Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mike Brown's New Book: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Episode Date: December 13, 2010

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The man who killed Pluto writes a book. Mike Brown, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The Caltech professor whose discoveries include the largest solar system body found in the last 150 years returns to our show, this time with his excellent new book. We'll talk with him at the publishing party thrown in his California home. Emily Lakdawalla was there, but she'll use her segment to bring us up to date

on the Japanese Venus probe that failed to enter orbit. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy pays tribute to that effort and a couple of other big events last week. Speaking of big events, a lunar eclipse is just days away. Bruce Betts will tell us where and when to see it. He'll also give away a 2011 Year in Space desktop calendar. We'll also give away a 2011 Year in Space desktop calendar. Some would say the biggest of last week's space stories was the successful flight of another SpaceX Falcon 9 and the first-ever orbit and re-entry of a commercial cargo-carrying capsule. I'm inclined to agree. We'll feature this story in an upcoming episode,

but we can't let it go by without hearing from the SpaceX CEO and CTO, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk was almost speechlessly thrilled at the post-flight press conference, but he did want to make a point about his Dragon space vehicle. People sometimes think that to take a cargo spacecraft and put crew in it requires this enormous amount of magical pixie dust or something. This is not at all the case. If there had been people sitting in the Dragon capsule today, they would have had a very nice ride.

They would have experienced maybe up to four and a half Gs, about what you'd see at an amusement park. And they would have done quite well. So except for the escape system and seats and some minor upgrades to the life support system, the vehicle that you saw today can easily transport people. Elon Musk of SpaceX, immediately after the successful launch, orbiting, and reentry of the company's Dragon vehicle. Let's hear from Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome back.

In just a couple of minutes, we're going to hear from Bill Nye talking about a very busy week in space, a couple, unfortunately, of failures. But when Bill recorded his commentary, there was no word at that point as to the cause of this failure of Akatsuki to enter orbit around Venus. And I guess you have some news about that. Yeah, I've been following the news from Japan pretty closely in Akatsuki, and it looks like it's pretty bad news, actually. As I'm sure you discussed with Bill, the spacecraft failed to enter orbit. It was the 12 minutes when what it needed to do was to fire its thruster in order to break into Venus orbit. And it looks like it only fired its thruster for about two and a half minutes. And apparently what was happening during that two and a half minutes

is that the pressure was continuously dropping in its fuel lines. Usually there's a fuel tank that contains liquid fuel and the pressure inside that fuel tank is maintained by bringing in some kind of inert gas. In this case, it was helium. And the pressure was dropping inside that tank. They think that probably what happened is that there is a blockage in the helium line and that that prevented the pressure from being kept up in the main fuel tank. And so not enough fuel was being sent to the thruster and they just weren't able to maintain their burn. Then there is something else mysterious about the rotation of the spacecraft, which apparently is unrelated to this thruster fuel pressure problem that also caused the spacecraft to switch from being controlled by its reaction control system, its attitude control thrusters, to its

reaction wheels. And then the reaction wheels couldn't keep up with the rotation. And that's when the spacecraft went into safe mode. So there are actually two different major problems going on at the same time. And that's what resulted in the spacecraft stopping its main engine after only two and a half minutes and sailing right past Venus. And now it's in a solar orbit, won't get back to Venus again for about six years. And even then, it's really not clear if it's going to be able to enter orbit with a possibly damaged thruster. Real heartbreaker. And you do have this sort of farewell to Venus and what might have been photo in the blog. It's a beautiful photo. I happened to be, it was late in the evening, my time, which of course

was the sort of midday Japanese time when I saw this image posted. And I checked Facebook and a scientist I knew, David Grinspoon, is a well-known Venus scientist, what happened to be on Facebook at the time. And so I chatted with him and he said, it's a poignant and heartbreaking image for everybody involved to know that the instruments work so well when the spacecraft is not going to be able to make it into orbit around Venus after all, at least not for at least another six years. Well, we'll finish on a much happier topic, and that is that the doors continue to open on your Advent calendar.

Yeah, I'm enjoying digging through archives of lots of different kinds of space images. Last year I went for global pictures. This year I'm looking at detail images. And that's kind of fun because I don't post these kinds of images on the blog that often. So it's been fun to look for the images to post. You'll find them at planetary.org slash blog, which is for the most part the work of Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, also contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Here's Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here,

executive director of the Planetary Society. This week, a very, very exciting week in space and here on Earth. First of all, NASA's NanoSail-D, this little spacecraft that was going to deploy these sails to pick up enough aerodynamic drag, even at 400 nautical miles above the Earth's surface, so we could bring spacecraft down out of orbit to de-orbit them much more cheaply than is done now. But something went wrong. Either the sails didn't deploy properly, they tangled,

or maybe the battery went dead before they were ready. But I'll tell you what, they're going to learn something from this. They tried it. They were out there trying it. That's good. Speaking of which, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, had a little problem with Akatsuki, the spacecraft that had such a great success earlier this summer when it deployed a solar sail in deep space. Well, they were hoping Akatsuki would hook up with the orbit of Venus and end up in this elegant, elegant flight path taking these wonderful pictures. But someone went wrong. So we're going to have to wait seven years for that thing to come back around where they can try it again. But let me tell you, JAXA did this before

with Hayabusa. So don't put it past them. They're going to do something great with this spacecraft yet. But get this, your own producer, Matt Kaplan and I, went to Dryden, to NASA up in the high desert in California, and we saw the SOFIA telescope. This is a telescope mounted in an airplane with a giant hole in the side. That's right, there's a 747 with this elegant garage door thing, and they can get above the Earth's water vapor, way up in the atmosphere at 41,000 feet, and take pictures of stars in the infrared. Do you know what they're going to find up there? Nobody knows. That's why they're going. But here's the big news. Our own board member,

Elon Musk, and his company, SpaceX, launched the Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. It orbited the Earth. It splashed down in California just right out of the textbook. It was perfect. This is going to free up money for NASA and for space agencies all over the world to do deep space exploration because this rocket will almost certainly be able to take cargo and people to the International Space Station. And it's commercial. It's not a government thing. These guys are in business to make money. It's fantastic. You know, and they had a secret payload. That's right. It was a wheel of cheese in honor of the cheese shop.

I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. Caltech professor of planetary astronomy Mike Brown didn't start out wanting to kill Pluto. In fact, it was the International Astronomical Union that pulled the trigger. Of course, it was the discovery by Mike and his associates of Kuiper Belt bodies, including Sedna, Eris, and the impossible-to-pronounce Quaror, that forced the IAU to consider the meaning of the word planet. The whole story is in Mike's great new book, How I Killed Pluto, and Why It Had It Coming. It's a breezy and very enjoyable story with a cast of characters that includes Mike's wife, Diane. Last week, she and Mike celebrated its publishing with a party at their home

in the hills above Pasadena. Mike graciously sat down with me on the sofa as his guests enjoyed themselves. First of all, thank you for the party invitation. You have a lovely home, and this has been a lovely party. Thank you. It's been really fun to see everybody come out and be here. You actually wrote them in the book. Yeah, look at that. Thank you for leaving the blank pages of the book for notes. Had this been a novel instead of nonfiction, it would be the great American novel. You realize it's got everything, let me tell you.

It has intrigue, international intrigue, conflict. It has romance. It has intrepid explorers. It has the joy of discovery. It has a baby. It misses, youid explorers. It has the joy of discovery. It has a baby. It misses, you know, for the classical model, it misses boy meets girl, boy

loses girl. Although it's got a little bit of that in there, but that's, you know, really if I were to rewrite it, there would need to be a rocky period after I meet Diane where we were held apart by forces beyond our control, and then it would be a good Shakespearean plot. But other than that, I guess you're right.

I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right. Brought back together by gravity. By the solar system or something, yeah. Well, there is a point in that. I mean, when you first set out to look for the 10th planet, you didn't find it, but you did find a wife. You found a spouse. And if I had to do it over again,

I think I would still choose to find that one instead. I did well. You are the discoverer and destroyer of worlds, and yes, now you've thrown a party. Do you find it ironic that it was, in a sense, your discovery of these new worlds that ended up having Pluto and them barred from being planets? Honestly, it was a little bit difficult for me at first because, you know, you discover something and you want everybody to jump up and down and be excited about your discovery. And it's been, the main story has been not the discovery, but the demotion of Pluto.

It took a while for me to wrap my head around the fact that it's the same story. It's just the same story in a slightly different context. But it did take me a while to be okay with that. But I'm okay with that. Do you feel a kinship with Pluto's discoverer, Ply Tombaugh? Oh my God, no. I worshipped Clyde Tombaugh. He's one of those great astronomers of the past that I could never hope to be like. I beg to differ, because it seemed like you both,

you shared certain qualities, dogged, determined ability to stare at image after image after image, looking for things that are moving. I mean, I learned about Tom Bow as a kid. I read his book. He did an incredible thing. He individually took these pictures with the telescope. He developed the photographic plates. He looked at everything by eye and he found Pluto. Having gone through the sky myself with a robotic telescope and digital pictures and computers doing everything, I know how hard a

job that was. And that was an astonishingly hard job. If you had put me in his shoes, I don't think I could do what he did. What we did has some similarities, but I'm not him. I really couldn't have done it like he did. I know myself. I couldn't have done it. You did a good part of this work up on Palomar, one of my favorite spots in the world, but not with the Hale, the 200-inch telescope, but with that little brother or little sister down a little ways. It's the 48-inch Schmidt telescope, the Samuel Ocean telescope.

It's my favorite telescope in the world. It's a beautiful little telescope. When they built it, they built the 200-inch telescope, and they had a little bit of money left over. That never happens these days. And they realized that they needed a telescope to take pictures of the sky to know where to point the big telescope at. And so that telescope took pictures of the whole sky

and made these photographic plates and these prints of photographic plates that every astronomy department in the world has a collection of. And that was what, these days you get it all on the web, but back when I started graduate school, that's how you knew what you were going to look at you went to these these the library to get your photographic plates and or your prints of the photographic plates and you found the spot in your sky with those photographic uh those prints and the fun part of the story is once we found eris the the one that's the same size as pluto when we found eris we went back and looked at all the old pictures we could find to see who else accidentally took pictures of Eris and didn't know it.

The very first picture we ever found was from the 48-inch telescope at Palomar, the same telescope where we discovered it from 1954 on a photographic plate. It's a great part of the book because you have this story not only about this telescope and using this now archaic technology, my God, photographic plates, but the two people that you work with there who taught you, I guess, how to make use of this telescope. Yeah, I'm actually really sad they're not here tonight at the party because they're working at Palomar tonight. So they couldn't come down. You know, it's hard when you have a night job instead of a day job, and it's a long ways away. But Kevin Rykowski and Gene Mueller have been

working at Palomar and working on these telescopes forever. And they're sort of the last people who really know this arcane technique of photographic plates and develop and then looking across the sky. And they do just a fabulous job. We'll return to Mike Brown's book publishing party and wake for Pluto in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us.

You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. What do you do after you've killed a planet?

You write a book and throw a party. We're about to return to that celebration at the home of Mike Brown, Caltech professor and discoverer of worlds including Eris, the far, far away object that is as big as Pluto. The party whirled around us as our conversation continued. You talk a lot about a lot of great people in the book. We just lost one of them, the head of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, Brian Marsden, former guest on this show. He must have been pretty special to you, because he went to bat for you.

You know, it's so easy after someone dies to say he was the nicest guy around, but in Brian Marsden's case, it was just true. He went to bat for me, but he went to bat for everybody. He went to bat for the solar system.

He was that rare combination of, he was a fabulous scientist, and he was an enthusiast. He was the first person, if you discovered something, and you sent it into the Minor Planet Center, and if it was something cool, you would get an email back from Brian saying, wow, what a great discovery this is just fantastic and i i have told this story before and then when he died i i i wrote about this a little bit and so many people responded with their own stories the same way so there's me who's discovering

you know uh biggest thing in in 150 years there are amateur astronomers who discover their first asteroid and they're really excited about it, and Brian writes them and talks about it excitedly. He was just, he loved the solar system, and he was always excited when someone found something about it, and he always wanted to know more about it. And he was that way until he died. I guess he officially retired a couple of years ago,

but it's not like if you sent in an email to the Minor Planning Center, you still wouldn't get the email back from Brian because he was there. He was probably still there every day of the week. I don't know. But I literally had a copy of the book that I pulled out of my stack of copies that I had, and I was about to put in the mail to Brian when he died. So I was actually really looking forward to being able to hand it to him. It makes me sad.

And when people read the book, as I highly recommend they do, they'll see that he stood up for you in other ways as well, but we won't go into that right now. You kind of close out the book with a consideration of the importance of classification. What is a planet? What isn't? What's in a name? Are you satisfied now, or do you still think the IAU needs to get back together and consider a bit more about what is a planet and what is not?

No, I actually think that the definition that the IAU came up with, which they probably came up with at three in the morning, right before this vote was going to happen, not probably, literally, they came up with at three in the morning as this vote was about to happen. If you actually read the written definition, it's pretty poorly worded. It's not clear at all. It can be bickered with, and so people bicker with it. But if you ignore the actual lawyerly definition, which I encourage you to do,

because there's nothing in all the rest of astronomy that has a definition trying to write it down in the same way, astronomy works in concepts, and the concept that they tried to codify in that definition is the right concept. I don't know how I would write it down. If I were forced at gunpoint to write down a lawyerly definition of what is a planet, it would be a very difficult thing to do. But if you asked me the concept, I would tell you that in our solar system,

there are eight major bodies that dominate the solar system, and then there are millions and millions of tiny things that are moving between the bodies, beyond the bodies, sometimes hitting the bodies. And the division is obvious. And we should call those big major ones that are so different from everything else, we should call those something profound. And in our solar system, the profound thing that we have to call things

is the word planet. So I'm happy with that. So I hope that that doesn't change. The definition could be fixed, but we don't really need to. It'd be better just to toss it out and say, we know what the planets are. It's these eight because that is a profound thing to say.

You said your daughter, Lila, knows. She knows. Actually, I asked her today as the party was starting if she thought Pluto was a planet or not a planet, and she said, today, I think it's a planet, and you should un-kill it. So I still have my work cut out for me. Last question.

Are you still looking? We're still looking. I'm not sure when I'll finish looking, but right now we're definitely looking in the Southern Hemisphere. Nobody's done a major search in the Southern Hemisphere ever. When we were doing the Northern Hemisphere,

we knew that Clyde Tombaugh had done all the Northern Hemisphere before. So if there were anything really bright, Clyde Tombaugh would have found it. And the southern hemisphere, it's basically virgin territory. We don't know what there might be. So we're excited to see that, and we're excited to continue. Even in the north, we're excited to continue to try to look, continue to look further and further for those things that are even more cold,

even more distant, even more pristine, that will continue to tell us about the earliest, earliest parts of the solar system. Do you still think there might be that Mars-sized body out there waiting for us to find it? I don't know if there is or not, but if there is, I desperately want to find it. Swell party, Mike, and a terrific book. Thank you very much.

Thanks for coming. Time to visit with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's going to tell us what's up in the night sky and probably some other stuff. Got you back on Skype this week. I missed you. You were busy in a meeting when Bill Nye and I got back from the desert last week. So here we are on the 21st century telephone. Roger that.

So what's up? We've got our usual, so to speak, of Jupiter dominating the evening sky, super bright. Star-like object Venus, the same in the pre-dawn sky with Saturn above it. But what I want to get to are the special things. We've got the Geminid meteor shower peaking December 13th and 14th, but still we'll have increased meteors for a few days after that. Best meteor shower of the year traditionally from a dark sky when the moon's not up, you can get up to 100 meteors per hour. So still good at a not so dark sky. You can check that out. And then we've got a total lunar eclipse well posed for North America.

You can catch a little bit of it from Western Europe or Eastern Asia or Northern South America. little bit of it from Western Europe or Eastern Asia or Northern South America. This is on the evening starts for us on the West Coast, the evening of December 20th. It's December 21st in most time zones that can see it. Partial eclipse begins at 6.32 UT. That's 6.32 in the morning. That would be 10.32 for those of us playing on the west coast of North America in Pacific time. And the total eclipse begins about an hour later. Greatest eclipse about a half hour after that. Total eclipse ends another half hour. And the whole partial eclipse ends at 10 UT or 2 in the morning West Coast time.

So it's a party. Go out and check out the total eclipse of the moon. Don't happen that often. I'm looking forward to it. What about you, Matt? I am too. I should have just stayed out there in the desert and waited for the Geminids and this. We actually would have appreciated that.

That's not nice. I mean, just because you get such great planetary radio coverage of the events. Speaking of events, a lot of stuff happened this week in space history. In 1962, the first successful planetary flyby, Mariner 2, flying by Venus,

had the last footprints on the moon left in 1973 by Apollo 17. 1970s, so 40th anniversary of the first successful planetary landing. That was the Soviets with Venera 7 landing on Venus and getting back a half hour or so of data. And, of course, all the way back in 1903, the first powered flight of an aircraft, those pesky Wright brothers. Who'd have thought that just, what, 67 years later, we'd have a robot reporting back from Venus and people walking around on the moon?

Who'd have thought? I don't know. Not Orville, I bet. Oh, probably not. Maybe Wilbur. He was... Wilbur was the visionary. I just don't know.

So this next segment, am I introducing it? You've only just reminded me that we do have one unused Random Space Fact piece yet. But you go ahead and do your thing this time. So am I. Random Space Fact! Yeah, that equaled anything we could have gotten from a listener, I'm sure. Ah, you were kind. I am indeed.

So we had that whole SpaceX Falcon 9 Dragon successful thing this last week. SpaceX Dragon, the three parachutes that bring it back, and in this case did a splashdown, 35.4 meters in diameter, each one. Apollo's were 25.5. Wow. Well, this is a big old capsule. Still very reminiscent of Apollo. Those of us who remember seeing those things coming down under those three chutes, it was a very pleasant flashback. Let us go on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what is thought to

be the source object for the Geminid meteor shower? And I discussed there's weirdness about it. How'd we do, Matt? Quite good, quite good. A lot of people were hoping to get one of those Beyond Earth t-shirts from chopshopstore.com, but it was Paul Young who is the lucky guy that's going to get to wear it around. Paul Young of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and that's where London Bridge is, you know. The geminate meteor shower is caused by the... Of course. Where else? It's caused by the object 3200 Phaethon, or Phaethon, which is thought to be a Palladian asteroid rather than a comet.

Is that the significance you were looking for? That is thought by some that it may have broken off Pallas, whereas most meteor showers are from an asteroid. This may be a comet, but it's still debated. Or maybe it's some hybrid, some type of hybrid asteroid comet or even asteroid with its orbit going so close to the sun that it heats up and sheds things that you wouldn't otherwise except getting close to the sun. In any case, it dumped off a whole bunch of stuff compared to other things. So the big debris cloud, and that's why we get the very nice gem in the meteor showers. So thanks to it, whatever it is. It's not that it was, according to Ed Lupin, Zeus's dandruff.

Well, we're not totally sure. Again, it's up in the air. It is definitely up in the air. What do you got for us next week? Speaking of parachutes, during the course of the Apollo program on actual flight missions, how many Apollo parachutes failed and on which mission or missions did that occur? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. Oh, that is, that's frightening. Even in retrospect, you've got until December 20th, December 20th, 2010 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us the answer.

And I have heard, in fact, from you, that we're ready to give away the Year in Space desk calendar for 2011, which I think you and I both have some of our writing in. We do, and also the official source of this week in space history on Planetary Radio. Very cool. I'm holding the 2010 edition in my hands right now. Lots of beautiful images and cool stuff going on every day in the history of space exploration. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, think about bumper stickers and what you'd put on one. Thank you, and good night.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. And you know my favorite all-time bumper sticker? It was a red bumper sticker that said, If this bumper sticker looks blue to you, you're going too fast. Much, much too fast. Join us next week as Bill Nye and I have an excellent adventure on a 747 with a 100-inch infrared telescope.

That's SOFIA, next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова