Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Master of the Moon Rocks: NASA Astromaterials Curator Francis McCubbin

Episode Date: January 12, 2016

Francis McCubbin is the new Astromaterials Curator at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where the priceless collection includes the Apollo moonrocks. Join host Mat Kaplan's visit.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Master of the Moon Rocks, 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. Come with me to Building 31 at the Johnson Space Center, where they study and protect the greatest collection of rocks and other materials that have come to our planet from across the solar system and beyond. Wait till you hear who Bill Nye had dinner with. It wasn't Bruce Betts, but Bruce will take us to one of the most distant objects in our

solar system on What's Up. Our first stop is Mars with senior editor and tour guide Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it was time for another of your terrific Curiosity updates at Planetary.org. This one is dated the 8th of January, and there's a lot to report on. That's right. Curiosity has spent about six weeks exploring the Bagnold Dune Field. This is a line of very dark-colored sand dunes that's very easily visible from orbit. It's one of the main features you can see in Gale Crater. And Curiosity spent three years driving

kind of at an angle to this dune field, trying to get to the spot where it's a little thinner so the rover can drive across it and get to some interesting rocks. They finally reached the dune field just before Christmas and have started exploring these absolutely incredible, impressive, huge, active dark sand dunes on Mars. The scenery is just amazing. It really is. There are some terrific, well, you also have that great self-portrait taken by Mastcam. But I'll tell you, there are a couple of images that are really striking for me. One of them, and there really are two sets of images of this, is this progression of work done by ChemCam. Tell us about this.

Well, ChemCam is the instrument on top of Curiosity's mast that has both a telescope and a laser. And it uses the laser to blast material on rocks or sand into plasma and the telescope to take spectra of that and determine its elemental composition. But in doing so, it leaves this little line of laser holes right along a rock or a drill hole, or in this case, a sand dune. And you can see the progression. It took about 10 different laser shots going across the peak of a ripple. Presumably, they're trying to figure out if the sand on one side of the sand ripple has precisely the same composition as sand on the other side. And it's just really fun to see ChemCam at work like this.

It's the ray gun on Mars. And you can also read in this piece about how the team is teaching ChemCam to decide what to shoot more or less on its own. But I really, I got to say, the minute we have remaining for what I think is the most striking picture here, it is gorgeous. But part of it is just that it's so familiar. And yet it's just sand it's just sand you know curiosity took it's it's a very high resolution hand lens imager and held it very close to the surface of these sand dunes and when i saw these pictures come down i was just gobsmacked that the sand grains it's it's the least dusty surface i've seen anywhere there are these beautiful round about half millimeter diameter sand grains,

incredibly uniform in size. It's really only wind that can sort grains so minutely into just a collection of same size grains. And yet you examine it closely and you see they're all different colors. They're all different minerals. And if you can imagine just walking on a sand dune, I'm sure many of us have along the beach, you pick up some sand, you stare at it very closely. On Earth, it would be full of seashells and other things like that. There's none of that here on Mars, but the diversity in the grains is really tremendous. And it's just great to think of all the different places across Mars that these little grains must have been collected from, sorted all by size and deposited in these active sand dunes in the middle of this giant crater. It's just mind-boggling. No seashells, not even one tiny fragment?

Oh, okay. Well, there is so much more for you to see here in this, as we said, January 11 entry in the blog. Tell us quickly, what's just ahead for the rover? Well, they're going to sample the sand dune. They're going to take out their little sand scoop, which they haven't used to scoop up sand since shortly after landing. And they'll be sieving the sand into little portions, and we'll be examining it, putting it in their analytical instruments.

And Emily writes a lot about that process just ahead for Curiosity as well. As always, Emily, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Time now for the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, our topic this week is not one that I expected, but it's the passing of David Bowie, a guy that I saw in concert once, and I don't see a whole lot of concerts,

that made me want to talk to you about not just him, but about the place of space in the popular arts. That's a great jumping off point, Matt. Thank you. Yeah, it really is. You know, everybody knows that song, Major Tom, Ground Control to Major Tom, and many, many people I cross paths with respect Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who sang it from the International Space Station, had millions and millions of hits because it's inspirational.

Everybody wants to fly in space. Everybody wants to see the Earth as this blue marble below and tell my wife I love her. And it's just a fantastic song. It stands the test of time. And I'm very sorry about Mr. Bowie's death. I mean, he was an influential artist, my word. And he was visionary. He thought about the future all the time in so many of his pieces. Did you ever see his movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth? Not the whole thing. That's how much of a loser I am. No, I didn't see the whole thing.

It's fascinating. It's a little bit of a downer, kind of like Major Tom. A visit to Earth from an alien who's a little bit desperate, not aggressive, but looking for something to save his own planet. It's an interesting piece. Space does show up in unexpected places. In unexpected places, speaking of which, the Golden Globes gave the Martian, our movie, the Martian, the one that we love, gave it a Golden Globe for a comedy. The Martian, the one that we love, gave it a Golden Globe for a comedy. And maybe this is kind of a British perspective on things, but it's really remarkable. And so along this line, Matt, just to talk a little more briefly about me, I was invited to speak at the National Board of Review because I was chosen by Drew Goddard to present him with an award.

Drew Goddard? Yes. He's the guy who adopted the book or adapted the book, The Martian, by our good friend Andy Weir and made it into that fantastic movie. So I was sitting at the table. I'm just some guy. I'm sitting at the table with Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, their spouses, significant other, and my new best buddy, Robert De Niro. It was just wild.

It was a wild, and Drew Goddard and his lovely wife, Caroline. And so this guy, he said he wanted the movie, The Martian, to be a love letter to science. Wow. And I thought that was cool. And so I got choked up delivering the little, I mean, I have to read, you know, a minute, but I got a little choked up because the guy is, he's passionate.

He's one of us. He wants to change the world and celebrate science. Art and science are closely related because they both inspire us, Matt. Absolutely. And I will bet you that as we speak, Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon are talking about how they got to have dinner with Bill Nye. How cool is that?

They might not be, Matt. They might not be. I didn't include Robert De Niro, you noticed. Anyway, Matt Damon was very supportive. He was familiar with my work, and he said, keep it up. You're right. That's what he said to me. It was really something, man. It was familiar with my work and he said, keep it up. You're right. That's what he said to me. It was, it was really something, man. It was something for me. And Jessica Chastain, just to tell you, at least personally, a total stranger is just absolutely lovely, thoughtful, just everything you would want in a super starlet.

More space on the big screen. That's what I say. Yeah, absolutely. With good science, with good science. With good science. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Carry on. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, hobnobbing with the stars and then visiting with us here on Planetary Radio. We will hobnob with some moon rocks at the Johnson Space Center in a few moments.

There's a check by another item on my bucket list. It happened when I visited Francis McCubbin at the Johnson Space Center's Astro Materials Acquisition and Curation Office. Francis was hired just last year as the astral materials curator. That puts him in charge of what is by far the largest and most important assembly of rocks, dust, spacecraft parts, and miscellaneous items that have come here from space. It was last November that I followed Francis into a long, narrow room. Windows were all that separated us from perhaps the most important, most valuable rock collection on Earth. So right now we're standing in the viewing area of our Apollo sample lab.

It's a class 1000 lab, which basically means that within every cubic meter of space, there is only 1,000 or less particles, size 1 micron or more, within that area. So it's very clean. Now, 1,000. See, to a layperson, that sounds like a lot, but it's not, is it? No, it's not at all. Houston Air orders 92 more particle count. So you see these stainless steel cabinets. Each cabinet is dedicated to a single Apollo mission. Now, Apollo 16 and 17 each get two cabinets because 50% of all the samples that were returned were actually returned during those two missions. And most of our requests come from those two missions,

so we needed the ability to process samples in two boxes. This box that we are closest to here, which has four lunar rocks inside it, which is incredibly exciting. Which one is this? Which mission? This is the only box in which we break our rule of one mission per box. This is so that we can bring visitors to actually look at the samples. And we've got four different samples within this box, one from Apollo 15, or sorry, two from Apollo 15, one from Apollo 16, and one from Apollo 17. The numbering for the Apollo samples,

they started off with the number 10 for Apollo 11, and then they said, okay, well maybe we should make the first two digits based on the actual mission. So starting in Apollo 12, all the samples that come back from Apollo 12 start with 12. And then by the time they got to 16 and 17, they were bringing back so many samples, they needed that extra digit to actually number the samples, so they dropped the one, and so Apollo 16 and 17 start with 6 and seven respectively. That's a little complicated. It can be, but it makes sense. One of the workers has come now to one of these boxes, the glove boxes. What is she doing? So she's processing samples. She's actually working in our Lunar Glovebox 2.0 project. So

this is sort of our advanced glove box where we've revamped it with updated gloves, as well as there's a webcam on top where people can basically dial in and look at the samples from their office and work with the curators to point out exactly where they want their sample from. Wow. Remote sensing. Yeah, and we're hoping to do this upgrade to all of our glove boxes, but we've just got the one for now to see how it goes. So each one of these boxes is connected. There is a tube leading to the wall that they are next to.

Does that go to where the samples are normally stored? Yeah, so that goes into a hallway, and then that hallway goes to the back and then to the right. And it goes back, if you look through the door, into our vault. Oh, yes. Now, that is an 18-ton door on that vault. It's the same one they used to use for the Federal Reserve. Wow. All of the lunar samples that are not being processed, all the pristine samples are stored in that vault. We have another vault identical to that one where we keep all of the return samples.

So after a scientist is done working on the samples, they can't keep them. You've got to send them back. And when they get sent back, they put in our return vault, and they're no longer considered pristine, but they're still usable to many types of science. What is this room that's at the end of this little viewing area? So this is used for cutting the samples. Now, it's hard to actually see where the saw is, but in this case here, you can see what samples look like after we saw them and how we saw them. And it looks very precise. I mean, why is it cut into all these different and different sized sections?

Well, every scientist wants to look at a very specific part of a rock. You want to waste as little sample as possible, so you want to have a very precise way of getting to that portion of the rock they need for their study. So these boxes that we see here, including your second-generation one, they've been, some of them, sealed basically for decades? All of these boxes are under our dry nitrogen atmosphere and so when we work with the samples they're never leaving a pristine environment. Occasionally we will open them up to air but before we get them ready to put samples in again we have to completely clean them before we're willing to allow the samples to go in again.

Would we see basically the same setup in the other labs for the other collections? No, every lab is a little bit different. The meteorite lab is similar to this one, but the cleanliness protocols aren't as stringent because, of course, they've been sitting on the surface of the Earth for quite some time. They have been open to alteration and interaction with the terrestrial environment whereas the Apollo samples have not so we don't need to keep them under the same stringent policy for example there's only three materials that are allowed to touch a pristine lunar sample aluminum metal

stainless steel and Teflon every material that comes in contact with the sample will contaminate it. But based on the types of science that people want to do, those three materials impact the kind of science the least. If these practices continue as they have for the last more than 45 years, would you expect that, what, 100 years from now, Do you expect that, what, 100 years from now, these samples will still be in the condition where they're still allowing good science to be done? Yes. In fact, if they're not, then I'm not doing my job properly. That's Astro Materials curator Francis McCubbin.

Stay with us for a conversation in his Johnson Space Center office. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday? He'll get there because people like you and me, and organizations like the Planetary Society, never stop fighting to advance space exploration and science. The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at planetary.org.

Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right?

Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Mark? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio radio i'm matt caplan we just visited the ultra clean ultra secure resting place of the apollo moon rocks by the way you can see my photos of the visit on this week's show page reached from planetary.org slash radio our guide was the curator of astral materials at nasa's johnson space, Francis McCubbin. His JSC office is one of many occupied by the scientists and others who work with and preserve the priceless samples stored at the astromaterials acquisition and curation office. Astromaterials are all basically in one building at Johnson Space Center, Building 31. The samples that we have, we started, of course,

because the Apollo missions to the moon brought back samples. And it was at that point that JSC basically got named as the place where NASA's astro-materials will be curated and stored. Although we haven't had any other human-based sample return missions, all the samples that have been returned on subsequent unmanned missions are stored here as well. But I guess what you're still most famous for, what this facility is most famous for, are those moon rocks. Is there still a big demand for moon rocks?

There is. We still get probably about 400 requests per year from people all over the world. We have both people doing research on the samples and also a lot of education and public outreach that occurs with the samples. So we have disks that go out to schools and various public events. We have a few stones in other parts of the world. There's actually one at Space Center Houston, which is just right next door to JSC, where people can actually go out and touch an Apollo sample. It's called the Touchstone. Yeah, we're still very active. door to JSC where people can actually go out and touch an Apollo sample. It's called the Touchstone.

Yeah, we're still very active. People are still very interested, and we're still finding out very interesting things about the Moon, the solar system, and even the Earth from these samples. How much of that collection that was brought back by the Apollo astronauts has never been touched? I mean, how much of it is really just pristine? Every single sample we've brought back has, at least part of that sample, has been investigated, and we know about it. But 80% of the entire collection has never actually been taken out of the lunar facility once it was brought there, so it's still considered completely pristine. And why is that?

Well, you want to kind of save material so that as we get new technologies and things to analyze, we haven't spent it all. You know, one example I'll give you that's actually pretty timely is in the last five years, there's been this sort of revolution of finding water on the moon. For 40 years, the moon was described as bone dry, and then about five years ago, a few different scientists started finding water. And the only reason they were able to find that water, it was there from the time we brought it back, was that our technology got to the point where we could get to the detection sensitivities required

to analyze that water. And that was, you told me before we started recording, that's some of the work that you did. Yeah, I was involved in some of that work. There are a lot of other people as well. So obviously it makes good sense to hold a lot of that stuff back, but you are also sending a lot of it out. All over the world. In fact, when the samples were brought back,

there was a rock from Apollo 17 called the Children of the World rock. It was picked up by astronaut Jack Schmidt, the only geologist to walk on the moon. When that rock was brought back, a piece of that rock went to every single country that existed at that time as a goodwill gesture to the world from America. Very cool.

Obviously now we're going on 50 years that some of these samples have been here on Earth. And I have seen on the website the kind of care that is taken of them. You must be a major buyer of nitrogen here. Yes. In fact, there's a tank behind my office here that is pretty large.

I don't know the exact dimensions, but you should take a picture of it. I will. Thank you. Nice inert gas, which is what you keep most of this stuff in. But over that period of time, even in the best of care, you'd expect, has there been any degradation to these samples that, you know, they may have been up on the moon for billions of years, but even 50 years down here on Earth, I was wondering if that's been tough on them.

Well, we, you know, we keep them under inert conditions, and we make sure that that nitrogen is dry. So we do everything we can to minimize interaction of the samples. The biggest problem, of course, is humidity in the air can cause things to rust. There are very small iron metal particles that are very prone to rusting if they're in a hydrated environment, and Houston isn't the friendliest place for keeping things dry. But the nitrogen we get is very dry. We monitor it every day, and the samples, as best we can tell, are still in great condition.

Give us an idea of the kind of measures that are taken when people working here have to work with a sample. I mean, they have to periodically, well, like saw off a slice, right, to go out to some lab. So those are done in saws that are within the curation lab. So they've only ever touched lunar materials for the most part, at least the ones in the Apollo lab. And it's done under dry conditions. We're not using lubricants like water or oil that are typically used for saw. And we basically do our best to make sure that we're not getting any contamination into the samples as we prepare them to send them out.

I want to talk about some of the other collections that may be a little bit less well-known. On the way in, we passed the Stardust Lab, which is a mission we did a lot of coverage of. In fact, I was on the air live with one of the Stardust scientists when the capsule re-entered the atmosphere and got a very good reaction. But once that capsule re-entered, did that material come here? Yeah, it did come here, and it's still in our Stardust facility, and we're also getting a lot of requests for that material all around the world. Sticking with Stardust for a moment, you got, what, comet bits,

right? But also stuff from, for all we know, of interstellar space. In fact, we do know it's interstellar space. Yeah, yeah, definitely. A lot of people are looking at that material. Similar mission, but one that presented interesting challenges is Genesis, which, of course, had samples come back the same way they did on Stardust, not quite as successfully, though. Talk about what happened. As the Genesis capsule was entering the atmosphere, it was supposed to hit a certain level and then just deploy a parachute,

but something got installed upside down, and so it didn't actually deploy, and it crashed. You know, you could have just said, okay, mission over, it failed. But that's not how we viewed it. We went out there, we took control of the whole area, collected all of the material, and then developed cleaning protocols so that we can actually salvage that mission and still accomplish all of its primary goals. So, I mean, obviously the stuff was supposed to stay inside the capsule, protected from nasty earth.

Right. And you were actually out. I mean, did this thing just sort of explode all over the ground? Yeah, basically. Wow. There were pieces everywhere, and, you know, not every single piece, you know, was usable for what was needed. But the nice thing about that mission is that the solar wind was actually being implanted slightly below the surface. And so if you develop cleaning protocols that clean the surface,

you can actually mill down into where the solar wind was and still get the analyses you need. All the more amazing because we're talking about tiny particles, right? How big are these? These are basically atoms being implanted into the surface. And the particles themselves? Are we talking nanometers? Yeah, smaller. You're basically getting groupings of, you know, atoms. Did that experience help prepare astromaterials for dealing with what came back from another mission, which I didn't even know we had samples from this mission, but that's Hayabusa, the Japanese asteroid sample return,

which also wasn't entirely successful. Yeah, so Hayabusa, we've got a bunch of grains from Hayabusa, and it's kind of handling those samples is very similar to how we handle IDPs. What's IDP? Interplanetary dust particles, which we get in collectors in the upper atmosphere. And also the stardust samples. We've got a real expertise on how to handle these tiny grain-sized, micron-sized

particles. And there's sort of expertise developed around the world that study these. And so this was a deal with Japan, I assume, or the Japanese Space Agency, where some portion of this tiny amount of material returned by Hayabusa came here? Yeah, and in fact, this is not the first time we've had an international agreement like that. Back in the 70s, the Russians landed on the moon as well, and they brought back samples not from human exploration but from robotic sample return, and those were called the Luna missions,

and we actually have some of that material down in our lunar vault. And Hayabusa 2, another mission being flown by the Japanese, is going to be bringing back samples in the early 2020s, and we've got an agreement with them to we're going to get some Hayabusa 2 samples, and we're going to give them samples from another sample return mission that will be coming in the early 2020s called OSIRIS-REx. And I know about that mission because we have something to do with that at the Planetary Society. Here's another surprise I got from the website.

You've got pieces of spacecraft too. Yes, we do. Those spacecraft are largely high-graded for space-exposed hardware surfaces that have been impacted by micrometeorites and interplanetary dust particles. And those micrometeorites and dust particles can be extracted and studied, both to understand contamination processes that occur during impact, but also just understanding the science behind those particles. I would think that this would be pretty valuable stuff for, you know,

if I wanted to build a rocket to Mars and carry humans there, it's going to be out there for a long time. I'd want to know what happens to it when it spends a long time in space. And is that some of the work that you're involved with? I'm not personally involved with it, but there's a number of folks here at JSC that are involved in that kind of research. One of those is the, I remember it because I remember when it went into space. It was a long time ago. LDEF, long duration exposure. I forget what the F stands for. And that material is here as well. I mean, basically, they put up a bunch of materials, and eventually they brought them back, right?

Yeah, and it was basically a mission to look at micrometeorite impacts. Okay, I hate to ask you to play favorites, but do you have favorite items among the various collections here? Personally, I don't have a specific favorite. Every curator for each individual collection has favorites. The saying for the lunar samples is lunar is better. And they kind of joke with the meteorite people and everyone. But honestly, any astromaterials we can get from anywhere

are going to fundamentally help our understanding of the universe, the solar system, and the origin of us. So I have no favorite. I do, and it's one that you've got. It's a real star, I think, and in fact, I already met a sliver of it when I did a story at UC San Diego, a lab there, I already met a sliver of it when I did a story at UC San Diego, a lab there. And that is a certain meteorite known as ALH84001, which became, if not famous, maybe infamous. Could you tell us about it?

Yeah, so ALH84001 is an orthoperoxenite, which means it's basically completely composed of this magnesium iron silicate called orthopyrroxene, and it comes from Mars. It was actually originally identified as a diogenite, which is an orthopyrroxene-rich rock from the asteroid Forvesta. But it was later shown that it's actually from Mars. It matches more closely with the chemistry of sugar tites, noccolites, and chastinites. And that rock became very famous in 1996 because there was a report of possible relict biogenic activity and this sort of announcement by Bill Clinton that they may have found life on Mars. There's a lot of doubt about that now, right? There is. There has been a tremendous amount of effort put into trying to understand those textures and the geochemistry. And what we've found after over a decade of research, almost two decades of research, is that it's very ambiguous.

Unfortunately. Yeah. It's just one of the meteorites that you have in a collection here that were picked up in Antarctica. Correct. How many of those do we now know of from all over the world that came from Mars? I don't remember the exact number of meteorites that come from Mars, but it's over 100 now. We are also getting a lot of Martian meteorites coming from northwest Africa, which we do not keep here in our collection.

I'm a scientist, or maybe I'm the principal of an elementary school, and I want to get some rocks. What do I do? How do I go about that? Well, we have a process where you apply to get the samples. Your application has to get reviewed by CAPTEM, which is the group of people that decide whether or not, you know, you have a which is the group of people that decide whether or not you have a scientifically viable project given the amount of limited sample that's there. CAPTEM? CAPTEM, yeah. Another one of those NASA acronyms. What does that stand for? It's the Curation and Analysis Planning Team for Extraterrestrial Materials.

Wow, a mouthful. There's also the Meteorite Working Group, which is part of CAPTEM. That kind of looks at that for meteorites. That's one of those NASA abbreviations or acronyms. I'll have, we'll have to look it up. Yeah. If it's approved, how does a sample reach you? Uh, we mail it to you via FedEx or USPS. Wow. And how about for schools? I mean, those ones that are, that are mounted in whatever, I don't know, lucite or plexiglass or something, acrylic. Those just go out in the mail? And then how do you make sure that those stay safe when they get out to some public school? Anyone who takes hold of those samples has to go through a training process

and has to get approval for having those samples. So most of the time, people from our office will go out with the samples and they'll stay with that person the whole time. There are a few people that have approval that have done the training course that they can kind of receive the sample and hold on to them until they can send them back. So barring being able to apply to get one of these for your very own, at least on a temporary basis, is this facility ever opened up to the public? I mean, I don't know if there are open houses here as there are at JPL near us.

There are not open houses, but we do give tours. Yeah. You enjoying the job? I'm very much enjoying the job. It's a lot of fun. Francis McCubbin is the new, still fairly new, astromaterials curator at the Johnson Space Center's Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He is here and ready to tell us about the night sky. Welcome. Thank you. First, we are really unable to provide birthday wishes for our listeners because, you know, this could just get

out of hand so quickly. So, Mark Little, we apologize. We are simply unable to wish you a happy birthday as your wife, Alex, would have wished. I mean, if we did it for you, there'd be 100,000 people in no time. That's a really good point. Thank you. I'm glad you agree with this, because we need to stand firm. What's up? Well, we've got those planets in the pre-dawn, and Venus and Saturn have switched places. So we've got Venus super bright, low in the east in the pre-dawn. And then as you work your way up and across the sky, you'll find Saturn and then Mars and then Jupiter. And Jupiter is actually getting quite far away and is actually rising in the late evening,

middle of the night, so 10 or 11 p.m. You can see bright Jupiter rising to the east and it'll be in the southwest by dawn. On to this week in space history. It's been 10 years, hard to imagine, 10 years since Stardust returned comet dust from a sample return mission. My, my, my, how time flies. How Stardust does fly. On to random

space fact. That's the second one of these that have been kind of laid back. Have you entered a new phase of life? Maybe. Maybe I have. I don't know. Just too many times damaging my voice. I realized I tried to mix it up, and the one thing I wasn't doing was anything resembling normal. The way for me to be weird was to be normal. I think you're right. It only resembles normal. You're absolutely right. Speaking of resembling normal, if you took

the Americas, so North and South America, and you flatten them out, it would take about 27 of the Americas end to end to reach the moon. I like that. It would, of course, vary some depending on where you're measuring the tips of the Americas, but ballpark, 25 to 27 Americas. By the way, speaking of normal, it's fun to see you getting carried away and all metaphysical in the new Random Space Fact that you did out in the desert when we were with Planetary Deep Draw. We did. We just released a new random spaceflight video a few days ago, and I am getting deep and profound. Yeah. And I'm excited because we've got a bunch more to release over the coming weeks that we've been shooting out in the desert

and shooting at the California Science Center. So look forward to that about once a week over the next few weeks. Excellent. On to the contest. All right. We asked you about how long is a Sedna year? In other words, how long does it take the really distant object Sedna to revolve about the sun? How'd we do, Matt? This got an outstanding response. It's the first post-holiday contest. People are looking for gifts, man. Christmas spoiled them. First post-holiday contest. People are looking for gifts, man. Christmas spoiled them.

We have a winner. I want you to give us the answer first. Tell us, how long is a Sednan year? It's about 11,400 Earth years. Well, that's a relief because that's what our winner, as chosen by random.org, said. It's Jose Costa, or actually Jose Roberto de Vasconcelos Costa, which is probably completely wrong because he's in Brazil. He's in Natal, Brazil, and I don't know how to pronounce that as if it was in Portuguese. It was a good effort, though.

Thank you, thank you. Jose said, in fact, 11,400 years, and he wished us a happy new year. Well, Jose, you are the one getting the post-holiday gifts this week. He's gotten himself a lovely Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for that worldwide network of telescopes, and a set of new year in space wall and desk calendars. Keep up with Bruce as he brings us This Week in Space History every week. Indeed, and I've got more. Would you believe it?

I'm not surprised. Let me give you a few more of these. Michael Bamberg said that it's only about 42 Plutonian years. Now, what's odd is that Andrew Ridd disagreed. He said it's 46, and Tom Van Scotter said it's 45 Plutonian years. Talking a long time here, so I hope they can get their numbers together. Lucas Appel and Brian Mangle both had versions of telling us that, in other words, Sedna one year ago, one Sedna year ago, was about when the city of Jericho was being founded.

Wow, nice. And finally, this one, Michael Unger, who said that it pretty much coincided, that one year ago, with the beginning of human cultivation of barley and wheat, which was used by the Stone Age folks to invent beer. So it's the one-year anniversary of beer on Sedna. There you go. And therein lies the true knowledge.

All right, now we're ready for another one of those. Moving on to, what was the first spacecraft flyby of a comet and when? First spacecraft flyby of a comet and when? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You've got, let's see, until the 19th. That would be Tuesday, the 19th of January at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

And we'll do the same prize package again. These guys are just crazy to have us give their stuff away. Now, the Planetary Radio t-shirt, that's easy because we have those. But you can also get yourself a 200-point itelescope.net account and a set of urine space wall and desk calendars. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the magic of transistors. Something you probably enjoy, Matt.

Thank you, and good night. I'm a vacuum tube guy myself. He's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its glamorous members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer.

Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies, Major Tom.