Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Marvelous Martian MAVEN

Episode Date: December 27, 2016

MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, has gone a long way toward solving the mystery of the Red Planet’s missing water and air. The University of Colorado’s Nick Schneider says it is also revealing gorgeous clouds, auroras and glowing skies.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marvelous Martian Maven, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. You want hard, exciting science after last week's space artists? We've got it. Nick Schneider of the MAVEN mission is back with astounding news of Martian clouds, auroras, the planet's disappearing atmosphere, and more. Later, Bruce Betts will take us out to the ballgame. Here's Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy to marvel with me at a December 21st blog post by someone you know. 21st blog post by someone you know. Bill, as we prepare to close out the year, I'm glad you want to talk about how our colleagues Emily Lakdawalla, who won't be heard this week, she's celebrating the holidays like many of us, and Amirk Boyan, our creative director, this interesting way they found to celebrate the winter solstice. Yes, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere of Earth, where most people live. Most of the land in the world, on our world, is north of the equator. What they did, Matt, they got north poles of 15 solar system bodies, if you include the sun, 14 plus the sun.

And it's amazing. These images are so high resolution. They're so sharp. The shadows of the North Poles of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Ceres, Vesta. It's just, it's amazing. And we have done this. Humankind has done this with international effort. We have had spacecraft from many countries that are exploring the solar system to learn more about that mythic thing I talk about all the time, Matt. Our place in space. So happy 2016, everybody.

And happy 2017, because many people, for many of our listeners, this will be the first show of ours that they hear in the new year. And best wishes to all of us. Best wishes to all. Let's change the worlds. I know it's going to be a big year for you and we'll be talking about that later as we get into the year. Bill, thank you very much. It has been an honor once again to share the last year with you. Oh no, Matt, it is you. It's an honor to be with you. No, thanks everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll see you in the new year. That's Bill Nye. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society.

Bill Nye, the science guy, and you'll be hearing a lot about him early in the new year. The 2016 meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences ended more than two months ago. If you're a PlanRad regular, you know that I talk with a lot of terrific scientists at that meeting. There's just one more I want to bring you, and he is bringing us amazing news from MAVEN. That's the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission that has now been orbiting the red planet for over two years. MAVEN is enjoying an extension of its investigation, and Nick Schneider says there is much more science and probably many surprises still to come. Wait till you hear him talk about the clouds and auroras of Mars.

On the MAVEN team since 2005, Nick is an associate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He's also a researcher at UC's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, where the mission was conceived and is managed under Principal Investigator Bruce Joukowsky. Nick, join me at the Planetary Radio table in the DPS exhibit hall. From all appearances, from everything that I have heard, MAVEN has done what it went to Mars to do, and then some. We're going absolutely gangbusters on MAVEN, and you're right that we're doing exactly what we were sent to do

to understand the escape of the atmosphere to space. I'm going to put a little nuance in your statement there. We're seeing exactly the kinds of processes of the atmosphere to space. I'm going to put a little nuance in your statement there. We're seeing exactly the kinds of processes of the escaping atmosphere disappearing to space. We know those processes exist, but we still got some work to do on finding the numbers. And the idea is that Mars lost 99% of its atmosphere, and we can't yet back it up that we've lost exactly that much. So there's still some more math. So you folks are pretty happy that you're going to have another couple of years at least.

Absolutely. The extended mission will take us for another Mars year. It's not just to collect more data, but more data under different conditions, different Mars seasons, different levels of solar activity, so we can piece together how Mars responds under all those different circumstances. As we have heard from the folks with Cassini and so many other missions, getting to spend more time there is a huge advantage. That's exactly right. I work on the imaging ultraviolet spectrograph. The amount that we have learned on how to optimize our instrument, how to take exactly the best data. It's singing now. It's absolutely

beautiful what we can do now compared to when we first got there. And so the data we take for the next two years is going to be even better than what we took for the first two years. All right. I'm going to come back to that instrument and some of the stuff you talked about today. But even with the data that has been collected so far. Bruce Stokowski earlier today was able to stand on stage and say, we now know that most of Mars's atmosphere was lost to space. And it was enough to take it from warm and wet to cold and dry. Do I have that right? Yep, that's pretty much right. I'm going to say that we owe the team some numbers. The estimates that you've heard so far have been the charged particle escape.

We have a set of instruments on board that measure the charged particle escape. We're responsible for the neutral escape. And so far, a lot of those have been estimates, but we're going to have some fabulous numbers. Our team member, Mike Chaffin, he's actually in charge of some of our neutral escape numbers. And he's one of the most careful and insightful scientists on the team. And so we really want those numbers to come home and to contribute to this overall statement about the loss of the carbon dioxide and especially the loss of the water. You mentioned, Mike Chaffin, there was an announcement

just apparently today, which I have not seen yet. But Bruce Joukowsky told me it's all about hydrogen, pretty light stuff. Yes, really important to track what's happened with hydrogen because it ultimately was the water on the surface that we think made up certainly lakes and rivers and maybe even oceans on Mars. Today's release talks about the fact that hydrogen release, hydrogen escape from Mars is not steady. We used to think that there was a very slow regulated process where the hydrogen would sort of reach the top of the atmosphere and then just almost evaporate away. What we now know, thanks to MAVEN, is that that escape process can sometimes

change by a factor of 10. Sometimes the hydrogen is escaping 10 times faster than at other times. So that's a pretty big deal and a really big departure from the earlier views about how hydrogen escape should happen. A big part of Bruce's presentation this morning was focused on argon, another gas, and two isotopes of that. And what was that telling us? Bruce has really put a lot of effort in understanding the behavior of isotopes. The beauty of isotopes is that they're chemically identical, but they differ in mass. Now, my favorite isotope is deuterium, heavy hydrogen. And it's pretty easy to imagine that you might

have water with HDO, we call it, or water H2O. Heavy water. Exactly. And that those different isotopes, hydrogen and deuterium, will behave similarly in water but very differently when they get to the top of the atmosphere. And the lighter one, regular hydrogen, will escape much faster than deuterium does. The same idea applies to argon, but it's not as extreme. It's a heavier element to start with, and so the mass difference doesn't cause

as large of an effect. I'll let you talk to Bruce more about argon. Ask me anything you want about deuterium, or my colleague John Clark, who runs our deuterium program, you might say would be a good one. Well, let's talk about the stuff that you presented right after Bruce was on stage today. You talked about this fascinating phenomenon called night glow. Yes, night glow is something that most people have never seen, but it's actually very common on Earth. And I don't know if you look at all these beautiful time-lapse pictures on the Internet today

that people are taking looking up at the sky. The better these cameras get, the more they see night glow. So keep an eye out because you're going to see a green glow, sometimes a red glow, along with the stars. So in our own atmosphere we're getting this recombination where in this case an atom and an electron find each other and it gives off light, the red or green light from from oxygen. But this is not an aurora? Correct. This happens in an atmosphere with absolutely no illumination and not even any charged particle precipitation.

So the sky just glows. It's really beautiful on Earth. You can see ripples if you do a time lapse because waves in the atmosphere can speed up or slow down that reaction. And you must be as nuts about the movies from the space station as I am. They fly over the Earth. Sometimes they see aurora, which is mind-blowing, but there's always a green glow. You watch it next time.

Yes, yeah, I remember this. Sure, I've seen this. That's night glow in our atmosphere. And so the same phenomenon we think happens on every planet. Of course, my favorite planet, well, second favorite is Mars. Our instrument, the Imaging ultraviolet spectrograph on MAVEN, has a new capability to really map out this nitric oxide night glow on Mars. And you showed this to us. That's right. So the backdrop here is that the chemical reaction is a

little different on Mars. There is nitrogen in the Mars atmosphere, molecular nitrogen, a small fraction, even though on Earth it's a large in the Mars atmosphere, molecular nitrogen, a small fraction, even though on Earth it's a large fraction. You break down nitrogen molecules, you break down CO2 molecules on the day side of Mars through these really energetic electrons coming in. They can rip apart molecules. And this is all high altitude. They're all sort of drifting around. But just like on Earth with Hadley circulation, where the whole atmosphere sort of drifting around but just like on earth with hadley circulation where the whole atmosphere sort of gets carried around on global scales on mars those global scales can take these atoms all the way from one hemisphere to the other all the way to the pole to nighttime on the winter

pole which is the coldest place on the planet and you can imagine that that's a place where air is going to descend. Yeah. And that molecules, these atoms are going to find each other. These lonely atoms, they find each other, they recombine, and they give off light. We expected it to be bright around the winter pole, but we also found this weird pattern. You saw it on the screen today. Yeah.

It's not uniform. It's screwy and that tells us that all these winds all this circulation that happens on Mars is is irregular people do these computer models it's always nice if it looks flat and even and stuff like that well we're gonna go to them we're gonna say hey folks can you make an atmosphere flow its winds to cause this kind of pattern? And if you can do it at one moment, can you do a completely different pattern four hours later? Because that's what we see. Over that short of a time frame.

It really changes. And so this is going to give a new view of how atmospheric circulation works on Mars. That's Nick Schneider of the University of Colorado Boulder and the MAVEN mission at Mars. He'll share amazing revelations about clouds and auroras above the red planet when we return. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL,

partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. I hope you'll join us. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM team.

And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We have welcomed back Nick Schneider of the University of Colorado Boulder. He also leads the team that is using the imaging ultraviolet spectrograph on the Maven Mars

orbiter, one of eight sophisticated instruments on that spacecraft. Nick was telling us before the break about the surprising level of activity in the Martian atmosphere, where things happen very fast. So this fits a theme which has come up over and over on this program, which is that Mars is a much more dynamic place than we once thought. That's right, and this is the natural progression of science that you, dare I say, assume a spherical cow. I mean, so it's better than a linear cow or a point cow, right?

But thanks to missions like MAVEN and just a host of new missions, we are now getting to the level of having more data than we can explain. If you take one spot measurement, I got a theory for that. Two, maybe I got a theory for that. But when you have these global images, it really puts you in an almost Earth-like circumstance. There's a lot to explain. And I think it's a wonderful transition in science to be living through. You went from there to talking about ozone. That's right. It's common wisdom, shall I say, that there's no ozone on Mars,

but that's an exaggeration. Mars has so little atmosphere and so little oxygen that the majority of the planet doesn't have any ozone. It turns out that ozone can exist there as long as the chemical reactions that naturally destroy it happen slowly, and the slow reactions that create it are allowed to continue. That only happens in the polar regions. Now, everybody's seen these pictures of the ozone holes on Earth. We know that the chemistry on Earth destroys ozone where it gets cold. Mars is

different, and it turns out that's the only place where ozone can accumulate in significant amounts. So I call it an ozone pile instead of an ozone hole. The reason it exists there is that water, especially as broken down by ultraviolet light, destroys ozone. So there are a handful of chemical reactions that just eat up the ozone. You know, ozone is interesting in its own right, but it's especially interesting because wherever you see ozone, there is virtually no water vapor. And water vapor, you know, that's the important stuff. That water vapor is how you lose an ocean.

It's how you lose ice in the polar cap, etc. So we want to trace the distribution and the chemical reactions of water vapor and we can do so by watching the ozone. So as I remember in the image that you showed, there was this sort of purple haze, if you'll pardon the expression, over the pole. That's right. The ozone there is sort of corralled in by the polar vortex, which is this wind that circulates around the pole. That's right. The ozone there is sort of corralled in by the polar vortex, which is this wind that circulates around the pole. We have a polar vortex around the North

Pole and the South Pole. Same idea. It's sort of chemically isolated by these rapidly circulating wind patterns. And so we basically see with the edge of our ozone, we see the contour of that polar jet that goes around the edge. That turns out to be dynamically important for the overall circulation of the atmosphere. Now, remember we talked about how the nitric oxide is being carried at high altitudes down and descending into the poles over the Winter Pole. Well, we've got this polar jet circulating around it, starting to get a little more complicated. Yeah. But it all hangs together in the simplest approximations. But the image that I showed with that wiggly edge, that wavy edge on the ozone, well, guess what? That looks completely different four and a half hours later as well. We call them GCMs, global circulation model. Wonderful set of men and women who are running these models and trying to reproduce the observations.

There's this beautiful balance in science where you go from having too much data and not enough models to having too many models and not enough data to constrain them. And MAVEN is tipping that balance. The modelers are running fast and furious, very sophisticated supercomputers, and they haven't had any data to compare against. And now that we've got these observations, they've got their work cut out for them. Let's go to another topic that you talked about. And this is, of course, one of the prettiest things you can see on Mars, invisible light.

And those are the clouds. Aren't they just gorgeous? Gorgeous images. Exactly the word I was going to use. We did a public release of these images. I used to think only I would find these beautiful, but to see them spread across the Internet, it's pretty clear that this is evocative. Now, we've talked about this connection between Earth and Mars. Is Mars now as complicated as Earth? Well, maybe so, but it's also got so many similarities. So this video that we produced takes a handful of maven images as the planet rotates. And

now the Mars day is pretty similar to the Earth day, close to 24 hours. Here's the scene. The animation starts with just the hint of those incredible volcanic mountains on Mars, which are tens of kilometers tall. Like Olympus Mons. Olympus Mons. And there's a set of three right in a row. And as the video progresses, those rotate onto the disk. and they each start with the tiniest white dot of cloud and over the span of seven hours those clouds grow and grow and grow so that by the time sunset comes around and we have this image as they're sort of fading into twilight those tiny dots of clouds have just merged into this cloud bank which there's literally a thousand miles across now this is not a foreign phenomenon. This

happens everywhere. I was going to say, I've seen it around Denali in Alaska. And we see it in Colorado all the time. First of all, orographic clouds, really common phenomenon. The air has a little bit of moisture in it. And as it passes over a mountaintop the air gets carried upwards where it's cooler and that's enough to cause condensation and to make a cloud. You might not have looked at clouds in this sense but anytime you see a cloud over a mountain you know the wind is blowing. Yeah. An ice crystal usually is forming and is being carried over the top of the mountain or the volcano and then is being carried downwards and evaporates. Those are just a transient phase in the wind.

And I don't have to go to Alaska. I mean, we see the cloud banks up against the mountains right behind us here in the San Gabriels above Pasadena. Right, and in Colorado, we have afternoon thunderstorms sometimes every day in the summer, and that's the same thing. You get the heat of the day, the buildup, you get this convection that again raises the air to higher altitudes, lower temperatures, and the clouds form. And so this combined effect, you see it all the time here on the Earth. And there it is happening on Mars. You know, I watched that and I, you know,

home away from home, I guess would be the sense that I got. So I mentioned Olympus Mons, tallest mountain in the game, in the solar system, which literally stands out in the photos that you showed. Isn't that remarkable? Yeah. So the number I carry in my head is 30 kilometers for the height of Olympus Mons. Sounds right. And a typical atmospheric scale height is in the neighborhood of 10 kilometers. And that means at the top of Olympus Mons, the math would say you're down by a factor of E cubes. My son could do that in his head. But at any rate, yes, the top of Olympus Mons is sticking up through the atmosphere, and because that atmosphere is so strongly scattering, really scattering, same thing that makes our sky blue, in these pictures, Olympus Mons looks black

against this fuzzy, hazy planet, because we are seeing its dark basalt rock surface hanging out there up above the atmosphere. Basically in space. This is why the author Kim Stanley Robinson put the planet side of his space elevator on top of Olympus Mons. Of course, of course. Amazing stuff. One more to talk about. We already mentioned auroras, and MAVEN is doing some work there as well. And it is, I was going to say counterintuitive, but it's counter to what a lot of people thought you needed to get an aurora. That's right. Many people haven't seen aurora. They know that it happens up north at the edge of Earth's magnetic field. And they carry, I say they carry, we carried this impression that you need a magnetic field to sort of funnel those particles down into the atmosphere to cause an aurora.

Many of us have seen those diagrams of particles following magnetic lines of force right down to the pole and making those beautiful colors. Exactly right. And so we considered that as sort of a precondition for aurora, that there be a magnetic field. Aurora on Mars were discovered by the Mars Express spacecraft. The SPICOM instrument was able to take spectra and discover there were certain places where an extra glow from the atmosphere was observable. And those places were where the magnetic field that existed on Mars billions of years ago was locked into the rocks because those rocks

solidified in the presence of a strong magnetic field. We call those crustal magnetic fields. And the MAVEN spacecraft has also seen that kind of auroral mission near those we call the magnetic umbrellas. They're very small regions of magnetic field, and they kind of connect and disconnect from the solar magnetic field, which is streaming by in the solar wind, and you get aurora there.

So that kind of aurora had been seen, was expected, and we sort of said, well, we'll just wait until we're looking at those regions, and we hope that we will see aurora also. But that wasn't what happened. We were a few months into the mission, and we were saying, well, I guess it's going to be, you know, many, many more months before we get to see aurora, all of a sudden we started to see this strange emission from the night side when we weren't expecting anything. Now, the night glow we can identify by its spectrum,

and we were seeing that sort of on schedule as predicted. But all of a sudden, some emissions started showing up that only happened on the day side of Mars. We checked our coordinates, no no this is midnight on Mars there's something weird going on. There must be something else which is causing atmospheric emission. And then our buddies over on the particles and fields instruments started to say, hey we're seeing a whole lot of charged particles coming from the Sun. Anybody else see anything weird? Over here, over here.

We do. And so we connected those dots. The charged particles from the sun were so energetic, and the solar wind was so mixed up coming past Mars that those solar energetic particles were able to strike the night side and cause aurora. You can imagine how foolish we all felt because, duh, what is going to prevent charged particles from the sun from striking a planet with no magnetic field? See, that's what our magnetic field does is it protects us from charged particles. So it's logical to think that if you have a strong magnetic field, charged particles are excluded. If you want aurora, they have to come in around the edges.

But you take that magnetic field away, and the entire planet is exposed to charged particles coming from the sun. So we saw this aurora. Near as we can tell, it was nearly global. The entire sky alight with aurora. The entire sky alight with aurora. So just this instant mind flip that you don't get aurora at the edges of magnetic fields, you get aurora wherever magnetic fields are absent. I understand the feeling, you said you felt like dopes, but that's another recurring theme. I mean, this happens all the time.

We just heard Scott Bolton saying something about the Juno mission and this cyclonic storm sticking up above the rest of the atmosphere that they caught by accident. It never occurred to anybody. Duh, he said. That's right. And so this is why we do these missions. We don't just sit with our simulations and say it should act this way. And here's the other beautiful thing is we designed this instrument. You go read our proposal. It must do A, B, and C extremely well. And so we designed an instrument to those requirements, mostly related to atmospheric escape and the day side of the planet. If you do that, you are also going to discover D, E, F, G, H,

all the way through the end of the alphabet. And that's exactly what we're experiencing. So ain't science wonderful? Say that again? Ain't science wonderful? We're just having an absolute blast. And I'm pretty sure that we're less than halfway through our list of discoveries. Keep up the great work, Nick.

You've been at this for a lot of years now, you and the rest of the team. That's right. And one of the things that I absolutely adore about my job is that I get to work with an incredible team of bright individuals, men and women who are just breaking down scientific frontiers. They're all really good at what they do. I work with engineers who are great at what they do. And we sort of sit around the table, and we each think that we have the best job. And it's because we each think that way, because we're all working towards this same goal, we're really accomplishing wonderful things.

I get you all beat. I get to talk to people like you about amazing things happening around our solar system and in the skies above Mars. Thank you, Nick. I know this won't be the last time we talk. I look forward to the next occasion. I can't imagine what it'll be. Nick Schneider of the University of Colorado, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics there,

which is kind of a home for MAVEN, although MAVEN has a lot of homes, including up above the atmosphere of the red planet Mars. Wait, we're not done with Nick. Here's a special holiday bonus for you. It may make you glad you get your space news from Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society and not certain other sources. You'll also meet Nick's MAVEN colleague, Michael Chapin.

Nick mentioned him a few minutes ago. Nick, when you were on stage, you said your dream was always to make the Weather Channel, and you have. But? That's exactly right. I saw these images come in, and I visualized this animation of the clouds going across the face of Mars. And I said, surely this is the stuff for the Weather Channel. And I was right. Someone sent me a link, and I said, wow, this is great.

My dream has come true. And I watched in horror as the online caption came up. And the picture showed the clouds appearing as Mars rotated. And it says NASA scientists have no idea why there are clouds on Mars. And I just I feared all my colleagues were going to blame me for this. I said, no, no, no. Sounds more like a National Enquirer headline. Yeah, well, I think I've become clickbait, if you know what I mean. Yeah, maybe. No news is bad news, I'm not sure.

No such thing as bad press. No such thing as bad press. I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm not so sure about this one. While we've been talking, you saw your colleague, who you already mentioned, Michael Chaffin, and you gestured and brought him over here. He's now sitting at the third microphone. Michael, welcome. Thanks.

It's good to be here. And congratulations, because according to Nick, your work was largely responsible for what we were hearing about this press release that came out earlier today about hydrogen. It's been a team effort. So one of the things that's really great about MAVEN is that we have a lot of ways of addressing hydrogen escape. In particular, we have multiple instruments which have started to tell this story. This is the first time we've had all the instruments at Mars

to make all of these simultaneous observations. So my work is one of four instruments that are examining this change. It's really a dramatic change that we're just starting to understand. So I love radio, but now and then I do kind of regret the lack of pictures. But you shared one with us that is pretty stunning, both in what it means for Maven's work, but also it's just pretty. Yeah, I know. It's one of my favorite images. It comes from the first three orbits that we had around Mars when we got there initially. So we had three orbits at large distances from the planet before we went into our science orbit.

And in those orbits, we were able to capture an image of the hydrogen corona of Mars extending to huge distances from the planet. It's the best image of the Mars corona we've ever obtained. And unfortunately, our science orbit right now is too close in to enable us to make a similar image. But we have other ways of telling that hydrogen on Mars is changing. But that picture is definitely the poster for atmospheric escape from Mars. Nice work. Time for the last What's Up segment of 2016. And that means, I know, Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, is on the Skype line.

Hope you had a wonderful holiday. Delightful, and you? It's still underway. We're about to have lunch, a leftover lunch downstairs, but so far so good. Lots of people around. Looking forward to a new year. I hope a good one. So what's up there for us to look at in this last week of the year? Well, the easy, cool thing to look at is Venus early in the evening. Actually, for like two hours after sunset, it's up in the west, still fairly low, but up there for Venus. And it's looking like a super bright star. You've got Mars much dimmer and reddish to its upper left.

For New Year's, you can celebrate New Year's the night of the 1st, and also the 2nd with checking out the crescent moon, hanging out with Venus and Mars in that part of the sky. And if you're up in the pre-dawn, you can check out Jupiter already up high in the east or the south. There were several of us out on the driveway last night looking at Venus. It's just hanging up there now. It is. It's stunning. There's another thing going on. We got the always hard to pronounce Quadrantids meteor shower. It is peaking. A meteor shower, the Q meteor shower, peaking on January 3rd and 4th. Has a fairly sharp peak, but first quarter moon, it's fairly well positioned.

If you check it out later in the evening, you might be able to see some good meteor action. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1801 that Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the asteroid Ceres, which would be called a planet, an asteroid, a dwarf planet, a whole host of names I can't repeat on the radio. Motobene Giuseppe. Nice work. On to...

How high can he go? Foolishly, back to the Quadrantids. Meteor showers are named after the constellation their radiant is in, the point meteors appear to radiate from in a given shower. But the Quadrantid meteor shower has no current constellation it is named after. Quadrantid meteor shower has no current constellation it is named after. That is because the shower owes its name to the now defunct constellation Quadrans Morales. It was left off the list.

It was booted out when the IAU developed the official 88 constellations in 1922. But because the shower had already been named and because people wanted to laugh at people on the radio trying to pronounce it, they kept the name Quadrant Tits. Thank you for that bit of history. We've got more coming up. All right. Yes. Let's go to our historical trivia contest. For a time during the Korean War, John Glenn was the wingman of what famous baseball player? How'd we do, Matt? This was such a fun response. We have so many space fans out there who also are baseball fans, and many of them Boston Red Sox fans.

Just one great example, Robert Cohane in Worcester, Massachusetts. He said, as a homegrown Red Sox fan and a frequent traveler to San Diego, I'll explain. You have to know the kid, the splendid splinter, Teddy Baseball, the one and only Ted Williams. Correct, right? Although Robert is not our winner. Sorry, Robert, but I just wanted to open with your entry. That is correct. And there is a Ted, you know, I didn't look it up, but I know there is off of one of the freeways here, I think the 15 down in my new hometown of San Diego, or a little north of here, there's a Ted Williams Boulevard or drive because he lived in that area. Indeed. And in fact, little Betts family trivia, my dad went to high school at the same high school as Ted Williams, just a few years off, very few years, in Hoover High School in San Diego. I'll be darned. And they are the Hoover what?

What's their mascot? Cheese balls. Okay, here's our actual winner. Dylan Borenpole, a first-time winner in Columbia, Illinois, who indeed did say Ted Williams. So, Dylan, congratulations. You are getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and that's in both men's and women's styles now, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, and a Planetary Society, let's say it together, rubber asteroid. Rubber asteroid. Sorry. I was busily looking up it.

Cardinal. Cardinal. Oh, the Cardinals. The Hoover Cardinals. I don't know. I think we should petition to make it the cheese balls, but I probably have some Hoover listeners listening. Nathan Quinn in West Deptford, New Jersey. Fun fact.

Both Ted Williams and John Glenn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but Williams got his 21 years before Glenn. Here's just one more, and it must be true because it comes from Martin Hajoski, who is a newspaper guy out of Houston, Texas. He says, true story, once when enemy anti-aircraft fire ignited flames on Williams' jet. Glenn flew by his window and his cockpit and pointed skyward into thinner air, which extinguished the flames, and Williams, of course, survived. Wow.

Good story, huh? That is a good story. Well, what's the story for next week? The story for next week, return one more time to John Glenn kinda. John Glenn flew in space at the oldest age of any person, 77. My question for you is who flew in space at the oldest age of any woman? Hint, recent.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. That's very good. Thank you. You have to answer this one until January 3rd, can you believe it, 2017 at 8 a.m. Pacific time, Tuesday, January 3rd. And that's it for not just the last What's Up of the year, but basically the last Planetary Radio of the year. Don't feel bad. Planetary Radio of the Year. Don't feel bad. There's another 52 coming up. Yay!

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about words you have trouble pronouncing. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. The only, the only person who has been on every one of these episodes of this show, other than me, we almost, I was prepared to let it go this time because we're right between the holidays, but Bruce said no. No. No. Can't break the perfect record. And thank you for that. It's always a pleasure. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members.

Danielle Gunners, our associate producer, Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Best of New Year's to all of you, and clear skies.