar. I just wanted to wish you happy Julian Day 2,455,564. Really? What does that mean? Well, I'm glad you asked. Those wacky astronomers like to use Julian Days. The good news about Julian Days is you don't have to worry about those pesky years. We just count sequentially the days that move on. So one day is 2,455,564, and then it'll be 565 the next day. And it makes it easier to do your plots and comparisons of astronomical phenomena as they vary, but it does sound pretty off the wall at times. And of course, time zero of the Julian dates is January 1st, 4713

BC at Greenwich Noon in the Julian poleptic calendar. I'm not going to ask why, because we don't have time to go into it, but I'm glad they could pick the date. So, Julian dates, important to those

wacky astronomer guys so we go on to uh to trivia question yeah we had a pretty good response i should tell you uh because i think people wanted the really cool prize that we're offering uh what did you ask i asked who is on board the international space station right now what astronauts and cosmonauts how How do we do, Matt? Well, I'm going to try and give you the names. The Americans, of course. That'll be entertaining. Yeah, but, you know, these are difficult, some of these. The commander is Scott J. Kelly.

Flight engineer, Alexander Kaleri. Flight engineer, Oleg Skripochka. Flight engineer, Catherine Coleman. Flight engineer, Dmitry Kondratyev, and Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli. Amazingly, those were all perfect pronunciations. Thank you, because your Russian is far better than mine. Now, I may have you beat on Italian, but I'm not even sure about that. We got those names from a whole bunch of people, including our winner this week, Stephen Whitehead.

We got those names from a whole bunch of people, including our winner this week, Stephen Whitehead. Stephen or Stephan Whitehead in England, Alton in Great Britain. What did he win? And that commemorative SOFIA pin that flew with the SOFIA telescope on the 747 on its first science flight. So congratulations, Stephen or Stephan. I did want to mention as well, Felipe down in Brazil didn't win, but he gave all the right names of the crew members on the ISS, and then added plus, of course, the millions of people sharing the dream of space exploration whose thoughts are always with the men, women, and robots floating in the sky. Happy holidays to

the whole Planetary Radio crew. And we got nice holiday greetings from a whole bunch of listeners, not all of whom we'll be able to get back to, but thank you all. Thank you. And happy holidays, happy New Year, and happy Julian date. We're going to use you, our listeners, to help figure out some of the cool things that can be done in the future in NASA. Maybe, Matt, did you want to tell us about what NASA's asking for,

that we're going to ask our listeners to do a, let us say, somewhat more informal response to us of what their thoughts are? Sure. This came out of a press release, a NASA press release on December 21st. NASA seeks proposals for technology flight demonstrations and information about suborbital flight services. The gist of this is that NASA wants proposals from researchers, which includes all of you people, because if you listen to Planetary Radio, you're clearly a researcher,

interested in testing new technologies during suborbital flights. And I guess if your proposal is chosen, it's either going to go up on the Vomit Comet, of course, the parabolic flight that gives you a few seconds of weightlessness or microgravity. Or it might actually go on a suborbital flight that a number of people are getting ready to give a shot at. So what we want are your proposals. What's your technology that you think should be tested in microgravity? We make no promises that these things will ever fly. Yeah, what do you think we are nasa no but but uh listen we're gonna judge this on man i think we should do the usual humor

value yeah that's always nice if you can work us into it that that that doesn't hurt no humor value and actual value that nasa might perceive might perceive if your proposal was chosen. Okay. So send those to us. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how. What should we give them as a prize? A calendar.

That sounds good to me. A 2011 year in space calendar? Yes. That would be so cool. All right. We'll do that. 2011 year in space calendar? Yes, that would be so cool.

All right, we'll do that. You have until the 10th of January in this new year, 2011, Monday, January 10 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your proposal that should go into orbit, or not quite orbit. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about all the things you're smelling right now. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts is the director of... What is that? He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Want to know more about NASA's Flight Opportunities Program? It's one of the

links from this week's show page that you can reach from planetary.org. Think the holidays are over? Not when we've got one more present for you. Well, it really comes from John Boswell's Symphony of Science. We Are All Connected features our own Bill Nye, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the late Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman. We can't quite fit the pictures in your radio or mp3 player, but we hope you'll enjoy this special gift of music and inspiration. We're all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically. I think nature's imagination is so much greater than man's. She's never going to let us relax.

We live in an in-between universe where things change all right, but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature. I'm this guy standing on a planet. Really, I'm just a speck. I'm just a speck. Compare with a star. The planet is just another speck. To think about all of this. To think about the vast emptiness of space.

There's billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of specks. The beauty of the living thing is not the atoms that go into it. But the way those atoms are put together. The cosmos is also within us. We're made of stars. We are a wave. The cosmos is also within us We're made of star stuff And we are a way

Of a cosmos to know itself Across the sea of space The stars are others And we've traveled this way before And there is much to be learned We're all connected To each other Biologically To the Earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomic.

Find it elevating and exhilarating to discover that we live in a universe which permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people to stream the same. Have you heard this? The beauty of the living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. The cosmos is also within us. We're made of

star stuff. We are a way of the cosmos to know itself. Deuce. Deuce. the cosmos to do its own. There's this tremendous mass of waves all over in space which is the light bouncing around the room

going from one thing to the other and it's all really there, all really there Really, really there But you gotta stop and think about it About the complexity To really get the pleasure It's all really there

Really, really there The inconceivable nature of nature To think about all of this To think about the vast emptiness of space Thank you. are put together. The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way of the cosmos to know itself. Across the sea of space,

the stars are others. We have traveled this way before and there is much to be learned. You'll find the video version of We Are All Connected at symphonyofscience.com or on the PlanRad page at planetary.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова