Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - More of Our ALMA Adventure in Chile's Atacama Desert

Episode Date: March 25, 2013

Our special coverage of the ALMA Observatory inauguration continues, with the President of Chile, the incoming ALMA Director, and much more from the Atacama Desert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My Chilean ALMA adventure continues this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this week, back to the Atacama Desert in Chile, continuing my coverage of the ALMA Observatory inauguration. But we've also got all our regulars, beginning with Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome back from LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Look forward to seeing more of your blog entries. I know you're preparing more for us, but there is one in particular for March 20th that I think is quite fascinating. I

don't know how you're going to be able to summarize this, but I particularly want to call attention to vugs, smectites, new berries, and 300-year-old lessons about stratigraphy. That's right. You know, geology, it's a fun subject because, first of all, you have this long three-century-old heritage going back to Steno talking about various laws by which you can interpret flat-lying strata. And also they have all these wonderful terms. And I think that geologists spend a lot of their time hungry because there's an awful lot of food metaphors. But no, so there was an awful lot of detail in these presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. but I was struck by these parallels between Curiosity over at Gale Crater on one side of Mars and Opportunity over on the rim of Endeavour Crater on the opposite side of Mars.

And despite the fact that they're looking at rocks that are in completely different locations, they're both occupied by the same activity right now, which is to interpret the geologic history of flat-lying strata of sediments that formed in a running water environment that was a neutral pH that, by all estimation, would have been a really nice place for little Earth-like microbes to survive. And they're doing this on opposite sides of Mars, and by doing that at the same time in different places, they're actually kind of amplifying each other. So we're getting a more three-dimensional picture of what ancient Mars might have looked like at this time.

So the evidence, apparently, based on what you heard and a lot of conversations you had with great scientists like Matt Golombek, is that there may even have been multiple instances of wet areas? Yeah, that's right. These rocks have been wet numerous times in the past in different kinds of chemical environments. They were laid down by water. They were turned to rock by water. They were altered by at least one and generally at least two episodes of groundwater flowing through them. And yet for all of that, it doesn't seem like anything spent a lot of time being really wet under really warm climate. It's kind of on the edge of being habitable because it doesn't really look

like stuff spent a long time being wet yet. So there's still a lot of work to do in this area to decide whether or not this was a kind of place where life could have originated and thrived. Much, much more to learn. And will you indeed be writing up much more about your experiences last week? I hope so, because I wore my fingers off taking notes. Good. Well, we'll get some good use out of those. And there is already an entry that you may want to take a look at on March 21st with a picture of a beautiful meteorite that might just be from Mercury. Emily, thanks so much. We'll talk to you next week. All right, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and

our planetary evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope Magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Up next is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Bill. Is it safe to say that there was finally a little bit of good news out of Washington? Absolutely. The Omnibus Bill passed, and in it, the funding for this year of planetary science was included.

And in it, the funding for this year of planetary science was included. So now the next thing is, what about the fiscal year 2014 budget, which is first going to be released in a couple weeks? You talk about moving parts. Talk about complicated. The fiscal year 2013 budget was going to have a continuing resolution. Well, instead, they had the omnibus bill that got passed, the everything all at once bill got passed. But meanwhile, already upon us is next year's fiscal year budget that has to be produced. And everybody's concerned that in that one, the money for planetary science will be taken back. And so it's just complicated. And what I would say is stick with us at the Planetary Society. We research these issues as carefully as we can, and we make recommendations. And I like to say we were successful, but it's not over yet. And meanwhile, NASA is working on a scope of the budget for the

broad agency announcement of opportunity for the next rover in 2020. So everything is going on at once. So this is going to be a rover that's supposed to be on, if you will, the same chassis as the Curiosity rover. And everybody wants it to be a machine that will cache or store samples of the Martian surface, the regolith, so that then another spacecraft two years later or 26 months later can come down and pick that up and take it into Martian orbit. And then another spacecraft 26 months after that can take it out of orbit and bring it back to Earth. And this is all, these are years and years and years, and it's all connected to the budget

and the bill and the budget for next year. And it's wild. It's just if I were king of the forest, Matt, and I'm not, we would just fund it at a high enough level where there wouldn't be all these machinations every year where everybody would just say we're going to have a long term plan and we're going to achieve it. Far too sensible. We're working hard on this, Matt. We're just trying to, dare I say it, change the world. too sensible. We're working hard on this, Matt. We're just trying to, dare I say it, change the world. Thanks, man. Thank you, Bill. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. He joins us most weeks right here on Planetary Radio. Up next is the second part of my coverage of my Atacama adventure, my time in Chile at the Alma Observatory. Listen to a few eloquent words from one of the speakers at the inauguration

of the ALMA Observatory. Can you guess who this is, speaking through an interpreter? But it will make a significant contribution to the entire mankind by allowing us to know better the universe we live in, the world we live in. Maybe it will help us discover life beyond planet Earth. The name of the plateau where the 66 antennas are located, Chajnantor, in the language of our original people means observation point. So maybe they knew that it was a privileged place to look at the stars, the universe. Through this vision we were going to be able to know ourselves better. I hope that this project,

this adventure, this ALMA adventure is not only technological as I understand that it has a metaphysical meaning to know better who we are, where we come from, where are we going to. That That is why astronomy has always had a privileged side in mankind. Astronomers have been recognized and admired people from all times, with Copernicus and Galileo. We don't know if there is life as we know it somewhere else, but we do know that we are part of a universe that is immensely larger and extension of this large universe we live in. Nobody should be afraid of knowledge. Nobody should be afraid of the alert spirit, of the curiosity spirit, which has moved the world since its origin,

which is today clearly manifested through this project. That was the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, speaking under the big tent at the inauguration of the ALMA Observatory. Those of us from other nations can only hope that our heads of state feel the same way about science and the quest for knowledge about our universe. You'll remember that ALMA stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array, already the world's most powerful radio telescope, with the last of its 66 dishes still to be installed. One of the people most responsible for making sure ALMA reaches its potential

is Stuart Corder, the project's commissioning and science verification project scientist. Though he deals with the day-to-day challenges of a huge and hugely complex project, the wonder of ALMA's capabilities aren't lost on this astronomer. Wow, you know, this is really going to revolutionize things. I mean, it's not 10% or 50% or even a factor of three improvement. I mean, we're talking about a factor of 10 better in in every way, factor of 100 better in a lot of ways. And this is, calling it revolutionary is exactly the term that several of the other scientists have used. No, I mean, it's a complete game changer. I mean, I look at my first paper in

the field, which is A.B.iki looking looking for spiral structure in the disc which would basically either indicate the presence of a planet inside driving it or some gravitational instability which was causing spiral structure like you see in a galaxy but in a in a massive disc and i was like you know i really want to you know follow that up can you form a planet by having just the disc so big that it locally just comes together? And at Karma, we struggled to do that with high resolution, but the sensitivity wasn't good enough. And it's just like, God, you know, OMA is just going to just destroy this sort of thinking. And it's really, you know, proved to be that.

I mean, I had arguments with a friend of mine as a student. He's like, you know, everything we see is symmetric. You need to give up on this non-axisymmetry business. It's not going to get anywhere. But, you know, now we talk about it and it's just like, you know, you were wrong. You weren't going to see the axisymmetry at the level that you wanted to. But it's starting to show up. I mean, there's substructure in almost everything.

And so it's going to be really hard for us now to say, you know, we come up with all these nice smooth models and everything. And now it's like, oh, my God. None of that really works. You know, the fundamental assumption of, you know, if you go around an azimuth, it's all the same. Sorry. But isn't that half the fun? Yeah, no, I mean, that's all the fun to me. I mean, you spend all this time, you know, taking the data and trying to make your model, you know,

work and explain what the data looks like, and you get far enough, and I feel like at some level the existing arrays had kind of gotten us to where we could get to without a big leap forward, but almost just such a huge leap forward that we're taking data last year with 16 antennas out of the 50 that we're going to have in the baseline array on baselines that are a factor of 50 less than the maximum baselines are going to be. And there's still just fundamentally awesome stuff coming out. I mean, a few things that I've been involved in, I mean, Formalhut, which is a nearby massive star with a debris ring around it. You know, we were like, you know, what's this ring going to look like?

It's hard to tell from the single-dish data. And it's like it is just incredibly narrow, which the only way you can really get that is if you have a plan on either side, really polishing it up to make sure that it stays nice and tight. And then, you know, other things that are coming out of the data that we got in a later stage. I mean, you know, one of my other principal debris disk studies early on was, you know, oh, there's non-axis symmetry in this, and someone else did it with the SMA, and they said, oh, you're crazy. It's completely smooth. And now we look at it, and it's like, well, the asymmetry I saw is maybe there, but there's a lot of other stuff going on too,

that now we have to work really hard at explaining. And, you know, we even had an aha moment. Well, sort of, we were all daring each other to say, you know, we see this thing and it looks like there are two rings around this, this, the star, but it's, it's kind of marginal. And we were all hinting around it. and finally one of my collaborators was like, does everybody else see two rings there and not just the one that we've been talking about for the last 10 years? And we were all like, yes, I just didn't want to be the first one to suggest it. But we have a little bit more data we can add it in, so it'll hopefully firm up. But I mean, it's those sort of exciting things that really get you going, as well as,

But, I mean, it's those sort of exciting things that really get you going, as well as, you know, for me, it's that, but it's also knowing that I've helped everybody else. So you feel like you're a little bit of a part of everything that's happened. So as long as you can stay a little bit in both camps, it's really exciting. Stuart Corder. Still ahead is a conversation with the incoming director of the ALMA Observatory. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our

next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular

blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with more of my adventure at the Alma Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. Before the break, we heard from Stuart Corder, head of the team of commissioning scientists, that makes sure the Great Radio Telescope Array will deliver great performance and science. Denis Barkats has just transitioned from commissioning scientist to system astronomer. This young cosmologist and his wife fell in love with Chile. They left California and now live in Santiago with their children, though Denis spends eight

days at a time far to the north of the capital at the ALMA operations support facility, where he is generally found in front of a computer screen. What's the core job description for a system astronomer? Well, system astronomer, as the name might suggest, is really just making sure that when the observation happens, the system is ready for that observation to happen. Because, you know, we just think, hey, just point your telescopes and run. Well, it's not that easy. There's a lot of, you might, we just think, hey, just point your telescopes and run. Well, it's not that easy.

There's a lot of, you might call them vital signs. Okay, you have to make sure that the vital signs of the whole observatory are ready for it to be doing these observations. Let's just pick one specific example. At the highest frequency that we're observing in ALMA, what we call band 9, this is up to 900 gigahertz. So in wavelength, which might be more familiar to you, this is 300 microns, 0.3 millimeters. So just a little below infrared light? This is a little, yeah, it's beyond infrared.

To observe there, your field of view is tiny. That's the field of view that you can have when you're observing. Your field of view is tiny. It's about 9 arcseconds. That's how much you see of the sky, okay? Well, you better make sure that the source that you want to observe is in that field of view. And to make sure that it's in that field of view, your telescopes better be pointed to that accuracy, because nine arc seconds is really tiny. So how do you do that? Well, you go to a source

that is a point source, and you point to it. Well, here we have a problem. We have so much resolution, we have so much, exactly, resolution on the sky that there are no more sources that you can use for pointing. Typically, we use, for example, Jovian satellites. We use Jovian satellites because they're really tiny objects and we use those, their point sources at other frequencies as pointing sources.

Well, we don't have those anymore because we resolve them with our accuracy, with our resolution. We resolve them. Basically, you mean they're too big. They're too big. Amazing. They're too big. So most sources that you use at other frequencies are too big for ALMA to use as pointing sources. So we essentially are in a new regime where we have to find alternative sources to be used as pointing. And so that's a challenge. When we're going to be using those longest baselines, that highest resolution,

we're going to have a challenge to actually get the telescope pointed. This is trailblazing. Yeah, I usually say we're working on the cutting edge and we get cuts very often. We'll close our special coverage of the ALMA inauguration outdoors where one of the giant transporters

was pulling a 110 ton radio telescope assembly onto its back. Watching this fascinating process with scores of reporters was Pierre Cox, the incoming director of the ALMA Observatory. You said this is the first time you've seen this? Yes, exactly. This is the first time I've seen it, and I'm excited like a kid could be. It's great fun. it's absolutely fascinating. It is a great fun and it is fascinating. I think one of the things which I'm marveling about even if I'm becoming the director of this facility is how incredible

the facility is at all its levels and of course here you see a gigantic level where you see one antenna lifted by a transporter. But the technology which is behind this is just incredible and the brain hours which are behind it, everything which people have thought about so that things are going smoothly and seems to be going smoothly. You have seen these images. In fact it's not at all that smooth and it's very complicated to be going smoothly. You have seen these images. In fact, it's not at all that smooth, and it's very complicated to make it smooth. This is exactly what I was thinking when I saw you,

that there are so many pieces to this project, which is already resulting in such terrific science. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you have to realize that today the science which was presented this morning is a science which is based on only 16, 20 antennas at the most. And that's only a third of our total number of antennas which will be available soon. And I think that once Elma will be fully operational, it will be tremendous. I mean, we will see things which we haven't even dreamt about before.

And hopefully so. How do you feel about next month, all of this being under you? I'm thrilled, honored, but also fearful. It is tremendous, and it's a huge responsibility. Since I've been nominated not too long ago, I've tried to get familiarized with the whole facility, with the people. There are lots of people. And the best way to describe it is that I was drinking like at a fire hose and trying to digest all the information I got. Of course, I mean, when you take a direction of such a facility, you're never alone.

I mean, you're never alone. You're one of the many people making this happen. I think that the people working here are exceptional. The proof is what you see around you. Each piece of what you see, there are people behind it making it work, and making certain that it works. I think as a director, the most important thing is to make certain that this spirit of companionship, of really collaboration is taking place and it makes it a successful facility.

You will be the administrator, but it was clear from your presentation earlier today at the press conference that you are a scientist and you are very excited about the science. Yes, I'm still very excited about the science. I've been up to now, I've directed a big institute as well with a big array of telescopes, and one single telescope in Spain and in France. The real fun of that job is to see that science is enabled, and very well so. And so I think my other big responsibility as a director of ALMA is to make certain that the best science is done at each time.

And it's a lot of work, it's a lot of administration, probably also a lot of politics and so on and so forth because of the governance of this huge project. But that being said, everybody has one goal, is that the science is done and that the best science is done. So I will do my best to make that happen. And I'm certain that I can count on the full support of the executives to make that happen. I hope it's a long and very productive tenure. Certainly, this instrument, ALMA, is off to a very good start.

I hope so, too. And I think my huge job now is to make it operate. I mean, the operations are going smoothly and well. And, you know, transition from construction to operations is never an easy one. And I'm just coming at the right or wrong time. I don't know. I think just the right time. Perhaps the right time. But it is a real honor to be able to direct this amazing facility

and to steer the ship towards, let's say, the dreamland that people have had in their mind for decades. Yes. I'm keeping you from watching this amazing machine. Let's go back to watching. Okay, let's go and watch it. Thank you. Thank you. The ALMA inauguration ceremony is complete, machine. Let's go back to watching. Okay, let's go and watch it. Thank you.

The ALMA inauguration ceremony is complete and we'll be headed back to San Pedro de Atacama, getting on the bus in about 15 minutes. There should be much more to hear of my Atacama adventures and our experiences here at ALMA at planetary.org. I hope you will take a listen and check out some of the video and stills

as well. The Skype line is open and occupied by Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. It's time for What's Up. Welcome back. Hey, thanks. Good to be back. It's good to have you. Please jump right in. Tell us, what's up? Well, we've still got Jupiter looking like a super bright star in the south in the early evening. We've also got Saturn rising earlier and earlier. Now, just coming up an hour or two after twilight and on the 28th and 29th, the moon will be kind of near Saturn on one side one night,

one side the other. Mercury is having a kind of lame apparition in the pre-dawn, but if you have a good view over to the east, low to the east in the pre-dawn, you can see Mercury. What? No comets? Well, it's just dimming. But you can still get comet band stars if you get a view low to the western horizon in the twilight and use binoculars. It's just fading some, so I stopped mentioning it.

Those who love it will find it. All right. We'll move on. This week in space history, 1974, Mariner 10's first flyby of Mercury being the first flyby of Mercury ever in the history of humanity. Mentioned early on in the show

that Emily has a nice blog entry about what might be a Mercury meteorite, a rock from that hot little planet. So interesting. Nice tie in there. Random space fact. I hear scrabbling. Did you upset the dog? I've excited them.

You know, anytime you talk like Scooby, it gets them going. Oh, they love that show. On a Snoopy snack. Anyway, which leads me logically to cosmology. Planck spacecraft telling us our universe is a tiny bit older than we thought. The cosmic background radiation that Planck and the others that have hunted for such things sees originates about 300... God, they love the Big Bang Theory. I think they want to hear how old the universe is in dog years.

I'm sorry. I should have known. I should never do a Big Bang talk when I'm near the dogs. That's all right. Just ignore them. All right. Just ignore them. All right. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang is when electrons and nuclei, they were just kind of flying around in their craziness, started to hook up and make hydrogen atoms and other atoms.

And this allowed photons, those light particles, to go run wild, to allow them to escape and not be slamming into electrons and other things. Before that, it was an opaque universe of photons. And after that, it was pretty transparent. And so that's why our cosmic background radiation dates from that particular era. Very good. And I do think that would be about 2.3 million dog years. Thank you for calculating that for me.

I'll let them know. In the dog years. Thank you for calculating that for me. I'll let them know. In the dog-iverse. Swamp dog universe. Save us from this. Okay, trivia question, and we asked you, what is the highest permanent astronomical

observatory, and how high is it? How do we do, Matt? Wow. I was surprised because I would have guessed it was ALMA. No, it's not. It's a neighbor of ALMA's. Yeah. You knew about this.

I did. Well, you know, when I started researching the question. All right. Well, our winner this week, first time winner, longtime listener, Steve Peterson of Clayton, North Carolina, who said it's the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory or TAO, more likely, T-A-O, at, get this, 5,640 meters or 18,500 feet, which is a full couple of thousand feet and about 600 meters, I think, above where I was, the ALMA observatory, that big radio telescope. And you were complaining. Yeah, I mean, we had a couple of people say, Matt ought to go there while he's in town. Yeah, I mean, we had a couple of people say, Matt ought to go there while he's in town. No, 16,500 feet was quite enough of a challenge.

Thank you very, very much. Bjorn Gettup, he put in a vote for Spirit on Mars, now that it is stationary, observing Mars at a height of 56 million kilometers above Earth's sea level. Should have been more specific. A very legitimate entry from, and I'll mangle this, of course, Vojta Navalek of the Czech Republic, who put in a vote for SOFIA, the Airborne Observatory, that flies quite a bit higher and is a, what, I guess a semi-permanent, not in place, but a semi-permanent infrared observatory. Anyway, some very good guesses there. But it's Steve who's going to get Bill Nye's voice on his answering

system. And let's give away another one of those. It's dictionary time. What is the term for where the solar wind slows down from supersonic to subsonic? Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 passed this location in the last few years. It's not what they were talking about more recently. The term for solar wind goes from supersonic to subsonic. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until Monday, April 1, April Fool's Day, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what your dog's thinking about right now. Thank you, and good night.

Cheese, no doubt. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the always curious, always exploring members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies at all wavelengths. Thank you.