Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Matt Taylor Rocks Rosetta

Episode Date: November 1, 2016

Mat Kaplan talks with Matt Taylor, the Rosetta Project Scientist, just two weeks after the spacecraft touched down on 67/P.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rosetta Project Scientist Matt Taylor, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome and happy post-Halloween, everyone. I hope you got lots of treats and no tricks. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I collected so much great stuff at the recent Division for Planetary Sciences meeting. It's time to start sharing it with you. We'll begin with one of the greatest successes in the history of space exploration. I think you'll enjoy hearing from plasma physicist and death metal fan Matt Taylor. Bill Nye can hardly wait for election day here in the USA, while Bruce Betts dressed as his

favorite cartoon character for this week's What's Up segment, Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's senior editor. I asked her about the photo in her October 27th blog post at planetary.org. Emily, you show us photos of a brand new crater on Mars, but it's not something to celebrate. No, we're looking at photos of two dark splats on Mars and one bright spot. These are all that remains of ESA's Schiaparelli lander, which seems to have met a sad fate upon arrival at Mars. Sad indeed. Does ESA, does the European Space Agency, is beginning to get an idea of what went wrong? There are various stories coming out in the media,

but not yet a formal statement. The good news is that the lander was broadcasting telemetry throughout its approach to Mars to a couple of orbiters. And they got much of that data down. They got all of the data down. And it actually, the lander was operating fine until very late in the landing sequence, shortly after the parachute had decelerated it. So they actually accomplished many of the goals of the mission. It was ESA's first landing on Mars, and they got through the heat shield phase, the parachute deployment, but then something went wrong.

And so the fact that they have all that data will really help them in future missions. I want to make a big point of that. Most of this process was actually successful. Their point was doing this experimental landing. But it looks like something happened while the spacecraft was under parachute. The lander somehow got tricked into thinking it was already on the ground. And now we just have to figure out exactly what the sequence of events was that led to that.

Up above Mars, there's something that ESA can be very proud of. Absolutely. It's got its second orbiter at Mars right now, the Trace Gas Orbiter, and its orbit insertion was going on throughout Schiaparelli's arrival, and it did fine. It's in exactly the right orbit.

They're now preparing to turn on all the science instruments and operate them on what they call two capture orbits in November before they start the long aerobraking process, which will bring them down from their initial elliptical orbit into their circular science orbit. So the title of that orbiter kind of says it all, but is a big part of this looking for those elusive patches of methane that pop up on the surface? Definitely. They're looking at many trace gases. They're looking at atmospheric properties,

but methane is very high on their list, trying to understand why it appears to disappear and reappear on Mars over very short timescales. Well, congratulations to ESA and the team behind TGO, really the entire ExoMars team. Here's hoping for a great success on the next mission, which may be that rover on the surface. Yes, in 2020, looking forward to it and hope it meets a better fate than Schiaparelli did. And Hal, thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. The CEO of the Planetary Society is Bill Nye, the science guy.

Bill, as we speak, it is the day of the eve of one of your favorite holidays, I know, Halloween. But there's a nearly as significant event, at least for those of us in the United States, just eight days away. Yes, the election of the world's most influential political leader. Yeah, that one. That's a big deal. You know, and Matt, let me just, before we go too far, I do enjoy Halloween, but I don't really think of it as a holiday. You have to kind of go to work on Halloween. But that's it. Yeah, this election's a big deal. And both political parties support NASA, support space exploration, because it brings out the

best in us. It's this optimism about the future, provides jobs. All the money that's spent in space is actually spent on Earth. So check out the Planetary Society's website where we have an analysis of each political party's space platform, but they're both supportive and that's generally good. One big difference though is the political party's stance on the environment, and I know that will affect me personally, not as the CEO of the Planetary Society, but as a guy, Me personally, not as the CEO of the Planetary Society, but as a guy, a voter.

The environment is very important to me. So I hope you all will consider how much work NASA does to understand the world's environment from using space assets. That said, the world we were talking about there was the Earth. But we also had more and more news from Mars, another world, where another spacecraft crashed. Doggone it. It's hard. It's hard to land on Mars, man. We all laugh because nobody got hurt, just money got spent.

But it was disappointing. And we'll continue to get information from the Trace Gas Orbiter looking for that methane, which might be evidence of life, maybe. And then we'll do our best to replace the Schiaparelli spacecraft with the instruments on board. So the future is bright again. It's a hard business, and that's why we press on. And we congratulate the European Space Agency team that is behind both of those spacecraft. And hopefully that data they picked up about Schiaparelli is going to help them get it right next time. Bill, thank you very much. I'll see you at the voting booth. See you at the booth, Matt. Carry on. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, who joins us most weeks here on the show.

Next, we're going to talk with another representative of a European team that is celebrating this week and has good reason to, Matt Taylor of the Rosetta mission. Were you watching as Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko became the final resting place of a second visitor from Earth? It was only a month ago that Rosetta joined the little Philae lander on the surface of that distant and oh-so-fascinating object. The mission's success was celebrated at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, which was also this year's European Planetary Science Congress. All of this happened just down the street from the Planetary Society in which was also this year's European Planetary Science Congress.

All of this happened just down the street from the Planetary Society in Pasadena. I was thrilled to welcome a key player in that success to my interview table in the poster and exhibit hall at the meeting. Matt Taylor is the project scientist for, I almost said the just completed Rosetta mission, but it's not over, is it? Yeah, be careful, be careful. I mean, that was my main message coming here and has been since the 30th of September and even before when we were approaching the end of operations.

That's the thing. We ended the operations, but the mission has only just begun. There was a talk this morning by Nicola Beaver. He was saying they've got over 200,000 spectra from the Miro instrument, and this is equivalent to something like, I don know it's less than five percent again or two percent of their data set and that was showing everything already so we've really just scratched the surface there's there's so much there's so much work to do yet so it's definitely not over of course you are proud of this mission but also must be so proud of the team of scientists basically that you have

led or served if you prefer and this kind of work you're talking about yeah i mean that's the thing it's it's just great to see this all come to fruition and i've only been on the mission for about three years but it was through the most intense set of days and months that anyone could experience but there's certainly a feeling of pride. There's also, there is a feeling of emptiness. I was talking to Holger Sirks, the PI of the Osiris camera, which still hasn't sunk in. I was outside this morning with him and Chechi and Carsten from his team,

kind of going, you've got time to spend now. But it's, you know, you're kind of going, hang on a minute, aren't we supposed to be in a telecom? There's still that feeling of there's something to do but and we're still getting these uh automatic emails that haven't been switched off and you think i could just delete that one that operational email but it is that there's it's just great seeing this science being done because ultimately that's what we did this this was an exciting mission it was daring there was this newness about it uh this exploration aspect but but it was about science. And that's what we're seeing this week, certainly. There's just volumes of stuff

coming out. We talk about Rosetta on the show all the time, particularly with Emily, but we had a number of the scientists and mission leaders on. And I hear from listeners about how thrilled they have been to follow this mission. Last week, I heard from a guy who has a very young daughter who fell in love with Rosetta largely because of the animation, the cartoon animation that was done to accompany the mission with people like her in mind. But now she's a space fan. And that's it.

That's one of the big, I have to say, it's the biggest achievement, I think, of Rosetta. I mean, there seems to be an upsurge in general with New Horizons. Just people are interested in space. But I have to stick with Rosetta because that's what I do. It certainly engaged people. And we've had a lot of feedback from all backgrounds, all ages. But I pick out this one particular one, a guy called Thomas Grittoni May, I think is his name,

and he applied for a competition, a story writing competition for Radio 2, I think it is, in the UK, a 500-word competition, and he contacted me to say, I've got through to the final, and he went to the Shakespeare Theatre on the South Bank in London to present his work, and that was very good, but he sent me an email beforehand just to indicate that he'd got that far with this piece that he wrote about Philae landing on the comet. I sent this to the science working team, the lead scientists of the mission, and they came back saying, this is it, this is our achievement. That was the peak, the pinnacle, that they had engaged this guy,

he's 12 years old, and that got it. That's the thing that we see, that there there's an inspiration and it's not just about the science and i mentioned this in my plenary it's the fact here at dps we have all of this these artists as well that that rosetta has also engaged musicians as well so it's not just about stem it's about just engaging people and inspire them to do something and and i know it's it's not probably the best english but that's that's what i've said before we've inspired inspire them to do something and and i know it's it's not probably the best english but that's that's what i've said before we've inspired people just to do something just to basically excuse the french get off their arses and maybe draw something play some music

maybe just do something more than the normal day-to-day or it's just made them feel happier and inspire them to maybe go for a run i don't know but i know i'm being all you know going orthogonal here but that seems to have worked. It's just something. It's got something, and it's inspired, so that's good enough for us. Last night at the agency night, so-called, the ESO representative talked a little bit about Rosetta, how could he not, but also put up this slide with just a fleet of spacecraft that the European Space Agency has in space right now doing science. It seems to me that Europe is catching on, that Europeans can be as much in this game as we have grown used to NASA being in this country.

Yeah, and I think it's not new. The East has been around for quite a few decades, and it's been a beacon. It's stamped our place on the world stage. We've been there for a long time. Those missions have been running, some of them for decades. So I mean, I was working on a mission that's still running called Cluster.

It's a heliophysics or it's a space science mission, a space plasma physics mission. That's been going since 2000. MEX, Mars Express, Venus Express, and then all the astronomy missions, they're all there, they've all been going, but now ESA's a player because of Rosetta. It's really put our name there.

And we'll follow up tomorrow with dropping Scaparrhot. We already have dropped it, so we'll be landing on Mars as well, hopefully. Big, big morning. I'm looking forward to being there tomorrow, Wednesday morning, with a crowd here. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to be there, certainly. We'll have to see how things are going. Because having, as well, I'm in contact and I'm very good friends

with the people doing the communications aspect, the outreach stuff that's being done in ESOC. And, yeah, I'm with them there because I'm with the team. You have these teams that interact with one another, that overlap. There are people that were working on Rosetta that are now working back on Cluster. And a colleague of mine from the flight control team, who's the spacecraft operation manager, the deputy spacecraft operation manager of Cluster, is the deputy spacecraft operation manager of ExoMars. So you have this kind of family feel within ESA that you know certain people that work on the missions

and yeah, so I feel for, this is Silvia Sanjoggi, she's excited as anything. I spoke to her during the end of mission of Rosetta and she was, you know, getting ready for this insertion. A broad and growing community. Exactly, yeah. Rosetta Project Scientist Matt Taylor. He'll be back after

the break. 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. Hi, I'm Kate.

And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. 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. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Matt Taylor stopped by my little exhibit hall table at the 2016 DPS-EPSC meeting in Pasadena. We talked about the marvelous Rosetta mission, of course. Matt is the project scientist for that spacecraft that delivered more science data about and images of a comet than we humans may have collected over all of our previous history.

Not a fair question to ask because, as you said, a lot of the science is still to come. But if someone forced you to pick some of your, the favorite science, the stuff that you're most excited about that has already come out of the mission. Well, I'm a plasma physicist by trade, but there are things there that have really excited us, really surprised us. But I have to say, as somebody that's not a kind of chemist or somebody that hasn't got that background, what has astounded me is the measurements that we've made

of the gases of the volatiles coming off of the comet and how they constrain how that comet formed, where it formed, and in fact, what the situation was like before the sun formed. So the fact that we detected molecular oxygen, that we found nitrogen in the comet, these things mean they can only be there. Oxygen in particular is such a friendly molecule, it wants to get with other molecules,

but we have it there by itself in abundance. For that to happen, it has to have been locked into the comet in a certain way, at particular temperatures, which have these repercussions in terms of how the solar system was before the sun was formed for me that's mind-blowing the fact that you make this and it was a surprise this detection and also from that detection we then went back or this is the rosina spectrometer they went back to a similar instrument that was not as high resolution on the giotto spacecraft and look back at the spectra and saying now we know we have these

great measurements of oxygen with rosetta we think they're also there from halley as well so you there that's how broad-based the rosetta results you can go back and look at other data sets and say actually oxygen was in halley as well so we've got oxygen measurements from halley we just didn't know that because we didn't have the context, the high resolution that we have with Rosetta and we went back to that data set. So for me that oxygen result is one of the big ones there as well as everything else about this mission.

Well you just see from the images, from the presentation I gave and just the nucleus, the shape, the diversity of features that we're seeing, the way the comb is acting, the fact that seasons are so important on this comet, you cannot comprehend that from looking from the ground. You have to be there to ascertain that this is a driver.

The tilt of the orbit, the tilt of the rotation axis have massive implications on how the comet activity works, how the comet works. They're the big things that have massive implications in cometary science. And as you've alluded to, as I've said, we've just scratched the surface. Do we need to visit some more? Of course. Many, many more.

I mean, I think I answered one of the questions to my plenary. Somebody was asking about, you know, sampling how jets were working and what the constituents were. And I immediately go from my heritage with Cluster, which is a multi-spacecraft mission like the mms mission uh that nasa is flying at the moment for spacecraft mission investigating 3d plasma the same there for planetary if you can have more than one spacecraft you rosetta we could have got rid of some of the political should i say scientific discussions of certain instruments wanting to do one thing and other instruments wanting to do another

we saw we saw a there was a presentation this morning looking at how, or talking about how the microwave or submillimeter instrument was scanning across the nucleus and looking at the coma. At the same time, that perturbs other measurements. So if we'd had at least another spacecraft, we could have had a remote sensing spacecraft, then an in-situ spacecraft flying closer to the comet. So that was the comet. So that

was the thing. We had only one spacecraft. All right. We had Philae as well. But in terms of orbiting, you want something up close. You want the context of going far away, which is the importance actually in Rosetta of having ground based observations that you see this thing on the grand scale, on the massive scale, and that we're in the middle of all of this. But having multi-spacecraft around a comet would be incredibly invaluable. Well, the other thing that I heard someone say last night, I love this, they said, if you've seen one comet, you've seen one comet. Yes, yeah, this actually, again, as I say, I've come from another background in terms of science, the plasma physics background, that's a phrase that we use when we talk about substorm physics,

the physics driving the aurora. Dan Baker from the LASP Institute in Boulder, that's what he said. You know, we've seen one substorm, we've seen one substorm. But I think you have to jump a little bit ahead there. You have to say, we learn and we are learning a lot about this particular comet and we can put those measurements and we are putting those measurements into context with other comets. that's already being done i alluded to a paper that um nilda oakley is she's got a poster here where she's working with jessica sunshine on the deep impact and epoxy results

to compare rosetta deep impact and epoxy so you've got three comets that you're doing cross comparisons with spectrally wow so already you're you're broadening what the impact is you can use the the the long-term evolution that we're seeing with rosetta and put that in context with the snapshots that we got from other spacecraft flybys also the ground-based as i say we're starting to match up the ground-based observations with rosetta and that opens up the entire data set of comets that we've ever seen of course you can you can't compare all of them, but it's more than we ever had before. And so I think, yeah, we've seen one comet and we are going to compare it with the other comets.

We have to. It's brought up many more questions, though, and that's the thing. So we need more missions, of course, but Rosetta's set a high bar here and we've got a lot of science to be done. You certainly have set a high bar. You've set an example as well.

I mentioned to you that I ran into Linda Spilker, the project scientist for Cassini, who's frequently on our show. After going to your plenary, she said, wow, now I have a little bit better idea what I may go through in a year when Cassini ends much as Rosetta just has. Yeah, there was a lot of feedback on Twitter to my end sequence that I put on my plenary and that's it it's kind of put people's mind uh what they're probably trying to avoid those people that have worked for years on casinia what a fantastic mission and linda's a wonderful wonderful colleague yeah that's a realization that that wall's coming and i that certainly was something for me that i didn't realize how affected i would be by the end of

mission and unfortunately and I said to somebody on Twitter just make sure you haven't got a TV camera pointed at you because I did and it you just basically the blood went out of my face it was just this it wasn't just about the mission it was about everything associated with your life just seems to change when I and all you're looking at is a plot a graph a spectrog a carrier signal. That disappeared, and it was a life-changing experience. So Linda and colleagues will go through that experience as well, and it's a massive milestone that will be for Cassini, because that's a wonderful mission as well.

I was watching at home when that peak disappeared, and I had just a small touch of that same feeling that all of you were having there at ESOC. And I think that the fact that that camera was pointing at you helped to communicate the passion and enthusiasm that you are also expressing here. And it is part of what is so important about what you've accomplished with this mission. So I can only thank you and congratulate you and the rest of the team on this absolutely glorious success that will that will

keep delivering for years to come well thank you uh i i i have to say i'm a small part of this this is as and in my plenary i stressed this alan stern was stressing it as well with new horizons it's a massive team effort i'm a small piece of a massive machine that is rosetta and still is rosetta that the science team the engineering team the people that built the thing. There are some people here that they were the originators. They thought of this mission. They were the ones that were inspired to give us inspiration now across the years. So they set this off. Everyone's here.

They've worked together to make this happen. They've worked together internationally as well, and that's the key thing, that we can't do this stuff without international collaboration. So people working together for the greater good. As I said, on the 30th of September, or maybe it's the 29th of September, the day before, we should keep on doing big things and sending small things to big things. Just get out there and do something together. Well said. Well done.

Thank you again for joining us. Been a pleasure. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He joins me today via Skype. Welcome back. Hey, thanks, Matt. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween to you as well. Is it going to be a scary night sky? It's spooky out there. Spooky, I tell you. If you look low in the west, shortly after sunset, you'll see a bright Venus.

And scarily hiding to the right of Venus is much dimmer Saturn and far to the upper left, reddish Mars. I wish I could do a good Peter Lurie, but I really can't. Yes, okay, mister. That wasn't great, but you

get the idea. So if you're listening to us in time, Venus will be near the moon, or more accurately, the moon near Venus in the early evening sky on November 2nd and 3rd, making for a lovely sight. Pre-dawn, we got Jupiter being the bright object over in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1973 that mariner 10 was launched it would fly by venus and then complete multiple flybys of mercury giving us our first up-close view of it and uh only view for many decades until messenger went back and

went into orbit we move on now to Random Space Fact! That was kind of a Sesame Street version of a Halloween greeting, I think. That was the count. The light from the nearest other major galaxy, Andromeda. The light which we see now left that galaxy 1, 2, 2.5 million years ago. All right, I'll stop this torture. Two and a half million years ago that we're seeing now that's back when ancestors of humans were all in Africa and a million years before any of them started using fire, at least as far as we know.

Yeah, my uncle told me it was really cold. How old is your uncle? We won't go into that. All right. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, in what region is ESA's Schiaparelli supposed to land? And of course, now it is on the surface of Mars. How'd we do, Matt? Better than Schiaparelli. I'm sorry to say. You know, as we've already talked with Emily and Bill about, it really still may have still been a successful mission, but not as successful as it would have been if it hadn't made a three-meter crater on the surface. Just the same.

It's a legitimate question, and it was legitimately answered by Chris Fletcher of Milford, Connecticut. I think he's only entered for about the last month and a half. But he said Schiaparelli will touch down, or something, on the Meridiani-Planum region of Mars, not far from Opportunity. And he added, clear skies. Is he correct? That is correct. And although they didn't land, that is where the spacecraft ended up. And I just have to throw in my own congratulations to ESA for the very successful trace gas orbiter, which should be doing great science in the coming years. Absolutely. We also got this message from Matt Minter in Glen Ellen, Illinois, something I just never stopped to think about. The name Planum Meridiani comes from the fact that the human-defined prime meridian on Mars, zero degrees longitude, for mapping purposes,

runs through this area. I bet you knew that. I did know that. I even think I know more, but it's a little dangerous since I'm not confirming it. I'm sure people will tell me if I'm wrong. But I think it was defined telescopically from a dark region that occurs around Meridiani Planum. So they defined a zero meridian because you've got to pick something

if you're then going to dole out longitudes. So here's another one that I shared with you. Steve Wienel. It landed in my fourth favorite Planum. Of course, I said, I'll bite. What are your first three favorites? And he responded, lunae, oxia, and certia. I didn't want to ask why. I was afraid he might have a really good reason. Some mysteries are best left unsolved. Yes. Dave Fairchild, the poet laureate of Planetary Radio, gave us this.

Meridiani Planum is where ESA took a gander, dropping with a parachute and rockets on their lander. Both went AWOL early in our little scaparelli. Unexpected took the dive and busted on her belly. Oh. Sad but true. her belly. Oh. Sad but true. We are going to be sending not just a Planetary Society

rubber asteroid and a 200-point itelescope.net account to Chris Fletcher. He's going to get that second copy of Andrew Vazekas' book, Star Trek, The Official Guide to the Universe from National Geographic, which is a pretty cool book.

Hey, Matt, do you like Lord of the Rings? I do. Well, that leads into, it's time to play one more time, Where in the Solar System? Where in the Solar System is Gandalf Kallis? Gandalf Kallis, Kallis being Latin for hills. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and tell us what body Gandalf Kallis is on.

You have until the 8th of November, Tuesday, November 8th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And if you're chosen by random.org, you'll get a Planetary Radio T-shirt. Got them in women's sizes now as well, along with a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Got them in women's sizes now as well. Along with a Planetary Society rubber asteroid and a 200-point itelescope.net account on that worldwide network of telescopes operated on a non-profit basis down under. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about Shaggy and Scooby. Thank you, and good night.

Scooby-doo-doo-doo! I love you, Matthew. I love you Matthew I love you too yeah Shaggy you have to see Bruce's Halloween costume he had Scooby with him as well we'll put that photo up on the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio

zoinks Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena California and is made possible by it's not very scary members Zoinks! Phantom Creep Theater in Coney Island, New York. Thanks, Paul. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.