Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Meet the Planetary Society’s Newest Asteroid Hunters

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Six amateur astronomers and small observatories around the world have just been named as the recipients of the 2019 Eugene Shoemaker Near Earth Object grants. You’ll meet an Italian who watches the skies in Sicily and a Minnesota high school teacher who remotely operates a telescope in Texas. Chief scientist Bruce Betts will tell us why the Society has proudly awarded this funding for 22 years. He’ll return for this week’s What’s Up. We’ve also got space exploration headlines from The Downlink. Learn more and enter the space trivia contest at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1218-2019-shoemaker-neo-winners.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They just want to save the world. The Shoemaker-Neo grant winners 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. Shoemaker-Neo, as in Eugene Shoemaker Near Earth Object Grants. The funding provided by the Planetary Society to amateur astronomers and small observatories all over our planet that are part of the effort

to discover, track, and characterize asteroids and comets that cross Earth's orbit. A new group of awardees has just been announced. We'll meet two of them after Bruce Betts provides an overview of the program. The universe never rests, and neither does space exploration, so here are a few headlines from The Downlink, our weekly space news digest from Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has put a bullseye on asteroid Bennu. The site chosen for collection of a surface sample is a 70-meter-wide crater informally called Nightingale.

After a perilous descent, the spacecraft will begin its return to Earth in February or March, with the long-awaited sample arriving in 2023. We'll see if we can get Principal Investigator Dante Loretta back on the show before long. Move over, Bennu. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab say they've found a nice spot to land astronauts on Mars. They chose the northern mid-latitude region because it appears there is water ice, and lots of it just centimeters below the surface. Add energy and the newly arrived Martians will have air, rocket propellant and something to water their potatoes with. The downlink always provides links to learn more about the stories mentioned. Here's one you really have to see. It's a video of NASA's test

of a liquid hydrogen tank for the Space Launch System. You'll watch as the gigantic cylinder ruptures explosively, just as it was supposed to. Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center subjected it to far more pressure than later tanks are expected to experience when the huge rocket finally lifts off. Everything is waiting for you at planetary.org slash downlink. Everything is waiting for you at planetary.org slash downlink. One of Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Spett's many responsibilities is oversight of the Shoemaker-Neo grant program. With six brand new grants just awarded, I asked our What's Up friend to remind us of why and how the Society has offered this support for over 20 years.

Hey, Bruce, I don't know how many times we have done this on the show, several now, many over the years, but I'm happy to be talking to you again about this latest group of Shoemaker-Neo Grant winners. Give us an overview, maybe the raison d'etre first, even though we didn't have any French winners this time. Yeah, we're really excited about the new crop of winners and all the people throughout the program. We've been doing it for about 22 years. It's the Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant Program or Shoemaker Neo Grants. And we award them mostly to advanced amateur astronomers

throughout the world to upgrade their facilities because amateurs with these amazing facilities, such as the people you're talking with today, are making real contributions to protecting the Earth from asteroid impact. So even though in more recent years professional surveys do the bulk of the discovery, there are still two really important areas where these advanced amateurs can contribute, particularly when they have advanced technology, which is what we're usually providing, and that is to do follow-up observations. So if you find an asteroid, it doesn't do you any good

if you don't know if it's going to hit Earth, and that requires lots of individual observations over time to build up the orbit. The other is asteroid characterization. So figuring out what its spin rate is, what it's made of, whether what looks like one asteroid is actually two asteroids, little things like that that will be critically important if and when we have to deflect one. How do these get picked? How do you figure out who has won since we get more applications than we've got money to hand out? Random.org. No, no. I don't think so.

Definitely not. A lot of great people put in a lot of time. So we've got an expert review panel that's put together by Tim Spahr, Dr. Tim Spahr, our Shoemaker-Neo grant coordinator, and he's on our board of advisors as well. Tim and the other asteroid experts go through the grants, and then they make recommendations to me, basically rank them. And then I go in and figure out what we can afford and what fits that the best. So then we pick winners. This time there were 20 proposals, and a lot of them were really great. So unfortunately, we couldn't fund everything we wanted to. We did what we could and we've got about $60,000 in grants and some great winners and we're looking forward to what they're going to be doing with the money in the future.

As you said, we're going to meet a couple of these folks in just a minute or so here. There are others who came from all over the world. Indeed. So we've got a winner in Croatia, two in Italy, one in Brazil, always helpful picking up the Southern Hemisphere to see that sky, and two in the United States. And throughout the history of the program, we've made awards to over 60 different awards to 19 different countries on six continents. We're still waiting for you, Antarctica. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and meet the first of these two winners that we will talk to on today's show. It's Russell or Russ Durkee of the Shed of Science

Observatory. He works out of, well, it's in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in Minnesota. Though, as you'll hear, his telescope is quite a ways away. He's also a high school science teacher, which will become obvious in the conversation. Bruce, thanks for giving us a nice intro to this, and I'll talk to you again at the end of the show with What's Up. Great. Thanks. Enjoy your conversations. Russ, congratulations to you on the award of, I thought you'd only gotten one Shoemaker-Neo grant before, but you told me, no, you got them in, we think it was 2009 and then again in 2010. And now you are a 2019 awardee. So indeed, congratulations.

Well, thank you. I want to hear about the Shed of Science Observatory, but tell us a little bit first about what this grant is going to do to enhance your ability to help us learn more about these objects, near-Earth objects. Yeah, sure. The grant was written to purchase a new camera for the observatory. I had received a grant back, I believe in 2010, for a camera, and the Planetary Society was generous enough to fund that camera. But we're now almost 10 years later, and the technology has advanced.

What it'll allow me to do is make observations of much fainter objects to really do the kind of work that I want to do, mostly identifying binary asteroid pairs. Yeah, I read that that's one of your specialties. It really is amazing, isn't it, how fast these CCD cameras for astronomy advance? Yeah, it's really changed the way observations can be done by the general public. We see cameras all the time in our phones, but what we don't appreciate is that astronomers are really taking advantage of this. And over the last 30 years, a lot of this technology has trickled down into the backyard astronomer. And even though they're making huge telescopes and doing amazing things with space telescopes and so on, smaller observatories like my own can take advantage

of that technology and still contribute to the cutting edge science. Tell me about the work that you do. I mean, in a couple of minutes or when we're done talking, I'll be talking with Alessandro Nastassi, another one of the grant awardees. His facility in Sicily mostly does astrometric observation, sort of tracking, you know, determining where these objects are going. You do photometry, which is equally important but quite different, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So while he's measuring the positions of the objects to determine their orbits, what I do is measure the brightness changes of the objects over time. And so if you think about an asteroid as an elongated potato-shaped object,

where as it rotates through space, the long side of it will have a brighter image than the narrower side of it. And so as it rotates through space, you can very carefully measure the brightness of these things and determine the rotation rate. From that basic observation, you can do all kinds of interesting things. You can constrain the size of the object, you can estimate its density. Most of those things are estimates that need to be done if you can find a binary object around it. But you can also estimate its size and estimate its distance and get some hints of some of those physical properties of these objects. You mentioned that you kind of specialize in the discovery of or determining that some of these objects are not just single objects, that they are binary. Oh, and we should say, by the

way, that you're at school right now where you teach science. And so we may hear some high school like sounds in the background as we did a moment ago there, I think. Yeah, I'm sure you will. And I'm in a teaching office here that I share with half a dozen other science teachers. So they're not necessarily the most quiet people. We talk all day and we're used to sharing our opinions with kids. And so it was kind of hard to clear out the office here of my coworkers, but it's just fine. And so don't be surprised if you hear some shenanigans in the background. Well, tell them the Planetary Society admires them and says hello. Sure, I will. But yeah, I teach high school. I'm lucky enough to teach nine through 12 students. I teach physical science and I have an astronomy class and I also teach a year-long research class. I'm actually using my observatory to assist some of my high school students to get introduced to photometry and I have two students this year who are actually doing asteroid work with me.

That's fantastic. So they are helping you with your observations. Yeah, exactly. And so I give them a crash course in how to do the photometry and how to control the telescope. The telescope, by the way, isn't local. I mean, when I originally got my grant back in 2009, 2010, my observatory was actually located in the city of Minneapolis. With filtering and some really careful processing, I could still do some work with identifying binaries. But over time, the low light pollution just limited my ability to do that. And so this observatory is now in the middle of Texas. I still live in Minnesota. And so my students and I are connecting to this thing remotely. And I teach them how to do the photometry.

We work with other people who are photometrists around the world to give them some experience working with professionals beyond the school. And hopefully they'll compete in some science fairs and some competitions this spring. Yeah, and I bet they'll do well if they do. competitions this spring. Yeah, and I bet they'll do well if they do. How often do you actually have to head down to Texas to physically be in the presence of this telescope? The good thing is that I get better skies down there and it's clearer and everything. The unfortunate thing is when things go wrong, you really have to have somebody there that can help you fix stuff. I mean, we have all the same problems that you might imagine with hard drives and dust and just unforeseen circumstances. I've been going down there maybe every three or four months. It's not a bad trip for me to do that. It's a straight shot from

Minnesota to Texas, and it's a couple hours drive once I get down there. It's been working out pretty well. When I do receive the camera, I'll have to make a trip down probably sometime around spring break, more than likely, and get ready for the summer season there. Back to binaries. We are learning, aren't we, that they're really pretty common. Yeah, it's surprising. You know, back when I started doing this work in 2004 or 2005, there was something like 20 binary asteroids known at the time. And the project that I'm working on is with Dr. Petr Pravets out in the Czech Republic. And he has a team of people all around the world that focus on objects every month.

And I'm part of that U.S. contingent that follows these objects. What the group has discovered, along with others, is that there's something like 15% of asteroids seem to have a companion. And these are large enough companions that you can see them using photometry. But if your listeners have been paying attention to the news, we've seen asteroids that are shedding much smaller objects. So chances are there's many, many smaller objects orbiting these asteroids that we just can't see from the ground. And my assumption is that if we found an object headed toward us on a collision course,

and one that we would need to worry about, we better know if it's on its own or if it has a companion or maybe even a couple. Yeah, it complicates things a lot. If there are two objects heading our way, you know, that's a problem. The other thing that this research does is it gives you an idea of the density of the system when you have that binary pair. So, for example, let's say you have a rock that's heading toward us and it's made of mostly iron. You probably are going to treat it differently than if you know the binary pair is made of sand. So it really is sort of a very useful and practical research that needs to be done in the event something like that does happen. Well, you're going to approach those two things completely differently. I want to ask you about the community of astronomers, amateur and otherwise, who do this work.

You mentioned it briefly, but it really is kind of a worldwide collaboration, partnership, even a bit of a family. Yeah, it is. The group that does this sort of work is not a large number of people around the world. I remember being at a conference many years ago, and that question was asked, you know, how many people are doing this sort of work? And the response was something like, well, there's hundreds in the world that are using their own money to fund this sort of work. Then there's university researchers as well that are doing this sort of work. There's probably thousands, but I don't think there's 10,000 of us. There's small universities, there are small budgets, they're private individuals. And it seems like in this particular group that is working on the binaries, it's mostly

private individuals and a couple of small universities. And we all know each other through email. Sometimes you meet in conferences, but I have relationships with people that I've published papers with for many years. We've never met in person. We just have an online relationship. But still, we email each other every clear night sometimes to agree who's going to follow what object. So there's a real camaraderie there.

And with a wonderful goal because, you know, as I have said to every one of you Shoemaker-Neo Grant awardees over the years, you just might, as our boss Bill Nye says, save the world someday. Well, I hope we don't have to, but we're out there trying to do just that. You know, a lot of us are doing this for the love of science. In my case, I also think it's important to mentor young people. You know, I'm just thrilled that the Planetary Society is supporting me in my work because I enjoy doing both. You are very welcome. And of course, we are especially happy whenever one of our awardees has the opportunity to both do science and interest young people and others in science. I got to tell you, I only wish that there had been a year-long sort of hands-on class in scientific research when I was in high school like the one

that you teach. Yeah, I'm jealous of my kids every day, to be honest. It's an amazing opportunity for kids. I think that even though we're in this world where everything is getting so specialized, there are still areas of science and research where somebody with very modest skills can make a difference. And the skills the kids are learning by doing these sorts of projects are things that they can take with them into college and really be a standout scientist or student or whatever, because it's really just about learning how to manage a project, how to tackle something you don't know. And it's great that, at least in astronomy, some of those projects are still within

reach. Yeah, those skills just might be useful even if they don't become scientists, I would say. Yeah, I think so. Thank you, Russ. Once again, congratulations. Keep up the great work. You've had terrific success so far, and hopefully this new camera will take you even further. Good luck in the hunt and clear skies. Thank you very much. And thank you to all the members of the Planetary Society for their support.

It really means a lot. That's Shoemaker Neo Grant awardee Russ Durkee. When we return, we'll jump from Minnesota to the island of Sicily, where we'll meet another winner. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here. The Planetary Society has just begun its 40th trip around the sun. That's right, it was 40 years ago that our founders created our organization. Help us celebrate four decades of connecting people around the world with the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. A certain very much beloved donor will match our gifts up to $100,000.

Please make your gift today and see your impact doubled. Go to planetary.org slash donate. Thank you indeed. Astronomer and data scientist Alessandro Nastassi returned to his birthplace not long ago. He joined Sabrina Macero and Mario DiMartino in applying for a Shoemaker-Neo grant. They learned just days ago that their proposal was a winner. It was only a few hours later that Alessandro joined me for a celebratory planetary radio conversation. Alessandro, congratulations to you

and to your colleagues there at the, I hope I have this right, the Galhassan International Center for Astronomical Sciences in Sicily. Congratulations on being awarded this Shoemaker-Neo grant by the Planetary Society. Thank you very much, Matt. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here and to be awarded of this prize. The name is a bit difficult to pronounce, you're right, because it's a bit Arabic. The right pronunciation is Galhassin, because Hassin is the former Arabic name of Isnello, which is the little village where the center sits, which means called the creek. This is the region. And then we put gal to recall like galaxy, the sound of galaxy.

That's the reason. I was going to ask you what that meant. That's already fascinating. It's a beautiful center, and it looks like it's a very popular place for people to visit. Well, it is. It's very quiet so far, because the tourism is not that intense in this specific region, but we are half an hour from the sea, half an hour from the mountain where it's possible to ski.

And we are in between in a very, very nice region, which is an area essentially, which is called the Madonia Regional Natural Park. It's a very nice region, which is an area essentially, which is called the Madonia Regional Natural Park. It's a very nice area, but especially it's a very dark area. So the light pollution here is very, very limited. That's why we are here. You've only been back in Sicily for a short time, but you were born and raised there. That's true, yes. I was born here in Sicily, but actually my education was done in northern Italy, in Bologna. And then I moved away. I moved abroad for, let's say, four years in Germany for my PhD in astronomy, in astrophysics and cosmology.

It's quite exciting having the chance to work in my home place in such a fantastic project. I hope that people will visit the website and we'll put up the link to Gal Hassan on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. It really is a beautiful facility. Tell us what this grant will be able to do for you to enhance your ability to study near-Earth objects. This center actually is mainly focused on science outreach and education. So we work with the students and visitors. But we also have a facility. It's a 40-centimeter Richer-Cretien telescope from Officina Stellare,

It's a 40-centimeter Richer-Cretien telescope from Officina Stellare, which we use for essentially observing and doing research about near-Earth objects for astrometric measurement. The problem is that this facility is in a terrace where all the other instruments are hosted. So when we want to observe, we are forced to open the hangar and the entire, let's say, building. And it is quite time demanding, let's say. So with this grant, we will build a new and independent dome a bit far away in an independent place, still within our center, but in independent spots just for our telescope, which is called the Galaxian Robotic Telescope, so GRT. In this way, we will be promptly ready to observe the sky at night and also during, for example, the visitor section. So when we look at the sky, observe the sky with visitors, because at the moment we can't,

okay, we're forced to stop research during the visiting time in this way with this new tom we will be independent in this way we will use this money also to synchronize the time the clock of our pc with the gps in this way we will have always the right time and that you know it's critical for very fast asteroids. I could mention also the other telescope, maybe the one-meter telescope. Yeah, please do. This is only the project for the near future, but actually next year, eight kilometers from the Galaxine, we will build a new telescope it will be a

one meter wide field telescope with F 2.1 so it's very very fast and it's a prime focus telescope it's going to be kind of a pioneeristic project because there is no other facility like this in

the Mediterranean area and in fact we will be the only telescope with such an aperture and speed, let's say, in this region for a long time. So we will use this money also to synchronize the PC of this, the controlling PC of this one-meter telescope, so that we will have two perfectly synchronized facilities working at the same time and synchronously. So this is crucial to do, for example, parallax measurements or occultation events monitoring. And you mentioned in passing that you tend to study objects that are moving very quickly across the sky because they're quite close to us?

Yes, they are close to us and then they are even brighter. So, of course, with a 40 centimeter instrument, we can go deeper than 19.5 magnitude. Still, we can monitor very well and very accurately fast and then bright objects. But for this, we need to have perfectly synchronized with the GPS time. And this money will help us to achieve this goal. 19.5 magnitude. That's quite a dim object. But as you said, you can track much brighter ones as well.

Yeah. Have you had good success already, even before implementing these new tools at the site, as you've done this astrometric work to basically establish where these near-Earth objects are going and where they will be in the future and whether they will pose a threat to our planet. That's true. We've been already quite successful in this activity because so far we've confirmed exactly 33 asteroids passing close to the Earth. And we've been the first in Europe to follow up this object in one third of cases.

We managed to be quite fast in following up object discovery, for example, by Catalina Sarvi, for example. We are quite proud of that. So it's a small facility, but well used. Tell me something before we go about your colleagues, who are, I believe, Sabrina and Mario? Correct. Sabrina Massiero is the director of the center.

She's an astronomer. And Mario Di Martino is another astronomer. She's an astronomer, and Mario Di Martino is another astronomer. He is the leader of the scientific committee of the Galaxian, and he's one of the maximum experts in Italy about asteroid studies. The scientific committee is bigger. There are other big names in our committee, and we work all together, despite we're not physically, let's say close,

except Sabrina, which, uh, work here in the same place. Longtime listeners to planetary radio probably, uh, already know that Italy has been quite a center of, uh, of research,

uh, on near earth objects. Uh, there is very good work being done all over the country. And we can thank all of you for that, because as our boss Bill Nye says, who knows, you may just one day save the planet. Who knows? Well, you're right. I would like to mention this. You know that Ceres, the first ever discovered asteroid, actually was discovered in Palermo, actually 90 kilometers from the Galassin, here in Sicily.

And it was discovered by a priest. His name is Padre Giuseppe Piazzi. And in 1801. And I could tell you that now if priest Piazzi would be still alive, would surely move his observatory from Palermo to the Madonia mountain, because now Palermo is still light polluted, and we continue his work and do his job in this sense. That's quite a legacy, something to be very proud of. Thank you, and please pass along our gratitude to your colleagues there for the work they are doing. And I do very much hope someday that I can visit you there in the mountains of Sicily.

Yeah. We're looking forward to see you here and to show you the facility that actually is still growing and growing. Because actually we are still a young center, let's say less than three years old, and we are still growing. let's say less than three years old, and we are still growing. But we want really to expand and, let's say, look forward to new projects. And your grant will really help us to do that. So thanks. Thank you again for this. You are very welcome. And thank you again for not just the work you are doing to track these objects that cross the path of our own world, but also for the outreach work that you do, as you said, the educational work that takes place at the center.

We'll look forward to hearing about how the grant and these new capabilities will enhance your ability to track those near-Earth objects. Thanks again, Alessandro. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. And we hope that with the new facility, with the one-meter-wide telescope, actually, we will not just follow up near, but we will start to discover near. Because recall that we are eight hours ahead from the U.S. in the night.

So we start working eight hours ahead. And we are also quite in the southern of Europe. So we have access to the galactic center. So we can study very lots of interesting targets. That's great. They've discovered so many at places like the Catalina Sky Survey. I'm sure they can spare a few discoveries for you there at Galhazan. Yeah, it's up to us. We'll do our best, of course. And we are happy to help at the Planetary Society.

Once again, clear skies and good hunting. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Thank you to all of you. Thank you very much. Alessandro Nastassi. He and his colleagues at the Galhassan International Center for Astronomical Sciences have just been awarded one of six 2019 Shoemaker-Neo grants by the Planetary Society. Time for What's Up on Planetary

Radio. So we return to Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, and I'll note that he's on vacation, and so we've jury rigged an audio system here so that he's able to take a break from that vacation and join us on the show. Thanks for doing this. Thank you, Matt. I wouldn't miss it. Especially with all this great Shoemaker Neo stuff, which we head up, of course. Along with these grant winners, what can the rest of us see in the night sky? Along with these grant winners, what can the rest of us see in the night sky? You can see Venus.

Venus is just going to dominate for the next few months in the early evening, low in the west, brightest star-like object out there. If you catch it in the next few days and look to its lower right, you might still catch Saturn, but Saturn's running away rapidly. And in the morning sky, which is going to keep getting more and more crowded, but right now it's Mars time. Mars looking reddish and fairly bright in the east in the pre-dawn. To its upper right is the bluish star Spica. And if you check it out on the mornings of the 22nd or 23rd of December, you'll see the crescent moon hanging out fairly close to Mars. And you got

Orion looking all beautiful coming up in the early evening, saying winter is around the corner. Well, for the northern hemisphere. On to this week in space history. It was this week in 1968 that Apollo 8 launched towards the moon to do its historic fly around the moon bit. Just amazing to me that we are now beyond 50 years from that momentous mission. Just amazing. Well, we're less than two Saturnian years. Don't even get me started on Uranus and Neptune.

Yeah, we'll talk about that more next week. On to Random Space Fag. Yeah. A little vacation space fag for you. Just that part. The next part isn't vacation, but it's cool. 50 of the Earth's moon, 50-5-0, could fit inside the Earth, assuming you squish the moon so there is no void space.

I love those. How many of these can you put in one of those? That's a new one for me. Thank you. You're welcome. I realized in all the years I had never done that. So it was an exciting moment for me as well. There's more excitement in store as we go to the contest. There is indeed. I asked you, what are the names of the first two modules connected to form the core of the International Space Station? How'd we do? I will let our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, provide the answer. Zarya was the first to fly in 1998. A proton rocket launched at high to be the starting gate. Unity came next aboard the shuttle with success. The two of them together formed the core of ISS. Oh, that's right. Our winner, and this is odd because he has been entering for over four

years and he frequently sends these great graphics, these illustrations that he has created. This time he did not because I guess he's not feeling well. He wasn't up to it, but he did answer. It's Daniel in Germany. He goes by CPA. I don't know if it's CPA or CPA. It ends with A-E. I should have asked him about that.

He finally, finally has won the contest after four years of attempts and a lot of great artwork. He indeed said it was Zarya and Unity. So congratulations. You're going to be getting that Planetary Radio t-shirt and a copy of Alcohol in Space by Chris Carberry, that fun book that traces the history of alcohol in space and also its future, which apparently is going to be fairly bright, unless you have too much of it, and then it gets very dim. I got more. Michael Unger in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is,

he calculated the number of orbits Zarya has made of Earth. By the time you read these answers, he says, it will be close to 122,000. I thought that was low, but I checked it and I think he's right. Sounds about right, based upon other spacecraft that I track on a daily basis, recreationally. And good for you. Mark Little in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, if it wasn't in lower Thor, but the ISS could take day trippers to the moon as it travels an equivalent distance of to the moon and back every 24 hours. Oh, that's a good random space fact. Ain't it? Yeah. Sorry, I beat you to it. Wait a year. Nathan Hunter in Vancouver, Washington, the other Washington, excuse me,

the other Vancouver. Researching this reminded me that there was not one but two proposed ISS modules that would have tested the use of centrifuges to simulate gravity. What's it going to take to test this idea out? I don't know, Nathan. It does seem like a good idea though, doesn't it? Yeah. David Douthat in Charleston or Charlestown, West Virginia. A marriage made in heaven or an orbit, to be precise, former rivals built a home in space where they could both play nice. Zarya marked the dawn of the fledgling ISS and with its partner, Unity, sealed the deal with a kiss. Did we mention that Zarya means dawn in Russian?

I don't think so. Better late than never. One more I got to mention from our regular Laura up in Eureka, California. 21 years of ISS and discussions of alcohol in space on your show, because those both did come up on the same show. Did we need to wait until the station was of age? Thanks, Laura. Thanks, everybody. Thank you for entering and being a part of this every week.

And we're ready for another one. Give them another opportunity. It is time once again to play Where in the Solar System? Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. I knew you'd be excited. So Where in the Solar System is the crater Fajoku? And there is no guarantee I'm pronouncing it even remotely correctly. So I will spell it for you. F-E-J-O-K-O-O. Fajoku. What body in the solar system is Fajoku, a crater, upon?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Have you seen that sequel yet? Oh, no, no, sorry. That's Jumanji. I wonder if that's one. Yeah, also up there. Anyway, you have until the 25th. Just happens to be Christmas in so much of the world.

December 25th, Wednesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. You might win yourself. This is brand new from our friend Thomas at chopshopstore.com. They are new Planetary Radio stickers. And it's about time because I pretty much run out of the old ones. But these are cool. They're square. They have rounded corners. And I can't wait to get my hands on some. You can

win at least one. I don't know. We'll send you at least one of these. And you can display your Planetary Radio and Planetary Society fandom wherever you want to put it. I'm going to put one on my forehead, I think. And anyway, that's what it'll be. They're in the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about if weeds grow so well, why don't we plant weeds? Thank you. You know, I remember the revelation that hit me when I was, I don't know,

eight years old, that weeds are just the plants you don't want. Yeah, but what if we did? Then we'd feel so successful as gardeners. Words to live by from the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts, 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 members, who are proud to make the Shoemaker-Neo grant program possible.

You can join them at planetary.org membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.