Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Moon Mission 3D from Queen Guitarist Brian May and David Eicher

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

You haven’t seen the best pictures from the Apollo era and other great space achievements till you’ve seen them in 3D.  Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May is also mad about stereoscopic imagery.  He worked with this week’s guest, Astronomy Magazine Editor-in-Chief David Eicher, to create this beautiful new book that contains 150 startling 3D images, along with clear 3D glasses. A copy of Moon Mission 3D will go to the winner of the new What’s Up space trivia contest.  Also, Planetary Society Digital Editor Jason Davis introduces SpaceIL’s lunar lander, heading for the moon in 2019. Learn more at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/1114-2018-eicher-moon-mission-3d.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Moon Mission 3D, 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. Who knew? Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May is also one of our planet's leading practitioners of 3D imagery. May and Astronomy Magazine Editor-in-Chief David Eicher have teamed up to create a space book that will knock your eyes right out of your head.

We'll explore it in depth, and you'll get a chance to win Moon Mission 3D in this week's What's Up Space Trivia Contest. Let's talk first with Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis about a new mission to the moon that is nearing launch, a mission from Israel and a non-profit called Space IL. Jason, what we have here, if it goes according to plan, would be the winner of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, if there was still a Google Lunar X Prize. Yeah, I guess technically the prize still exists. There's just no money behind it anymore. And if you go to the Google Lunar X Prize website, they're kind of saying like, hey,

we're looking for a new financial sponsor if anyone out there happens to be willing to put $30 million up for grab. So it's all glory, but no cash rewards. Especially now that it looks like SpaceIL is actually going to do this possibly as soon as early next year. I mean, you would basically know that you're going to be giving up the money, whereas Google never had to. Yeah, exactly. It does look like it's going to happen in early 2019. It was supposed to happen at the end of this year, but SpaceX delayed the flight a little bit. Typical SpaceX flights, they don't get more specific than that, but it does look like it's going to happen. Well, tell us about this mission and this little spacecraft, which to me

looks a lot like a kettledrum. Yeah, it kind of has this circular deck. It's almost similar to, if you remember the Phoenix mission to Mars, or even Insight Lander is going to be similar to this without the fold-out solar panels. So four legs. It's not very big, just a couple meters wide, has some solar panels on top of it. They're going to land in the Sea of Serenity. That's one of those big, dark mare. I always pronounce it wrong. Go out in the backyard, you can see that on the moon. It'll take two months to get to the moon by raising its orbit, and then eventually get captured by the moon's gravity, make a couple orbits there, and then land, send them high def videos and pictures. That was a requirement for the Google Lunar XPRIZE that they'd be able to show what they're doing. And then it'll actually try to make a hop. It'll lift off using the same engine it used to land,

travel 500 meters. Again, that was a requirement from the Google Lunar X-Prize. And land again. And that'll be it. It does have a science instrument, a magnetometer, that NASA has partnered with SpaceIL on to collect the data from that. Just kind of a fun little mission that was originally conceived, I guess it's been almost seven years ago, to do the Google Lunar X-Prize.

I like to think that that magnetometer is to discover TMA-1, the monolith in the 2001 movie, but I guess it's actually to investigate the interior of the moon through its remaining magnetic field. You mentioned NASA's involvement with that instrument. I saw that NASA's also going to be providing some use of the DSN, the Deep Space Network. Yeah, they're going to give them some DSN time. Space Isle already had some ground stations, but of course, with the DSN, you get full coverage no matter what the orientation of the Earth is at any time. NASA's also giving them a little retro reflector, so other spacecraft in orbit can shine a laser down that bounces back up and that gives you ranging distance. NASA is doing that kind of as this forward-looking thing. With all this talk

of going back to the Moon, there might be a bunch of small science landers on the Moon or commercial landers, and they want to start sending these aboard spacecraft so that they can kind of have this built-in navigation system for spacecraft in orbit, since they're expecting a lot more activity up there. Why is this relatively small team doing this? They're not going to get prize money. I guess the reason they continued, they were far enough along that they decided why not push for the finish line. But when they created the nonprofit back in 2011, it was just a couple Israeli engineers, three of them, I think. Really, they wanted to do the classic inspiring people to pursue STEM careers, something that NASA and a lot of other groups tries to do,

even the Planetary Society, of course, tries to do. They have this perceived gap that there's not enough Israeli engineers coming into the workplace. So they thought if they did this XPRIZE mission, they might get people, young people excited and want to pursue a career in this. Well, I will be inspired and not expecting too much since space is hard and landing something softly on something is even harder, but it'll be something to watch for, I guess, next year. Yeah, it sounds good. I'll be watching it too. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. Thank you, Matt.

That's Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society. And he mentioned the Planetary Society also trying to provide inspiration. He follows that particular project. Well, we do it in a lot of ways, but maybe the most prominent is with LightSail 2, which we're also looking forward to seeing that happen sometime in 2019. I've been a fan of 3D images for as long as I can remember. I'll usually pay the premium to watch a movie in 3D, even if it doesn't have much else to offer. And I love the stereo images that sometimes come from robotic space missions or from our own Emily Lakdawalla, another 3D fan. Most of those require the red-blue glasses

that never render an image quite as well as you'd like. So I was blown away when a copy of David Eicher and Brian May's book arrived. As you'll hear in my conversation with David, Moon Mission 3D is a stunner. We talked a couple of weeks ago while Brian May was busy touring with Queen and promoting the new movie, Bohemian Rhapsody. Dave, thanks so much for joining me on Planetary Radio to talk about this terrific book, which I have enjoyed enormously. Thanks for doing this. Well, thanks for having me, Matt. It's really a pleasure to talk to you and to be with you today. There are, as I'm sure you know, going to be a library full of books released between now and at least July of 2019, marking the mission of Apollo 11, about the space race and the space program and the Apollo program in particular.

Therefore, you're in a pretty competitive market here. My impression, having read almost all of this book and looked at, I think, all of the images, is that you have a leg up because of this very special and rather startling feature that you and your co-author, who we will talk about, have added to enhance this book. But before we talk about those great 3D images, I want to compliment you on the text because I think it's outstanding. Well, thank you. And of course, there's been a mountain of stuff, of course, on Apollo published since the event and even before. But the way this book sort of got started with a bunch of people who knew each other at the Starmus Festival enabled us to sort of come together and look at things in, we think, a bit of a unique way from both sides, from the United States side as well as the Soviet Union, and presenting a bit of

a social and political a little bit, and even a little bit of a musical history because of Brian's influence, along with the pure science and the pure technology, the program itself. And I think that those different aspects of the space program, the space race, I hate to keep using that term, that you address here, including the political, they add substantially to the value of the book and the fascination of the book that the book had for me. Let's go back to what you mentioned about the Starmus Festival. Is that where you met your co-author, this fairly well-known guitarist, physicist, expert in 3D photography? Well, it is. I mean, Brian May got involved in the Starmus Festival because he very successfully abandoned his PhD, which, believe it or not, was focusing on the zodiacal light in the solar system, dust in the solar system, in 1970. And because he had a rather successful day job that got going at that point, playing guitar and founding, along with the other three fellas, Queen, of course, the group.

But he actually came back, urged on by the famous astronomy writer and friend of his and mentor Patrick Moore. He went back and finished his degree, his PhD in 2008. And it was his PhD advisor, Garrick Israelian, in Tenerife there in the Canary Islands, who got him into this mode that there should be an international science and music festival. Thus, Starmus was born around the year 2010. That's where you met Brian May? Yeah, there have been a few Starmuses now, and I got to know Garrick, and I got to know Brian there. And for inexplicable reasons, they took a liking to me.

Patrick was aging. Unfortunately, we lost Patrick a few years ago now in 2012. And so they were sort of looking for a collaborator who was interested in all of this stuff. And I've had a lot of experience, of course, with the magazine writing. So it was sort of a marriage born in astronomy and rock and roll, which all of these guys at Starmus are really all into together. Talk a little bit about the 3D images in this and how Brian May has advanced this, if not science, art. Brian has been interested in stereoscopy and stereo imaging since he was a child. And in England, back in the day, in the 1950s, when he was growing up, you could get stereo cards that would come together. These are two

images that are shot slightly differently side by side, and you can look at them and get a 3D image, either with a special viewer like those that Brian now has designed, or just by relaxing your eyes in a certain way. This was, of course, a huge Victorian fad in England and an enormous thing about the time of the American Civil War here. It sort of came back in the 1950s as an insert in a cereal box, believe it or not, when he was a child in Weetabix cereal in England. And so this fascinated him. And when he's not playing rock and roll or looking at the skies or doing some animal welfare that he's very involved with, he's been fascinated with the stereo photography for years and years and years. The good fortune that we had thinking about Apollo was that there were so many thousands and

tens of thousands of images shot during the program, and the astronauts were actually trained to some degree to shoot stereomages. They really didn't end up doing it so much, but they shot enough images close by each other. And, of course, spacecraft move over time. If you shoot an image and wait a few seconds, the moon, other moons, you know, Earth rotates and so on. So if you troll through this enormous NASA archive, which is what Brian and his collaborators did, you can find some good were synthesized that were actually not originally didn't lend themselves to stereo viewing. That's right. There are a few that are that are faked, if you will, you know, that are synthesized from a mono image. And among them are the fame and two of the most famous images of all that the boot print of Buzz Aldrin that is erroneously called, you know, the Neil's first step sometimes. And also in many places, and also the shot of Buzz that was taken by Neil,

in which you can see Neil reflected in Buzz's visor. That's sort of a very amazing, those were faked to make stereo images. But there are only about half a dozen or a dozen images in the book that were synthesized in that way. Mostly Brian and his collaborator, who's an Italian photo researcher, Claudia Manzoni, they spent just many, many, many hours going through the NASA archive and finding pairs that could be cleaned up a bit and would work in stereo without giving the viewer a headache, if you will. Yeah. They did a heroic job. You've already mentioned two of my, not surprisingly,

favorite images in the book. That footprint that Buzz Aldrin left on the moon, which probably is still up there, it suddenly, like so many of these 3D images, has depth in the most literal fashion. But it's startling how real it becomes when it is viewed, and I should add, when it is viewed by the little stereo glasses that you guys have graciously included in a little inset in the back cover of the book, and that I guess Brian May calls owl, or in this case, light owl? Yes, Brian invented this owl viewer that's really sort of a modern version of what were the old stereo viewers 150 years ago. There's a small, a light version that is smaller and lighter tucked into the book. And that makes it easy to see these things. And yes, I mean, as you say, you know, you really get,

it was Charlie Duke who said that, geez, you know, seeing these images in stereo really is the closest you get to being on the moon. Because as you say, like with Buzz's footprint, you can see how really sort of delicate and powdery that lunar regolith is. And you can see the astronauts and rovers and the LEM and other objects scattered into the distance with also with foreground objects sort of jutting out to you. So it really gives you, you can get lost in this and really gives you a feeling a little bit as to what it's really like to stand on the moon's surface. Like most people, I bet who are going to either purchase or at least get a hold of this book on someone else's coffee table, because it is sort of that size, that format.

The first thing that they're going to do, hopefully they will come back and read the text, but they're probably going to do what I did, which is go through each page of the book and look at not just the stereo images, but I mean, I have it open right now to this two-page spread of the Apollo 11 astronauts and their ticker tape parade, which looks like it's right out of an old Life magazine. I'm dating myself here. I could date myself further and talk about the old viewmasters that we Americans of a certain age grew up with. There are so many images here, many of which I have seen before, Buzz's footprint. And of course, that shot that you mentioned of Buzz on the surface of the moon with the

horizon stretching behind him, Neil and the Eagle lunar module reflected in Buzz's visor, they suddenly become so much more real. Let me tell you about one that just struck me, I think, from the first time I opened the book. It's not the obvious. It's a shot of Gemini 7 taken from Gemini 6A during that first ever human rendezvous in space. 6a during that first ever human rendezvous in space. And in this side shot of Gemini 7,

their cables are filaments of some sort that are streaming out behind the capsule. And the cloudy earth, of course, is far below. I'd seen images like that before, but my jaw dropped when I saw this in 3D. Yeah. Brian likes to call that shot the tin can with a sort of a, you know, an homage back to David Bowie in Space Oddity, you know. Yes, of course. Yeah, I mean, you see these delicate things that even before the Apollo program, of course, because the book really starts with Yuri Gagarin and goes onward. And of course, as you know, Matt, I mean, the Soviets, until about the time of Apollo 8, they had a very robust program to land a man on the moon themselves, which of course didn't happen through a number of tragedies and some deaths of Korolev, the key engineer and so on. But it is amazing to see these early bits of spaceflight

and the first testing in Earth orbit of various things like Mercury and Gemini and leading up to Apollo and see all these little features. You can see little bits of stereo camera that were stored in some of the spacecraft. You can see the damage, of course, after it got back to Earth, going around the moon, that happened to the Apollo 13 command service module, of course. You know, these things that really sort of jump out that you might not have noticed so much in a mono picture, really, really pop in these stereos. And there are 150 of these stereo images in the book. So most of the images in the book are these stereos. And I don't want to give the idea

that this is just Apollo. I mean, as you said, it goes back to Yuri Gagarin. And even earlier, I mean, there was talk about Tsiolkovsky, that wonderful Russian pioneer who came up with so much of what is becoming reality now. And there's a great stereo image of Sputnik 1. And then you take it right up through the New Horizons Pluto encounter, and there's a beautiful 3D shot of Comet 67P, courtesy of Rosetta. And I don't want to say it's an exhaustive review of what has happened since the Apollo program, but the entire history of humans and robots in space is represented in the book. There's a fun stereo image of Sergei Korolev, who you already referred to, the so-called chief designer, that Russian asset who was very well protected for so many years

because he was so central to their program. There's one of him holding two telephones up to his head. That is really entertaining. Thank goodness we finally were able to get images like that from the Russian State Archive. Yeah. But there's some crazy images that sort of punctuate all through the space programs on both sides of the coin, both U.S US and Soviet Union. It's about 50,000 words. It's a good, solid history, the writing of the whole era, but it's not tremendously detailed. Of course, there are much, much more exhaustive histories, narrative

histories of the era and of Apollo. But we talked to a number of astronauts, though, and, you know, Starmus really sort of became a bit of a catalyst for the Americans and the Soviets getting together and becoming friends long after the programs. And so talking to some of these guys, for example, Alexei Leonov is on the board at Starmus and a bunch of Apollo astronauts, of course, are very involved. You know, we got some interesting stories from these guys like, you know, Jim Lovell talking about, you know, wanting to avoid becoming the first human popsicles in permanent orbit and some great stories of what it's like sort of to launch and to land and to spacewalk and really put your life on the line from people like Rusty Schweikart. He got ill, of course, early on in Apollo 9 and had to take the risk

because if you got sick to your stomach, of course, in a pressurized suit, you were dead. And so there are lots and lots of critical moments that these guys talk about. And what a really rough business it was, both the training and the missions themselves and how heroic these guys were on both sides of the coin. Charlie Duke, who you mentioned earlier, and Jim Lovell, of course, Apollo 13, maybe what he is best known for, contributed to the book, a forward from Charlie Duke afterward by Jim Lovell, and they seem to have had great fun going through this. There is an entire chapter, Chapter 5, about the sacrifices that have been made,

and it is the inevitable cost of exploring, of going where we have never gone before. That's right. We do have a chapter on that. And, of course, there were terrible events like the explosion very early on at Baikonur, events like the explosion very early on at Baikonur and, of course, key deaths, both from purely medical reason and training, you know, aircraft crashes, you know, that took the lives of Yuri Gagarin and others. And, of course, tragedies in the United States like the Apollo 1 test pad fire, of course. But it was a very, very dangerous business. And I think this brought the astronaut explorers closer together, even to some degree back in the day, because Apollo 15

snuck the sculpture on board, the crew there, and left the fallen astronaut memorial that memorialized both the U.S. and the Soviet astronauts and cosmonauts who had died up to that point. And again, it is sitting somewhere on the surface of the moon for hopefully not to be bothered by future lunar tourists. Yeah. Before we finish, I want to talk about a couple of the other images that were so striking. And maybe one that I was surprised is not in the book, at least as a stereo image, Voskhod 1, the Voskhod capsule. You can look right through the hatch into this thing. And it is disturbing to think of three cosmonauts crammed into what looks like not much more than an old phone booth. Yes. So terribly cramped and so difficult. It's just incredible. And even a roomy capsule that was much more luxurious than Voskhod 1, you know, even Rusty talking about an Apollo capsule, you know, there wasn't sufficient room when you were

in a suit to put your arms down. The guy who was in the middle of an Apollo crew had to alternate who had the arm on top and on bottom occasionally so the arms wouldn't fall. So even the most luxurious capsules, of course, were pretty cramped. And Vascahad and, of course, Mercury and even Gemini, which was a little roomier, where it was very cramped. And Rusty talked about, for example, after 10 days on a mission, you were dirty and stinky and the food was terrible and it was like camping at its absolute worst. And rather than splashdown, the showers and spaghetti and lobster

and chocolate cake came to mind in the minds of these guys after nine or 10 days. And there is a shot of the Apollo 11 astronauts looking out the window of their little Airstream trailer that they had to stay in for a while while they were on the aircraft carrier after recovery. There is also a shot. It's a little blurry, but probably the best that I've ever seen. It's a stereo shot of the by the oxygen tank. You can believe either Jim Lovell or even Tom Hanks about how tremendously dangerous this was, but it's hard for us ordinary folk to really realize that, that, you know, turning lunar module into this sort of lifeboat, the odds were really against these guys getting back. And they were so ill, especially Fred Hayes, by the time they got back. It was very perilous.

They nearly perished on that mission and thankfully did get back and were able to photograph that damage before they reentered. were able to photograph that damage before they re-entered. My one beef with this otherwise terrific book that I highly recommend, why no stereo Apollo 8 Earthrise image? Ah, I think we'd have to ask Brian, but that's a good question. Perhaps a second edition could ameliorate that shortcoming. Well, please tell Brian next time you talk to him that he has given me a a second reason to become a big fan of his uh and i look forward to the movie as well like so many people the movie is fantastic yes oh you've seen it okay i'm not trying to you

know brag here but i happen to be in london for our book launch at the same time as the premiere. So we all went to the arena at Wembley and watched it for the premiere. And it was quite, you know, I was on the outer orbit there of that. And of course, Brian and Roger were in the middle of it, but it was quite something to be there. And you'll love the movie if you're a Queen fan. Can't wait. Big fan. And the movie, of course, is Bohemian Rhapsody. I want to leave you with a look toward the future, which really takes me into the past, back to Sergei Korolev. Because you mentioned something I was not aware of, that Korolev, the chief designer, as he was thinking toward the moon, was already considering far beyond that, the red planet, Mars, and considering things like ion engines, electric engines that are just

now getting us to places like asteroids and comets and probably will be the way we reach Mars. I mean, any comment that you want to make about, you know, how this book and really out of your own personal outlook, looking toward the future? I would, and you're absolutely right about him, of course. And he was visionary in that way and really was focused on Mars, ultimately. And I think that one thing we are really taught, studying the history here and also talking to the living survivors who experienced it, who are still around, thank goodness, going back to the moon, going to Mars, certainly, which will be orders of magnitude more dangerous and difficult and expensive. The future of manned space exploration is going to have to rely on international cooperation.

This was a race. It was a political race originally 50 years ago. It can't really be a binary political race in the future because the ambition is so great to do what ought to be done next. We really need an international cooperation between governments and private industry all together to accomplish the next big step in human exploration of the solar system. Well said, Dave. Thank you very much for this conversation and for this great book. Thank you so much for having me. It's really been a pleasure to be with you.

The book is Mission Moon 3D, A New Perspective on the Space Race by Brian May and David Eicher, who we've been talking to over the last few minutes. It is from the MIT Press and is co-published by the London Stereoscopic Company. Another work by Brian May. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist for the Planetary Society. He is back to tell us about the night sky, and we'll have some fun along the way. Hi. Hey. Hi. Hi. Oh, hey. and we'll have some fun along the way. Hi. Hey.

Hi. Hi. Oh, hey. I guess I'm not talking well today. You can, though. Go ahead. Tell us. What's up?

Evening, Sky. Got a nice lineup of planets, but you got to go early. Really low on the western horizon shortly after sunset is Mercury. To its upper left is Saturn, looking yellowish, and to its upper left is Saturn, looking yellowish, and to its upper left is Mars, which continues to fade but still looking like a bright reddish star. The morning sky is dominated

by Venus, looking super bright in the east, and it is hanging out quite close to the bluish star Spica for the next couple weeks. We move on to this week in space history, 1969, Apollo 12 landed on the moon. Second set of humans down on the moon. About a year later, Lunokhod 1 of the Soviet program became the first wheeled vehicle on the moon. We move on to random space fact. Random Space Pack! That was nice. Kind of operatic. Kind of. So, speaking of the moon,

Zond 5, the Soviet Zond 5, was the first spacecraft to ever circle the moon and return to land on Earth. That was in September of 1968. Flew around the moon. Closest distance was about less than 2,000 kilometers. I had no idea. We'll come back to that in the trivia contest. Ah, good.

There's more fun trivia having to do with Zond 5. before the Parker Solar Probe just broke the records for the closest spacecraft approach to the sun and fastest spacecraft relative to the sun, what spacecraft held those records? How'd we do, Matt? People had some fun with this. The guy who's been entering for pretty much the last year, in fact, almost exactly a year, just about every week, but here is his first win. It's John Rumpf from Merritt Island, Florida. He says that that previous Sun Grazer was Helios 2. Is he correct? That is correct. John, congratulations.

It was worth the wait, I hope. You're going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account, more about those in a moment, and a signed copy of Bruce Bett's new book, Astronomy for Kids, which, when does the hardcover come out? Whenever you make me a hardcover, but the paperback version is out. It is out. It came out November 13th.

I thought it was about now. Okay, very good. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It's a terrific book, as people, I'm sure, have heard me say before, if you've heard this program in the last few weeks. John, we're going to send that your way. It's a signed copy, by the way. Signed by Bruce Betts.

Best we could do. Sorry. Jordan Tickton in San Luis Obispo, California. There really were two spacecraft, I guess, Helios A and B. First spacecraft built outside the USA or USSR to leave Earth orbit. It was mostly a German project, like 70% German, 30% USA. Yeah, it was a German-American couple of spacecraft and set the record in 1976. Mel Powell, a bunch of Californians today, Sherman Oaks, California.

He somehow got access to the final transmission from Helios 2. Really? Yeah, something like this. I knew I should have slathered on more SPF 1 billion before I got this close to the... That was static. Yeah, remember, spacecraft, wear your sunscreen. Anna Madewell, not in California, in fact, pretty far away in Wembley Downs, Australia. She said, this week I have a bad cold, but Parker's space probe facts keep my brain

toasty warm. Oh, I hope she's over her cold now. Brian Morton in Bangor, not where you're thinking, Bangor, United Kingdom. He simply said, whoosh, and that's it. All right. Well, it's time to go back to Zond 5. I'm not sure I quite asked this right biologically, but you'll get the idea. What were the most advanced creatures to fly around the moon on Zond 5? They had various microorganism, tiny little things, but what were the bigger critters that flew around the moon and came back successfully alive? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

Yes, and you have until the 21st. That's November 21st at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. Shades of the Planetary Society Life Experiment, sending living things out and bringing them back. Indeed it is. There's actually worked. Here are the prizes this time. A Planetary Radio t-shirt, no surprise there. You can have a look at it at chopshopstore.com in the Planetary Society store.

A 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for that worldwide network of telescopes that you can operate from any place with an internet connection. Pretty cool. And from our guest this week, David Eicher of Astronomy Magazine, editor-in-chief of Astronomy Magazine, co-author of Mission Moon 3D with Brian May, as we were just talking with him about moments ago on the show. It is a copy of this beautiful hardcover book. Oh, whoa. With the 3D glasses in this little clever inset on the inside back cover. And it really, as people have already heard me say, it's a terrific book.

We will send it your way if you win the contest in a couple of weeks. And I think that's it. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about how much better paperbacks are than hardbacks. Thank you, and good night. Well, they're much easier to put in your pocket, that's for sure. He is Bruce Batts, the chief scientist for the Planetary Society and the author of Astronomy with Kids,

one of the finest paperbacks I have ever read, although I read it electronically. But you, one of the finest electronically nodule paper, whatever. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. And you join us every week here, you know, on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its three-dimensional members, maybe four-dimensional, or eleven.

Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad Astra.