Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Vondrak

Episode Date: June 30, 2009

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A chat with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's top scientist, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Fans of exploration that you are, you're probably well aware that the first American missions in a decade are now circling the moon. We'll talk with project scientist Richard Vondrack about what the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will soon be telling and showing us about our only natural satellite. And we'll stay up there for this week's What's Up segment with our friend Bruce Betts. Wait till you hear how your fellow listeners describe the moon's surface area. Some of their responses are pretty cheesy. First up, here's a somewhat indignant Bill Nye.

Someone better tell Bill to count to ten. Oh, wait, he already has. I'll be back in a couple of minutes with Richard Vondrack. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. And this week I'd like to talk about Base 10, about the metric system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, decided to have its new constellation program that includes the Orion spacecraft, the Ares I and Ares V, giant rocket boosters. These things are designed to replace the space shuttle. They decided to run

that program with the English system or imperial units like miles and inches and feet. And if I may, that is like so 17th century. My friends, NASA is supposed to be leaders. The United States is the last country on Earth to use the English system. It's not because we know what we're doing. It's because we're living in the past. NASA is supposed to be a leader. And sure enough, if you ask an accountant, does this cost anything to change to the metric system? I would hope the accountant says yes.

Well, the accountant department came out with $370 million, which is a lot of money. But the cost of not doing it is not reasonable to even estimate. You may recall the Mars Climate Orbiter. People at Lockheed Martin were using pounds force. Let's see. It's a moment of inertia, right? So it must have been pounds per second squared, inches squared per pounds mass foot. Yeah, what could go wrong? Instead of using kilograms and meters squared, people, my friends, this is not rocket surgery. This is about the past or the future. So NASA has chosen in this program to live in the past. I mean, if you're going to make a souffle, you've got to break some eggs, if you're going to make a souffle, you've got to break some eggs. If you're going to make a rocket for the 21st century,

you've got to use the metric system. The metric system didn't come from the sky. It's right there on your hands. Everybody's got 10 fingers. That's why we use the base 10. Oh, it's troublesome, my friends. I hope NASA changes its mind. Well, anyway, I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Thanks for listening to Planetary Radio. Move over, Mars. The Moon has its own reconnaissance orbiter now, and the American vision for space exploration has taken its first step into space.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter joins India's Chandrayaan-1. It arrived with the LCROSS Lunar Impactor mission that will cover another week. It was barely three weeks ago that Japan's Kaguya spacecraft made its own violent impression on the moon. China's Chang'e-1 went kersplat, as planned, last March. Richard Vondrack is LRO's project scientist, responsible for the scientific integrity of the mission. He's also deputy director of the Solar System Exploration Division

at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. I started our conversation with congratulations on the successful insertion into lunar orbit that took place just a few days before. Well, thank you very much. We're very excited here at Goddard. This is NASA's first mission back to the moon in more than 10 years, and we're looking forward to paving the way for exploration. You've got a very powerful spacecraft now orbiting the moon,

and eventually orbiting at an amazing altitude of just 50 kilometers, or about 31 miles, I guess. You ever see the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Yes, I have. There is a shot in that, and it's this tortured astronaut stuck on the planet, and he's watching his mothership go by in the sky. And that thing looks like it must be about at the height that LRO is going to be above the surface of the moon. Yeah, we're down at a very low altitude, especially compared to the other international missions that have flown recently. They all did their primary mapping at either 100 or 200 kilometers altitude. So we're designed to fly low, get high-resolution images and other data,

and do that for at least a year. You have an impressive suite of instruments, but let me ask you first about the camera, the main camera, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera. Is this, in a sense, LRO's version of HiRISE on MRO? Yes, it has a very similar resolution. HiRISE, I believe, has about 50 centimeters per pixel, and that's what we get from 50 kilometers altitude with our narrow angle camera. We'll image a substantial part of the moon at that resolution. Each pixel is about 50 centimeters, so you can resolve objects that are roughly two pixels

or a few pixels in size. So yes, indeed, we'll see things that are the size of a golf cart, and we should be able to image the Apollo artifacts that remain on the surface. You know, it may not be scientifically that significant, but that really does excite the imagination, that you'll be able to show us what's left of Tranquility Base. Yes, we want to do that, but we do have a science goal in making those kinds of measurements because the Apollo panchromatic camera on the last three missions

measured the low latitudes with comparable resolution. And by comparing our images with those made nearly 40 years ago, we hope to see some fresh craters, which would help us to understand better the meteor flux into the lunar surface. LRO was conceived as an exploration mission, to the lunar surface. LRO was conceived as an exploration mission, and the purpose of LRO is to identify safe landing sites for human return, to search for resources, and also to measure better some elements of the space radiation environment that we don't fully understand. However, the instruments that were flying on LRO are comparable or have a strong heritage in instruments that have flown to other planets. So we're very confident that the data will be useful for science as well as for exploration.

Ultraviolet mapping seems to be an important part of this, as does hydrogen mapping. Is that all wrapped up in this search for water? Yes. Searching for resources, one important resource that we hope to find is volatiles in the form of hydrogen that would be detected or water, hydrogen that might be linked with water. So we have several instruments focused on resolving the question as to whether there's water ices at the polar regions of the moon or not. Does El Oro have any kind of role in, I guess, what could be called the sister mission of LCROSS,

or are they really independent? No, we work together very closely. LCROSS is going to touch the surface, as you probably know. Rather violently. In a very dramatic way, because LRO is going to do the best possible job you can with a remote sensing spacecraft to do things like search for water. spacecraft to do things like search for water. But to really find out what the surface and the subsurface is like in a particular spot, it's good to touch the surface, and that's what LCROSS does. We help LCROSS by helping them select their target. As you know, LCROSS has a several-month journey ahead of it, and it will come back to the moon in early October,

probably October 8th, and excavate part of the surface for us. What we will do is help LCROSS to identify which particular crater to impact. So some of our early data will be used in that target selection process. We may observe the impact itself, and then certainly afterwards we'll be looking for the two fresh craters that LCROSS and the Shepherding spacecraft will form in one of these permanently shadowed regions. You know, that's an interesting point, because I know from our conversations with folks on the Mars missions

that observation of fresh craters can sometimes reveal surprising things. Right. The LCROSS Centaur stage will excavate a crater that should be several meters deep and probably the order of 10 meters or more in size. We'll be able to measure that with not only our imager, but also we have a radiometer, an infrared radiometer that will measure very accurately the temperature in the coal traps, in the cold regions. So this fresh crater should be conspicuous in those types of measurements. I noted that there is an altimeter, which I guess will also play an important role in picking a landing spot when we humans decide to go back.

Right. This is a descendant of the MOLA instrument that you probably know about that was flown on Mars Global Surveyor that produced the beautiful topographic maps of Mars. The same group here at Goddard that developed MOLA, and then another instrument called Messenger Laser Altimeter that's flying on the Messenger mission to Mercury. They have a new design which has a laser that goes through a special optical element which splits the laser beam into five spots. So it fires at 28 times a second and then produces 140 spots each second on the lunar surface

and measures the altimetry, the distance to the surface, and then also the roughness of the surface. The advantage of doing five spots at once is that they're arranged in such a way that we get five parallel tracks under the spacecraft rather than just one. And also by measuring five spots at the same time, we can measure very precisely the slope of the surface. And the slope is very important for safe landings. The Apollo spacecraft could not land safely on slopes that were more than about 15 degrees. spacecraft could not land safely on slopes that were more than about 15 degrees. With the Apollo 15 mission, they actually had one of their landing pads in a small crater, which caused a sharp tilt in the spacecraft. Wow, I didn't know that. So we're going to produce a high-resolution topographic

3D map of the moon as part of LRO. We'll hear more from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Vondrack when Planetary Radio continues. Hi, I'm Lou Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society. You've made Planetary Radio one of our most successful programs. Our valued listeners depend on it for weekly space-related news, entertainment, and inspiration. However, today's economy is forcing the society to make tough choices. As a result, the future of Planetary Radio is now on the line. Planetary Radio urgently needs your financial support to continue. We know this program is important to you, so we're asking you to make a donation dedicated to keeping Planetary Radio alive. Please visit our webpage at planetary.org slash radio. Tax-deductible donations of $50 or more will be rewarded with a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Our listeners are a thoughtful and committed team. I trust you will help sustain Planetary Radio so we can continue to explore new worlds. Please extend your lifeline of support at planetary.org slash radio, and thank you. support at planetary.org slash radio and thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and its sister LCROSS mission are settling into orbit. LRO project scientist Richard Vondrack and his team are gearing up for what promises to be spectacular data, including images that may show us features that are just a meter across. I asked Rich how his mission complements the four other orbiters that have spent time circling the moon in recent years,

SMART-1, Kaguya, Chang'e-1, and the still-orbiting Chandrayaan-1. Well, from a scientific point of view, the lunar community is really overjoyed by this rich set of data that is now flowing from the moon after a long period with not many measurements of the moon. The international missions, some of them are measuring things that we are not measuring with LRO. For example, the Japanese and the Indian spacecraft have plasma instruments on board and a magnetometer, and those are very nice data sets. But when we designed LRO, chose to focus our measurements on our three top objectives

that I identified for you with safe landing sites, resources, and radiation. And so our instruments are selected to work together to try to comprehensively answer the questions in these areas. Much more to learn. The farther you get from the equator, the less we know about this object that's just a quarter of a million miles away. Right. The Apollo missions did wonderful science. They brought back those moon rocks that really opened their eyes to the history of the Earth-Moon system. They told us a lot about the evolution of the early solar system.

The late heavy bombardment were several hundred million years after Earth and the other planets were formed. There was some sort of major readjustment of the solar system that resulted in a large flux of objects into the moon. And we would not have known that had we not gone to the moon and brought back those rocks. Now, Apollo went to the equator in low-latitude regions. The moon has a surface area that's larger than Africa, and if you want to understand Africa and you just went to six places in the Sahara Desert, you wouldn't know much about that continent. The poles, we think, are greatly different than low latitudes in the equator, and that's

why LRO has an objective to understand better the polar regions of the moon. You know, you just gave away part of the answer to our current weekly space trivia contest, which is not only what is the surface area of the moon, but compare it to something else. Give us an analogy. You gave somebody out there a good one there. I'm not going to repeat it because I just watched before we started to speak the video that is on the website, and we'll put up the link, of course, to the LRO website there at the Goddard Space Fight Center. But that video was taken in your control center as LRO was inserted into lunar orbit. Pretty exciting stuff.

But what caught my eye, even though it was only there for a flash, I actually had to do a freeze frame, what caught my eye more than the plentiful Aloha shirts was a pirate flag, a skull and crossbones flag with what looked like all the instrument acronyms on it. You know, that was developed by the engineers very early, and the history of that is a bit obscure. I think the idea was that we're a fast-paced mission, and we've got something really important to do, and we've been developed on a schedule that's moving along more quickly than other planetary missions. LRO was conceived less than five years ago.

We had our instrument selection just a little more than four years ago, and our preliminary design review came well after that. So the team's been working very hard, and so I think they view this as an exciting mission, which it is, and one that is different than the other ones they've done. How far off are we from beginning to collect some of that great scientific data booty? We launched last week, and we arrived in lunar orbit, as you mentioned, early Tuesday morning, and we were captured into a rather eccentric orbit. We've been firing our engines once a day, and this morning we got into a 200-kilometer circular orbit,

and then tomorrow morning we're going to go down into our commissioning orbit, as we call it. This is an eccentric orbit that is 30 kilometers periseline over the South Pole and a 210-kilometer orbit over the North Pole. It's one we discovered here at Goddard that's fairly stable. It doesn't require much fuel to maintain. So we use the next six to eight weeks as our commissioning period. When you go to Mars or another planet, you've got a long cruise phase in which you can check out the spacecraft and the instruments before you arrive at your destination. Because the moon is so close, we only had a four-day cruise phase.

destination. Because the moon is so close, we only had a four-day cruise phase. Now we're going to spend the next six weeks checking out the spacecraft, activating the instruments and calibrating them. And then sometime in late August, we're going to dive down into our 50-kilometer orbit. We're hoping to turn on the camera fairly soon because everyone's eager to see the first images from the moon. So sometime after your show is broadcast within, I'd say, first week in July, we hope to have images released and put online. Rich, best of luck with those coming phases and with that beginning of the return of, hopefully, a boatload of data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and I hope that we can check back with you after that data starts to arrive

back here on Earth. Oh, please do. We expect to have very exciting data, and I'm sure there'll be new discoveries when we get new eyes looking at new places. You know, we'll make this all available to the public and enjoy talking with you in the future about them. Oh, and by the way, I almost forgot. You've got, what is it, 1.6 million names of people in that public carried along with you on LRO, including names of the members of the Planetary Society.

Yes, yes, I'm a member of the Planetary Society, and I'm very happy to see that my name is on LRO, along with so many folks who wanted to be part of the mission. And we're honored to both be along for the ride and have you along for the ride today on Planetary Radio. Thanks again. Well, thank you. Richard Vondrack is the project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, now

orbiting our one and only natural satellite. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter now orbiting our one and only natural satellite. He is also the deputy director of the Solar System Exploration Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which is where we've been speaking to him. Long history with NASA, he was the first director of the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program at NASA. He's also a winner of the Outstanding Leadership Medal from NASA and NASA's Excellence in Outreach Award, which is certainly what we've been about over the last few minutes. We'll be right back, and that'll be for this week's visit with Bruce Betts and What's Up.

It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, and we're going back to the moon a little bit later with Bruce Betts. That's where we spent the show so far, you know, with Rich Von Drack. Welcome. Thank you very much. Yes, good stuff. LRO, very exciting. Yeah, and he's anxious to come back on the show when they've got some data to report, so we will definitely do that.

Excellent. Let's probably talk about the night sky right now, just out of traditional habit. We've got in the evening sky, you can check out Saturn still fairly low, but over there in the West looking kind of yellowish ring still very edge on, not completely, but close. Also something to look for in the land of constellations, big red stars, Antares, which is the bright reddish red giant star in Scorpius. You can check that out over in the south and the whole constellation in the early evening on July 3rd and 4th. You can see the moon near Antares. So that bright reddish thing is the star Antares. In the pre-dawn, Venus, spectacular.

Over in the east in the pre-dawn venus spectacular over in the east in the pre-dawn mars is above it these days so much dimmer and reddish but still quite obvious above the extremely bright venus and then jupiter over towards the south and it's actually rising around the middle of the night right now over there in the east also looking very very bright just not quite as bright as venus let us go on to random space i give that a six degree of difficulty 3.4 let me revise that that was the judge from an unnamed country i'll give it an eight okay Okay, thank you. Yes, the Neptunian judge. It's terribly hard upon me for never pointing out his planet. Oh, they are so cold up there.

But, you know, it's to be expected. So Ganymede, largest moon in the solar system, it's larger in diameter than the planet Mercury, but it only has about half the mass of Mercury due to the widely different densities they have. Ah, very interesting random space fact. Thank you. I was just going to go on to the trivia contest. Yeah, you should, and I'm glad you saved a lot of time for this,

because we have a ton of responses that we want to go through here. There's all stuff that ought to be on a blog, but we had so many wonderful responses to your question, which was what? What is the surface area of the moon? And give us some analogies. And that's where we got lots of creative answers for how many of that in something else. How do we do, Matt? Go ahead. Tell us the fabulous answer and the more fabulous analogies.

People did incredibly well, just incredibly well. And that's to be expected from our rather brilliant audience. I guess you know that the answer is roughly 38, 39 million square kilometers or 14.6 million square miles. Indeed. And as we heard from Rich Vondrack, just a few moments ago, roughly the scale of Africa, although you might be able to throw in a good piece of Australia as well, as was pointed out by Craig Jernay, one of our listeners. But let me give you the answer from Randy Godowski of Omaha, Nebraska, who came up through Random.org as our winner today. How about 310,638 Disney worlds? Yeah, oddly enough, I've never heard that one before. He gave us a couple of others too. But in the interest of time, because we've got so many of these, we're going to skip those and move on to some more.

But Randy, congratulations. You are the winner of a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a rewards card from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. more. But Randy, congratulations! You are the winner of a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a rewards card from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. Can I give you some more of these? Go, go, go. These are so good. Paulo Ricardo Savino out

of Brazil. This is an interesting one. If everybody moved to the moon, each of us on Earth, each human being, would have about six square meters to live in. Could be worse. Could be worse. Here's William Stewart's entry. I think this is just a terrific one. If you put everybody on the moon and gave each of them 12,000 plan red t-shirts, they could cover the surface of the moon with that 12,000 times roughly six billion t-shirts, they could cover the surface of the moon with that 12,000 times roughly

six billion t-shirts. Huh? Somewhere there's an inconsistency between those two. Since if we only have six square meters, we're not going to take 12,000 t-shirts. We'll look into that and get back to you. Yeah, I don't think we have that many in inventory anyway. Here's one of my favorites. A little bit of nationalistic pride here, I don't think we have that many in inventory anyway. Here's one of my favorites, a little bit of nationalistic pride here, I think.

Elisabetta Antichi out of Italy, she came up with, and I have to get this right, not quite 92 quadrillion Mona Lisas. The person or the painting? Just the painting, I think. Wow, I have an intuitive feeling now. All right, maybe you'll like this one better because here's a real place. No, that was funny. I enjoy all of this. Well, here's Johann Peter Dahm's entry. Johann is a resident of the Faroe Islands, and his home village is Funninger.

And you could put, he figures, 2,107,222 funingars on the moon. Not that anyone's considering doing that. We're going to have to go visit just to get an idea of what that really means. Okay, much closer to our home. Not surprising we would hear from a Texan, right? Randall Sitton wrote to us. Randall, a charter member of the Planetary Society. 54.5 Texases. Texonomies. I can't believe the moon's bigger than Texas. Here we go. I'm ready for

your favorite. John Gallant. John Gallant of Lima, New York. We hear from John pretty regularly. I'm going to give you the exact number. One quintillion, 396 quadrillion, 740 billion, 890 million, 976,907.73 wedges of laughing cow cheese. Wow. Wow. Wow. And for those who aren't familiar with delicious laughing cow cheese, not a sponsor of this program, it's a little tiny wedge that comes in a circular box. And I don't think they have a green variety, but what the heck. Well, I'm hungry. So our hat's off, right?

Thank you. And we had more, but that was all the time we had. So apologies to the others of you who sent in wonderful, brilliant entries. We're running late. You got one for next week? I do have one for next week. My friend I mentioned earlier, Ganymede and Titan, as I think I've mentioned before and people may know, are both larger in diameter than Mercury. and people may know, are both larger in diameter than Mercury.

What additional moons of the solar system are larger in diameter than Pluto? Whatever you categorize Pluto as, what moons are bigger than Pluto? I've given you Ganymede and Titan. You give us the rest. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You've got till the 5th of July, July 5th, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. Hey, that was fun.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about the importance of sweat in the universe. Thank you and good night. I won't even try and come up with a perspiration analogy for the surface of the moon, but maybe they're going to find salty ice up there at the pole. That's quite enough of that. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he's with us every week for What's Up. Cheese. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week.