Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - More Planetary Radio Live With Mike Brown

Episode Date: June 14, 2011

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A PlanRad Live bonus, 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 told you last week that we had far more of our live show with Mike Brown and Bill Nye than we could fit in a single half hour. So, indeed, we are in the bonus round this week. Stay tuned for more of our conversation with Mike about his discovery of other worlds in our solar system, the demotion of Pluto, and why he is increasingly excited about the New Horizons mission to that former planet.

Barbershop quartet High Fidelity is also back for an encore. I can't get enough of their award-winning four-part harmony or their Star Trek parodies. Emily Lakdwala is still on vacation and has the week off. She'll be back for our regular show opening conversation about the Planetary Society blog next time. By the way, there have been some terrific guest bloggers filling in at planetary.org. One of them is our friend Bruce Betts, who wrote about the return from space

of the Shuttle Life Experiment. He'll give us an update when we join him for What's Up and a new space trivia contest. Let's get started with commentary from Bill Nye. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here. This week, the big news, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, okayed a mission to an asteroid. That's right, OSIRIS-REx, the origin, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security,

The origin, spectral interpretation resource identification security, REX, Regolith Explorer, will go to asteroid 1999 RQ36, I presume discovered in 1999. Now, maybe we'll get a better name for the asteroid someday, but the name of the spacecraft comes from the Egyptian god of the underworld. And these asteroids are way out in space where it is dark and cold, and I guess somewhat like an Egyptian ancient guy's interpretation of the underworld. And so we're going to bring back a piece of it, about 60 grams, about 2 ounces of asteroid. You know, if you talk to a geologist, what does he or she say?

That's right, every rock tells a story. And the same, it is presumed to be true of every piece of asteroid regolith, every piece of asteroid rocky crust. And when we get that stuff back here on Earth, hurtling through the air, just bouncing onto the ground in Utah, people will know a lot more about the early solar system. You can answer questions like how much water did there used to be? Where did it all go? Why did this particular type of dust accumulate into this particular ball and end up in this particular orbit? Because all of that stuff relates to where we all came from. It all relates to the early solar system. Answering that fabulous question, where did we all

come from? And then later, maybe, are we alone? Because whatever happened here, we presume happened on other worlds. It's a classic case. Why are you guys sending a mission way out to an asteroid? What are you going to find? We don't know. That's why we're sending the mission. Now, by the way, it's a lot of planning. This thing leaves in the year 2016, and it doesn't come back to the desert in Utah until 2023. And you know why it takes so long to do these things? Because they're complicated, and the main thing is there is just a lot of space in space. I get to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. Did you hear last week's episode? You can still catch it in our archives at planetary.org slash radio.

We had a wonderful time in the Crawford Family Forum at the studios of Southern California Public Radio in Pasadena. About 150 people joined us for Planetary Radio Live. The centerpiece of the show was my conversation with Bill Nye and Dr. Mike Brown, Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. Mike's book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, chronicles his discovery of worlds in the distant reaches of our solar system. It was these discoveries that led to the International Astronomical Union's demotion of Pluto from planet status. All the bodies found so far are Pluto-sized or smaller. Could there be something out there that is just humongous, or would we have seen that by

now? As long as you can put things far enough away, we wouldn't necessarily see them. You could put Jupiter out in the Oort cloud, where the comets are all sitting around waiting for us, halfway between us and the nearest stars, and we wouldn't see it. But very soon, we're going to have the data to even see those sorts of things. So there could still be some fairly large things out there that we haven't found yet, but we keep looking. So is New Horizons going to shed any light, pun intended, on this? On the larger objects out there? Yeah. No, it's not designed to do a search.

New Horizons, everybody, is a mission to Pluto. Left in 2006, going faster than any rocket anybody's ever shot. It will get near Pluto in 2015. Yeah, so it actually left in 2005. And it was, I happen to know this very clearly. It was January 2005? Yeah, because as it launched, it was launched to, of course, the ninth planet. I discovered Eris two weeks before the launch, but nobody knew about it.

So I was watching this launch thinking. So, yeah, so it's the only mission that's ever launched to a planet that then arrives at something that's not a planet. But help him just set me up. It was. Even though it may not find other bodies, that's your job. Are you excited about getting out there and taking an up-close look at the first of these? I'm actually more excited now than I was when the mission was first proposed. Pluto, for many years, was sort of this oddball at the edge of the solar system

that nobody knew what to make of, and there was only one of them. There's nothing else like it. And so it seemed like a good idea to fly there and see what it was. But it's hard to get excited about a single object that's different than everything else that you're not sure what it's going to tell you. Hey, just a minute. What's your favorite planet? See, a lot of people say Pluto. And I admit they don't know any better.

And, yeah, he'll have it. I'm partial to Earth myself. Yeah, if it's Earth-Pluto in the solar system cup, I'm all about Earth. I mean, this is where I grew up. My best friends were here. But it has held fascination for people, I guess, because of the dog. I think, yeah, I think it's really the dog is the main thing. No, people love the sort of runt at the end of the solar system.

I find this mission now going, this New Horizons going to Pluto, much more exciting now because we're going to learn about Pluto, sure, but we're going to learn about all these other things that are like it. We're going to learn about Eris and Maki Maki and Quarwar and all these other crazy sounding objects that have been found out there that are very much like Pluto. Pluto is the closest one and the easiest one to get to. So it's the obvious choice of which one to go to. So I'm pretty excited about that. Let's talk about the book some. You don't mind talking about the book, do you? If I have to.

And there it is again, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, available from Spiegel and Grau. It's a very personal story. I mean, it's not your typical nonfiction, you know, here's how we find other worlds. There's a lot of autobiography in this. It was an interesting period in my life, and it was hard for me to sort out where is the science and where is the rest of life. The announcement of the existence of Eris came when my daughter was 20 days old. Having a 20-day-old daughter, I'm sure some of you know, doesn't lead to

rational thought and sleep very much. And so I'm in the middle of these press conferences trying desperately to remember what we just named these things. And then for the months following that, as she's growing up and we're writing papers about this, it was all so intertwined that, for me, the whole story went together that way. We're getting close to opening this up to our audience here at the Crawford Family Forum. So you want to raise your hand now if you've got a question, and we'll get a microphone over to you. We'll do that in just a minute or two. Well, I just wonder, everybody talks about this dark matter, dark energy, dark something.

Ninety-four percent of the universe is unknown. That's a reasonable assumption. Is any of that unknown, unknowable, dark, can't-figure-it-out-tivity stuff between us and your new objects, new, your newly discovered objects? We don't really know the answer to that very well. You don't know how it's distributed. Around the galaxy, there's certainly dark matter distributed fairly evenly around the galaxy. Now, what makes you say that?

Because the way that you know that is actually by watching the motions of stars. Gravity. So gravity, yeah. So the stars orbit the galaxy. And in the same way that we figure out how much Eris weighs by watching its moon go around it and how fast it goes around, you can watch how fast a star goes around a galaxy and weigh the galaxy. They weigh too much compared to the stars that you see there. And so you can map out where the dark matter is at that kind of scale.

At the scale in the solar system, you can't really do it. It's spread over such a large area that it's local effect you can't see. If there is a local effect, if there's some reason that it's not here, equally compelling. I often think, I mean, Einstein, relativity, this and that, was barely a century ago. There's going to be another discovery, another astonishing world-changing, universe-changing thing sometime. And I think some of it might be trying to understand what these dark energy and dark matter is. It's going to be pretty profound. I say this all the time. Why did you send a mission to Pluto? What are you going to find there? We don't know. That's why we're going.

And so the planetary side, just to throw this in, I took a wheelbarrow full of your postcards to a couple senators' offices back in the 1990s to keep that New Horizons mission, which had three or four different names over the years, keep it going. So I'm glad that you are pleased with it. We're going to go to the audience now, see if they can shed a little light on all this dark stuff that we're talking about. Hi, sir, what's your name? Colin Wood. Outside you mentioned irradiated methane poop. I'd like to know a little bit about methane, a little back story, and also what the heck is irradiated methane poop? So we were talking about what's on the surface of these objects out in the outer part of the solar system.

And I sort of only semi-jokingly called it goo or sometimes I call it tar. But what happens in the outer solar system and in the solar system in general is if you have a massive enough object, it'll retain a little bit of an atmosphere, and those atmospheres in the outer solar system tend to have things like methane, natural gas that you guys are all familiar with. Saturn's moon Titan has a lot of methane in it. Comets have a lot of methane in them. It's a common molecule in the outer part of the solar system. How do you detect that? This is one of the things that we spend a lot of time with the biggest telescopes on the planet and off the planet. You look at the spectra, the reflected sunlight coming back from those objects,

and you can see in that reflected sunlight, you can see where the methane is absorbing some of the light. It's a little fingerprints of methane. A pattern. What happens then is that methane gets irradiated by sunlight and also just by the solar wind, all these things that are out in space, and it breaks it apart. And when it breaks it apart, it turns into what I like to call goo. If you found this stuff, you picked it up, it would be sort of this red, gooey, sticky substance that you would have a really hard time washing off. I mean, it's like if you went and stuck your hand in the La Brea tar pits or something.

It's very much like that. And so that's a very natural product, and that's what it looks like is on the surface of a lot of these objects out there. We're going to get another question in from the audience. Hi. Please introduce yourself. I'm Wayne Hayes from Pacific Palisades, and I thank you very much for this presentation. But curious about where the source of all your data for your discoveries, Dr. Brown. I was wondering if it was Mauna Kea, the Hubble,

or possibly you still work with the observatories over in Flagstaff where Pluto was discovered. They don't talk to me there, so I don't work with them. So all of these discoveries of the objects in the outer solar system that I've done in the last decade and that whole big survey where I said, you know, you take a picture of the sky and take another picture of the sky, all of those took place at Palomar Observatory just south of here, just east of San Diego, and not on the big telescope at Palomar Observatory. There's that big 200-inch telescope that was the biggest telescope in the world for 50 years. But beside that telescope, there's a smaller one.

It's called the Samuel Ocean Telescope, the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope. And that was one that was designed to look at wide swaths of the sky. And so that's the one that we've been using all this time. Now, once we find the objects, we use every single one of those other telescopes that you just mentioned. We fly out to Hawaii and use the Keck telescopes. We use the Hubble Space Telescope. We've been using the Spitzer Space Telescope. Everything that we can get our greasy fingers on, we use at that point.

We have enough time for one more question. Hi, ma'am. My name is Mary Gerke, and I have a question. You partially answered it. I was wondering if these other objects like Eris have moons as does Pluto. Many of them have moons. Eris has a moon, Dicenomia.

One of them, Haumea, has two moons, Namaka and Hiiaka. And so it's very common for these large objects, the largest of these objects out there, to have moons like that. Dr. Mike Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. Bill Nye and I highly recommend his book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming,

published by Spiegel and Grau. After a break, we'll once again take you back to Planetary Radio Live. Amazing barbershop quartet High Fidelity treated our audience to yet another great Star Trek parody. Your chance to hear it is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society

to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 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. Our PlanRad Live show overflowed our last episode, so we've got bonus content for you this week, including our musical guest, High Fidelity. This award-winning barbershop quartet came equipped with tricorders, pointy sideburns, and original series Star Trek uniforms, all of which made their hilarious parody songs even more fun.

Here's one you'll probably recognize, though the guys have warped it a bit, if you'll pardon the expression. Captain's log, startardate 89.3. Following strange transmissions, we've beamed down to investigate. Mr. Spock, report. Captain, sensors indicate we've beamed directly into a live radio show. These strange life forms here are known as planetarium nights. Planetarium. Planetarium.

Planetarium. Planetarium. Planetarium. Planetarium. Bones, get a reading. Are they human? Tough call. Tough call. Come fly with me aboard the Enterprise. Let's take to the skies. Let's take our voyage sooner.

And my dear, let's make it lunar. Oh, fly me to the moon. And let me play among the stars. Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars in other words hold my hand

in other words darling kiss me kiss me baby fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore and more. You are all I long for, all I worship and adore. In other words, please be true, oh, do be true.

In other words, I love you. You know I do. So let's fly. Come on, come on, come, let's fly. Come fly with me. Let's fly. Let's fly away. Fly away. If you can use some

exotic booze, there's a still in the shuttle bay. Come on, fly with me Let's fly, let's fly Away to a galaxy far, far away The Enterprise you realize is fine Top of the line Just say the word and we'll take this bird up to warp

Factor 9 It's perfect for a flying honeymoon. So they say, come fly with me. Let's fly. Let's fly away. Come on, come on, come on. Let's fly, fly, fly. Come on, come on,

come on, come on, and fill my heart with song so we can fly forevermore. You are all I long for. And you're all that I adore. In other words. Last words.

Please be true. Come on, baby. Do. Please do. In other words. I mean this, baby. In other words. In other words. In other words, baby. In other words, in other words, baby, come aboard the Enterprise.

Come on, Scotty, energize. Come on, come on, come on, come on, and fly. Fly, fly, fly. Come on, fly. Come on, fly. Fly. Back to having Bruce Betts on the Skype connection. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, of course. He's here for What's Up and the return, the grand return of the trivia contest.

Yay. Hey there, hi there, ho there. And the same to you. You were a big hit. Your juggling got a good laugh at Planetary Radio Live. Listen, before you start telling us about the night sky, tell us about millions of critters returning from Earth orbit. Yes, Planetary Society, we successfully flew millions, millions, I tell you, of passengers on board Space Shuttle Endeavour's last flight or fight.

STS-134 came back on June 1st and in their little tubes we had two species of bacteria, two of archaea and the ever popular animals tardigrades, also known as water bears. They got processed down in Florida and the little tubes pulled out of the commercial experiment package it was in, done by a company called NanoRacks. And then they went off to ATCC, our partner in Virginia, top biological repository in the U.S. for microorganisms. And basically, we're once,

as with Phobos Life, as we'll do this fall, we're trying to explore the effects of spaceflight on organisms, looking into whether they could travel between the planets. And this was kind of a precursor for Phobos life, allowing us to go through the operational procedures we'll use for that, but also get some real science out of it. What I read in your blog entry at planetary.org is that the tardigrades, perhaps these are the best-traveled, the most-traveled tardigrades in the history of the species because they have now headed somewhere else, or they're heading somewhere else. Well, yes, they are natively Swedish tardigrades. Ja, sure.

Ja. I heard them say it. I heard the accent, yes. They are. They're Swedish water bears. They're so cute. Yeah, they like playing in the snow just like everyone else. So, yes, everything's been split up. So the tardigrades have returned to their native Sweden.

The Bacillus subtilis MW01 has returned to its native Germany for analysis from our partners there. And the remaining three organisms were at ATCC, where I just got back from the first opening of the sample tubes, taking out the little critters and starting the analysis, and things were still alive. Now the detailed analyses come over the coming weeks as they grow up the samples, so you have more and you do more detailed analyses. So I'll update people in the blog probably during this coming week about my trip to ATCC

and then over the coming weeks and months about the results we find from the experiment. Excellent. Well, I will watch for the footage of the ticker tape parade down the main avenue in Stockholm for the tardigrades. After they do their science. After they do their science, of course. After they do their homework. Yeah.

Tell us about the night sky. Night sky, we've got Saturn in the evening sky, up in the west in the evening high up, looking yellowish, and it's actually near a a star right now so it's looking looks almost like a fake binary star and in the pre-dawn we've got super bright jupiter over there in the east below it is mars although it's still pretty close to the horizon looking much dimmer and reddish and there is a total lunar eclipse on june 15th so don't miss it unless of course you

like like we are are in north america in which case you will miss it but if you're anywhere else in the world uh check out the details on that on the web and you can watch a total lunar eclipse let's move straight on to random random random, random, random, space pack, pack, pack, pack. Not a bad rendition, but I do prefer four voices, like High Fidelity last week. Well, sure, it's easier for them to do it with four voices. I try to do it with only one. It wasn't bad. It was a nice arrangement.

Thanks. So there was that big impact 65 million years ago, killed off 70% of the species on Earth, killed off the dinosaurs, did nasty things to the atmosphere. That point in time, as you probably know, Matt, is called the K-T boundary. And I've always found amusing that K stands for Cretaceous, which starts with a C. But also, I had not appreciated that even the T now they've messed with. So tertiary is a time period being discouraged as a formal time or rock unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. So the KT extinction event is now the Cretaceous with a C, paleogene, or KPG. Somehow the young earthers will turn this to their advantage, I predict.

Anyway, there you go. There's my terminology. And we'll come back to this, not surprisingly, in the trivia contest. Excellent. But first, let's talk about our previous trivia contest. We asked you, who is the Kuiper belt named after? And I was specific that you could not just say someone named Kuiper. So how did we do, Matt? A very nice response to this and some very interesting responses. We did get one from Ilya Schwartz.

In fact, he's our winner this week. A long, long time listener to the program, has not won in ages. He said, Dwayne Kuiper, second baseman for the San Francisco Giants. That is absolutely wrong. No.

He then went on to mention Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Gerard Kuiper. But, but, we heard lots of other comments from listeners like Johan Peter Dahm in the Faroe Islands. I always think it's so cool that we have a listener in the Faroe Islands up there in the North Sea. He mentions that Kuiper speculated that there had been this belt, but it probably didn't exist anymore. So Kenneth Edgeworth is sometimes mentioned along with Kuiper. Sometimes it's called the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt.

Then it goes further. Yes, Craig Jernay says that Brian Marsden says, no, neither of those guys gets credit. It was Fred Whipple or somebody named Fernandez. So it's really the Edgeworth-Kuiper, Whipple, Fernandez belt. Wow. We're going to have to put an extra hole in that to be able to fit. Yeah. Well, just the same.

We're going to give it to Ilya. So congratulations, Ilya. We'll get a shirt in the mail soon. What do you got for next time? All right. For next time, the stratigraphic layers around the world at the K-T boundary are enriched in an element that is uncommon in the Earth's crust because it likes iron. It settled to the core with the iron early on in Earth's history.

But it is common still in asteroids and comets. Its discovery in these layers was key to the adoption of the impact theory of the extinction, or at least is a key element. to the adoption of the impact theory of the extinction, or at least as a key element. What is that element that is enriched in the KT stratigraphic boundary layer, or should I say KPG? It's peanut butter, isn't it?

You got peanut butter in my dinosaur. Great, I'm going to have to come up with a new question. You got dinosaur in my peanut butter. Sorry, I was a little slow on that one. I waited for it, sort of. That's disgusting. You have until the 20th of June to get us the answer to this one. That would be Monday the 20th at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about turtles. Thank you, and good night. Little tiny turtles or big tortoises? Well, turtles. Oh, with peanut butter and chocolate. Now who's slow? Apparently me, because I just wanted to think about turtles irregardless of peanut butter and chocolate.

I like the chocolate variety, and I bet he does too. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up? Yum! Back next week with another brand new show. Planetary Radio 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. Thank you.