Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mount Wilson After the Fire

Episode Date: September 7, 2009

Mount Wilson After the FireLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Has the Mount Wilson Observatory been rescued? This week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Last week, Bruce Betts described for us the flames in the San Gabriel Mountains. The vast station fire threatened the historic and active telescopes on Mount Wilson, high above Los Angeles. This week, we'll talk with the director of the Mount Wilson Institute, Dr. Hal McAllister. He was escorted up the mountain by firefighters

so that he could survey the damage. Bill Nye will be along shortly. The science and planetary guy is considering the past and the future. And it's pretty clear which one he'd like to live in. Emily Lakdawalla's Q&A will reveal how we know a faraway planet is orbiting the wrong way. And Bruce Betts has left the fire lines for the beach. That's where he'll deliver this week's What's Up segment, including a new space trivia contest. Let's go back to Emily for a moment, or rather to her blog at planetary.org. My colleague has posted some jaw-dropping animations

and images. You can see the moons of Saturn whiz by, Pick out Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, still in its sand trap on the red planet, and even see what the Apollo 12 mission left on the moon, thanks to the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. AJS Rail has published another of her delightfully detailed status reports for Spirit and Opportunity. You'll find that at planetary.org as well. I'll be right back with hal mccallister

here's bill hey bill nye the planetary guy here vice president of planetary society and this week i'd like to talk about the past and the future there are a few stories in the news this week that are quite relevant to these two time epics the europe Agency, ESA, is considering the purchase of some Russian Soyuz space capsules to send some European astronauts into space, maybe to visit the International Space Station. Now, the Soyuz capsule is old, the design is old, but it works, and people can get up and down from the space station safely. Now, why aren't the people at the European Space Agency considering the purchase of some United States NASA space capsules? Well, for one thing, the Soyuz capsules hold two or three people.

The U.S. Orion capsules are planning to hold four or six people. But not only that, the Soyuz capsules are in the metric system. The Orion capsule right now is planning to be in the English system, the last country on Earth, although it's the 21st century, planning to use the English system. So of course, the European space agency just can't make use of them very easily. All right, fine. The other thing is there are some congressional people who are trying to get the space shuttle to fly 10 more times. That is after its nominal retirement. There'll be two flights a year for five years. Now, there's a 2% chance that one of them isn't going to come back.

If you're in the astronaut corps and you worked and worked and worked, of course, out of pride, you will board the space shuttle and you will valiantly go where over 500 people have already been, but it's not clear that you'll come back. So maybe that's not such a good idea, let alone the billions and billions of dollars and other space agencies moving ahead with the metric system. Also, that's why you should be a member of the Planetary Society. I know it's shocking.

Some of you listening will be shocked to learn that some listeners are not members. But at the Planetary Society, we're about the future. That's why we have the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, going to and from Mars with organisms to see if they can make the trip. That's why we want to build a successful solar sail that can be pushed through space by the relativistic pressure of photons. These are missions for the future. Let's be part of it.

Thanks for listening. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Mount Wilson is normally a place of peace, beauty, and science. Families picnic near telescopes that have revealed the universe. Under one dome is the 100-inch telescope, where Edwin Hubble discovered that some of those nebulas were really entire, faraway galaxies like our own, and that they are all racing away from us at incredible speeds. Hubble's plain wooden chair still sits on an observing platform inside that dome.

It's no wonder Hal McAllister has come to regard this as a very special place. Hal doesn't live nearby. He is Regents Professor of Astronomy at Georgia State University. Yet he has developed a deep love for this site that looks out over greater Los Angeles. Hal directs CHARA, the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, which has an instrument on Mount Wilson that you'll soon be hearing about. That led to his service as Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Wilson Institute. So Hal had more reason than most of us to worry as the giant station fire crept closer to the telescopes. Late last week, he got word that he could visit the mountaintop,

and that's where he took a few minutes to talk with us. Hal, I am so grateful that you could take a few moments as you are up there on the mountain assessing the situation. How do things look right now? Is the Institute, is the observatory and all those instruments, are you out of danger? Everything is, let me first say there has been no destruction of any of the facilities up here. There's a lot of smoke effect and sort of collateral damage from the firefighting efforts, and it looks like we may lose a few trees that may have been girdled as a result of the backfires, but that's a very small price to pay for the wonderful preparation they've done for us.

Are we out of danger? This fire is still quite active off to the northeast and east. The weather forecast for today, for example, is for a change in direction that could position the fire for a run back towards the mountain. There are hotshot crews for, they've been, they're just incredible people. They're out working down on the ridgeline, meeting dozers coming up from below to put in a fire break, and they probably will complete that today,

and they may light a big backfire down there to help defeat any encroaching fires. We should make it very clear that you had to get an escort to get up the hill, and so it certainly is not open to the public, and people should really not even think about heading up that way. No, essentially the entire Angeles Crest Forest, National Forest, is closed. And there are the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and CHP roadblocks. And although my wife and I came up and were escorted in one of these by a fire chief, they came back and gave me a good looking over before they let us go through. And we don't know when the roads are

going to open. And I should also say that the roads, as you might imagine from the decimation that's taken place, are subject to rock slides and dirt slides. And in many places, it's a one-lane road. And this is going to be a continuing problem for the foreseeable future. When the wet weather season comes in, the Antus Crest, I expect, is going to be shut down quite often. I just was reading an article in this morning's LA Times about exactly that, which would be a shame, because I know a lot of people who are far more aware of the significance of this facility, its incredibly important history in astronomy, may want to start heading up there.

You're the director of the Institute. How did that come to be for a Georgia State astronomer? Georgia State has a facility that is operated by a center that I founded some 25 years ago called the Center for High Angle Resolution Astronomy, and it's the Char Array. And we have a major investment here. When my predecessor as the Institute director retired, a well-known writer and astronomer, Robert Jastrow, retired in 2003, I stepped into the position to take over, partly to ensure that CHARA continues to function well, but also because, like so many people, I've fallen deeply in love with Mount Wilson.

We're going to come back to CHARA, because there's some awfully important work being done up there. A lot of people who think that this is merely a historical site have some surprises coming to them. I want to come back to the instruments that are up there and the tremendous history that they represent. I mean, frankly, I think of this site as something of an astronomical shrine. I'm so glad to hear that there was no damage to the instruments, but with all the smoke and ash and dust that we saw from the webcam off of the solar telescope tower there, how are the optics? I mean, are they in pretty good shape? We don't know. We haven't had a chance to really go in and inspect things. I was up in the

100-inch dome yesterday to go out on the catwalk to just kind of look at the situation, and there's a lot of smoke inside the dome. i expect um you know once this settles down we'll go and we'll go in and and look at things to see if we have to recut optics the 100 inch for example the optics were recoded about six weeks ago so it had a fresh shiny new reflectivity oh my normally we don't do that very often because it's very involved and risky and expensive but i'm just hoping for the best. I'd like to say that the original old facilities, the two solar towers and the two nighttime telescopes, the 60- and 100-inch telescopes, you know, are still very active. They're still in great shape.

UCLA and University of Southern California use the solar towers, and occasionally people come in with special instruments for the 100-inch. And the 60-inch is, we have a very active and very popular outreach program there. But you refer to the place as a shrine, and that's absolutely true. I think of Mount Wilson as a world science heritage site. This is where modern astronomy was founded, where astrophysics was invented, and it truly is a precious site. I'll say two telescopes that were, in their time, the largest in the world.

That's right. Mount Wilson had the largest telescopes in the world from 1908 until 1949, and its founder, George Ellery Hale, was, of course, responsible for the telescope that beat the 100-inch, that is, the 200-inch. I haven't looked in the books carefully, but I think the 100-inch probably held the record longer than any other telescope. And I, frankly, I think the 100-inch probably held the record longer than any other telescope. And I, frankly, personally think the 100-inch is the most important telescope in the history of astronomy since Galileo's. Well, you said it was the birth of astrophysics.

And there is a wooden chair on a platform up there that I sure hope if the fire had really threatened the 100-inch dome, somebody was going to grab and take with them down the hill. You know, I think we probably would have. The Hubble chair sitting there on the Casa Grande platform is there for visitors to see. And there's so many things like that. There are lockers at the 60 and 100-inch that have name tags for people like Hubble and Bada and Joy and all the other famous staff members here. These are small components of what would just be the unimaginable loss of this place. You know, I was reading on your website, the Char website,

and learned that your life's course was set because of an almost chance visit to an observatory many years ago. Yeah. My older brother, Jim, took an astronomy course in college. He was 12 years older than me, and his professor invited his class up to the observatory one night, which was only a few blocks from our house. Jim asked me to tag along, so I did, and the place was just a miracle to me. I'd never been in any place like that,

and something just resonated. In fact, I'd never been in any place like that, and something just resonated. In fact, I ended up going back and back and back, and ended up going to the same college and was mentored by his professor and went on to graduate school, and here I am. That's Hal McAllister of the Mount Wilson Institute. He'll rejoin us when Planetary Radio continues in a minute. 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, 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. Georgia State University astronomer Hal McAllister was telling us how a visit to an observatory when he was a boy eventually led to serving as the director of the Mount Wilson Institute in California. Hal also directs the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy,

which operates the Chara Array on Mount Wilson. He was back in the mountain a few days ago, assessing the aftermath of the station fire. I'm guessing that more than one young boy or young girl who made the trip up with their family to Mount Wilson saw those instruments and maybe had their life changed in much the same way. I'm also betting that they saw these long, shiny tubes that run out to what look like tiny observatory domes spread here and there. And I guess that brings us back to Chara.

Yes. Yeah, the Chara array is one of two interferometers, interferometric telescope arrays on the mountain. The first is the UC Berkeley infrared spatial infrarometer, which Professor Towns, Charles Towns, Nobel laureate at Berkeley, has used to study giant and supergiant stars and their circumstellar materials. And he works in the mid-infrared. The CHAR array works in the visible and near-infrared. And the Berkeley facility is three telescopes on trailers. CHAR is six one-meter aperture telescopes with fixed mountings around the mountain. And it's shaped like a Y.

Each arm of the Y has two of these telescope domes, and the light is brought in as collimated beams to the central beam-combining station, and each arm of the Y is about 200 meters long. So it gives us very long baselines. We have the longest interferometric baselines ever put in operation anywhere. We have very productive collaborations with groups from France, one in Paris and one in Nice, near Nice, and University of Michigan, University of Sydney in Australia, and Caltech.

The Michigan group has implemented an imaging program with the array that has produced the first images of the surfaces of solar-type stars, other than the sun, of course, and even images of interacting binary stars. It's been a project that I started many years ago, and a number of my colleagues who are really smart than I am have made it work. And there's so many of us that have so much invested here. But, you know, I tell people that if something dire happened to Char, we could rebuild it, or someone could rebuild it,

and I'm not sure I'd have the fortitude, but if something dire happened to the original observatory facility, they're just gone forever. You mentioned six different instruments tied together in this Y shape. Basically, it gives you, in some ways, through interferometry, it's as if you had a telescope with a mirror. I don't know, how many meters or feet across would that be? It would be approximately 600 meters across would be the effective resolution.

So it's enormous. I mean, what we're doing is synthesizing a super telescope that allows us to see very, very fine detail. We don't have a lot of light gathering power, so we're limited to relatively bright objects, but we can zoom in and see details on stars and their immediate environments that have just been inaccessible before. Yeah, I'm so glad. I was going to ask you of all the accomplishments of Chara, which are listed on your website, and we'll provide a link to the Chara website

at planetary.org slash radio. There are a whole bunch of accomplishments here, but I'll tell you, the one that grabbed me, I've said before on this show that I remember in junior high, in my textbook, science textbook reading, that we will probably never see an image of a star as a disk.

And you've helped to prove that wrong. Yeah, well, our colleague John Monnier at Michigan and his great crew had built these wonderful imaging beam combiners. And this was always our goal, and it came to fruition sooner than any of us would have dreamed. And it really is kind of a hair-curling thing to look in and see these things on stars. So there's more to come, I hope. Me too. A word or two before we finish about the Mount Wilson Observatory Institute.

I know you have events that take place up there, and I assume that those are going to pick up again once everything is safe. I heard the great Paul McCready, the great American inventor, speak one time right up there in your visitor center. Is that right? You know, we have grand new plans. In fact, we have a capital campaign that we would have launched had the economy not gone south, as everyone knows, and we plan to awaken that sometime in the near future. Regrettably, from what has happened up here, there's the other side that we've gotten a lot of focus of attention here, and maybe there's a silver lining to this terrible cloud that we're still undergoing,

that more people will reawaken to the wonders here at Mount Wilson. And it's just an awfully pretty place, and surprisingly close to Los Angeles and the rest of Southern Wilson. And it's just an awfully pretty place and surprisingly close to Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California. It makes for a real nice picnic. It sure does. Yeah, it sure does. In fact, we've been in the process of reopening the old pavilion here as a food venue. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Come up and buy a sandwich up here. It hadn't been here for 20 years, but we hope to have that open this fall. You know, I've sat under that roof many times and wondered when the snack bar closed, but it's nice to hear it's going to open up again. It's coming. So how can people learn more about the Institute and Mount Wilson? Go to your website?

If you Google Mount Wilson Observatory, our email URL, excuse me, our web URL is simple. It's just www.mtwilson.edu. And we'll put that link up at planetary.org slash radio as well. And I'm assuming that you're going to keep the webcam running there as well. We are. We lost it for more than a day, and people all over the world lamented that. It's such a great thing. And I came out here last Thursday, and prior to that time, it was my eye on the mountain. And last Monday, all the firefighters

were pulled off the mountain when things were particularly dangerous, and for more than 24 hours, there was not a living soul at the observatory. That faithful webcam kept peering off in the kind of the teeth of the fire. Hal, thank goodness things have gone as well as they have. May they continue to, and I will look forward to meeting you up on the mountain someday before long. Matt, thanks so much for your interest. I really appreciate it. You betcha. Hal McAllister is Regents Professor of Astronomy at Georgia State University. He's also the Director of the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy up there on Mount Wilson.

That's the Chara Array that we were talking about. And, not by coincidence, the director and chief executive officer of the Mount Wilson Institute in those mountains high above Pasadena, California. We will head down the mountain in a couple of minutes to make our weekly visit to Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. And that will be right after we hear from Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, they recently announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet that moves

backwards around its star. How do they know which way the star rotates? Most planets orbit their stars in the same direction that the star itself rotates. That's because the star and its family of planets all formed from a single rotating disk of gas and dust. The star inherits its rotation and the planets inherit their direction of revolution from the original rotation direction of the disk. So the recent detection of a wrong-way planet named WASP-17 was newsworthy. But how could astronomers tell the direction in which the host star was rotating? It's not easy to tell which way a star rotates unless you have help from one of its planets. As a star rotates,

half of it is Doppler shifted toward Earth and half of it is Doppler shifted away, spreading out its light along the electromagnetic spectrum. When a planet passes in front of the star, it cuts off some of the light from one side of the star and then the other. If the planet is an ordinary prograde one that moves in the same direction that the star rotates, then it starts by covering up the part of the star that is rotating toward us, reducing the amount of light from the star that's Doppler-shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, and finishes its transit by covering up the part of the star that is rotating away from us, reducing the amount of light from the star that is Doppler-shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.

But when WASP-17 transited its star, it began by covering up the part of the star that was rotating away from us, proving it moved in a retrograde orbit. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. What you hear in the background there with Bruce Betts is not water-dropping helicopters this time, but the ocean, because he is at the sea with family enjoying himself. Hey, welcome back to What's Up. Thank you. It's good to be back. The fire is a big topic in today's show, as we heard from Hal McAllister.

It looks like Mount Wilson is out of danger. And your situation, looking good? Looking very good. Fire is still burning out there, but they've got it in the wild areas at the moment. As of for about three or four nights, you could see flames just looking out the kitchen window. But they've controlled it. Always the whole colossal firefighting force did a great job and beat it back. Well, we're very glad to hear it, and we heard the same, of course, from Hal. And hopefully by the next time we talk, that'll be fully under control, if not out.

So tell us about the night sky from down there by the beach. Okay, and for the first time in a while, we can actually see the night sky even in the Pasadena Alta, Dina Airing, due to lack of smoke. And from the beach, it's a much moister sky. We've got Venus over in the pre-dawn as the super bright object in the east. up above it is Mars, looking red and dimmer. And in the evening sky, Jupiter's that stunning star-like object over there in the east, looking quite lovely and fabulous. Had a day there when Jupiter was almost next to the moon. That was real nice a few days ago.

It was indeed. Just so you know, they didn't actually almost collide. They're in different planes. Well, they never touched, so I think everybody's safe. Okay. Okay, good. All right, pre-dawn's starting to get a little more exciting in the next few weeks, and I'll update you on that, but some more planets starting to pop up very, very soon. All right, let us move on to, let's go straight to random space fact.

This one, courtesy of Emily, in 1973, after the Viking project had selected its landing sites, it thought they had safety concerns. And in fact, those came back, which is a, you're kind of getting a two for one. When they actually got there they changed their landing site and landing date because of safety concerns but in 73 what's interesting and random is one of the sites they were thinking about was actually very close to where opportunity ended up landing in meridiani planum where they found lots of uh hematite and evidence for liquid water on Mars. So how would Mars exploration have been different if they had landed there?

Wow. I love these what-ifs. We'll never know. So instead, we'll move on to the trivia contest. And this was where I got a little strange on you and gave you the answer and asked you for the question, the answer being 1370 or approximately 1370. And then we gave you a little bit of a clue in the very end of the show alluding to watts per square meter. Indeed, 1370 watts per square meter is the approximate value of the so-called solar constant. It's how much solar flux reaches the top of Earth's atmosphere in our orbit.

And it's actually very useful not only for understanding Earth's radiation balance, but you can scale it to the other planets and use it. And it's a spiffy number that comes up in a lot of calculations. But how do we do, Matt? I know a lot of listeners got that, and a lot of them went on random hunts for really obscure information that matched 1370. Yeah, we had some interesting tangents here. We'll get to some of those. But a lot of people who got it right, thank you for the nice hint that you provided on the way out of the segment.

Maybe two-thirds got it right. Some of them who got it right also gave us very creative additional responses, like this one from Edward. As every grade schooler knows, in 1370, Philip of Anjou, titular emperor of Constantinople, married Elizabeth of Slavonia. Daughter, why are you laughing? Daughter of Stephen, Duke of Transylvania and Slavonia, and Margaretha of Bavaria. I'm just laughing because that was the first thing that came to my head after I said it. And I figured no one else would think of it.

Yeah, well, you're on the same wavelength. We got a lot of interesting. What is the diameter of Pluto as measured in miles? First observations of Mercury are thought to have been in 1370 BCE. The Earth's outer core is 1370 miles thick. Both of those, by the way, from Maurice Sluka. I like this one. Answer, 1370 is the beginning of the range of radio frequencies.

Significant to radio astronomy for hydrogen line measurements, 1370 megahertz. But, you know, here's our winner. From Olivier Lassaux, he got it right. Number refers to 1370 watts per square meter. Power the sun delivers to the upper atmosphere of the Earth. So, Olivier, we're going to send out a Planetary Radio t-shirt to you and an OPT rewards card, if we didn't already send you one of those. Excellent.

Well, let us move on to our next contest, where people can win, win, win. It's time, once again. I know, Matt, you've been missing this. Even if you didn't know you were missing it, it's time again for Where in the Solar System? Oh, boy. Such excitement. You can't contain yourself.

All right, everyone. Where in the solar system is a planetary feature named Hamlet? And this would be a natural feature named Hamlet. That would be Denmark. Oh, thanks. Now we need a new question. Oh, I'm sorry. No, somewhere else other than Earth.

How about that? Yeah. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how'm sorry. No, somewhere else other than Earth. How about that? Yeah. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You've got until the 14th. That'd be September 14th. Monday the 14th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. By the way, Olivier comes to us from Honolulu, which plays no part at all in the handlit myth.

Mahalo. Mahalo to you. We'll talk to you next time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about surfboards. Aloha. Bruce Betts, who lists his way in here every week to tell us about the night sky in What's Up. Oh, you like my grass skirt? Next week, Robert Zubrin.? Next week, Robert Zubrin.

No, not that Robert Zubrin. We mean the Robert Zubrin who lives on Mars in the 22nd century. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Keep looking up! Thank you.